I thought the following was an interesting anecdote from an article on Amazon’s recent promotion with their price-checking application. It is worth checking out the comments on this article as well. Generally I am not a fan of brick and mortar stores. I will still go for things like clothing and shoes. I also must concede that sometimes you need something the same day or you really want that gadget that just came out. I can attest to the pain of waiting for UPS to deliver my iPhone 4S while my friends had already retrieved theirs from the Apple or at&t stores.
Statements like this will no doubt make us all seem, to Amazon devotees, like a bunch of privileged, holier-than-thou ingrates. Privileged I’ll grant them. But as we swapped e-mails it quickly became clear that the real source of our collective dismay was actually gratitude, not ingratitude. On my first book tour I was invited to Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago. The employees optimistically set up seven folding chairs, then occupied those chairs themselves when nobody showed up for the reading.