I'm sympathetic to the owner's plight, as I imagine it's frustrating when you've got a bunch of customers who frequently stop into your establishment to profess how much they love your product, while failing to ever actually purchase your product.
This is something particularly common with books/reading, where it becomes more of a performative act, to demonstrate to everyone else how intellectual/educated you are.
Recently I've realized that if I want the local businesses I love to continue to exist, I need to be willing to give them some of my money. I've definitely developed a better relationship with a few local business owners by purchasing there regularly.
A lot of stuff may be listed cheaper online, but it's important to remember that customer service, atmosphere, and convenience* also factor into the price. I'd rather pay a small premium to enjoy a pleasant shop than pay for shipping from somewhere online.
*Convenience cuts both ways. I don't have Prime or anything like that so a local shop is the only way to get something same-day, but I recognize that I do have to leave the house and probably drive somewhere.
Plus once you’ve established that relationship, you can often get effectively competitive prices anyway, either in the form of the occasional freebie, or, especially in items with significant margin, like musical instruments, substantial discounts off sticker.
Come now, did you really take that to mean I had to imagine the bookstore and not the customer?
But sure, a few examples:
- People who adorn their bookshelves with ornate "leather-bound classics" or other esteemed novels that that they haven't read and have no intention of reading.
- People who conduct all of their Zoom meetings in front of said bookshelf.
- People who make recommendations to others about how they should read such great works of Western Canon, e.g. the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, despite themselves having never read anything of Shakespeare beyond the required Romeo and Juliet in high-school.
>Come now, did you really take that to mean I had to imagine the bookstore and not the customer?
If you went in bookstores all the time and never ran into customers behaving that way then why would you be imagining it and confirming a general pattern? Seems like you would have contrary evidence in that case.
>People who adorn their bookshelves with ornate "leather-bound classics"
Decorators use fake books. And fake flowers. And fake fruit. People are so used to fakery that they get upset when it's missing. Like when someone is interviewed and the transcript has lots of "um, er, ah". Because they're not reading prepared remarks from a teleprompter, the smartest person will never be that smooth extemporaneously.
Most of the books I put out on shelves are real books that I've read, but they're not there because I need them close at hand to reread at any moment. Also, I tend to skim a lot when something doesn't engage me, so I might fail a pop quiz on something I did read once.
>People who make recommendations to others about how they should read such great works of Western Canon, e.g. the Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The problem with Shakespeare's plays is that they're written in a foreign language, and it's often inflicted on people without even acknowledging that let alone trying to help them understand it.
I wonder if there are any adaptations to film with modernized subtitles and notes overlaid.
Fakery is almost everywhere. To add to the list: modern window shutters.
Plato has some commentary on the confusion of symbols with reality.
Reinforcement learning and cognitive science suggest that learning is deeply flawed, highly situated, but often useful enough in context. Generalization is not guaranteed. Aggregating human learning must be done very carefully or the errors will compound.
This is something particularly common with books/reading, where it becomes more of a performative act, to demonstrate to everyone else how intellectual/educated you are.