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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

> The effect will be to force the same sticker price everywhere, as intended for years now.

So in the end the seller with the best service will win.

I would welcome this. The French brick and mortar book stores are great and I love nothing more than spending hours at end walking through their aisles. They typically look small from the outside but then they are built like mazes, retrofitted into the building they happen to inhabit, branching out left and right, up and down.They specialise in topics, apparently by preference of the owners. Around my corner I have one that focuses on psychology and urban planning for example.

The one thing they're really lacking is a good distribution system. Trying to order a book they don't have in stock, especially foreign ones, can often result in multi week delivery times or even a flat-out "no" which is insane to me since I'm from Germany and there we've had next day delivery to any shop in the country since the mid 90s at least.

So this should help level the playing field and make it worthwhile for the book shops to compete in delivery times, because if I understand this correctly I would NOT have to pay delivery if I go to pick up a book in the store?

That's how it is in my local store, no shipping costs if you pick it up at their's.

> The French brick and mortar book stores are great

> I'm from Germany and there we've had

Well, drop by at happily coincidentally current https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28976112 and drop note of some places, then. In a possible path: is the Waterstone in Bruxelles good as they say?

It just removes the price out of the equation. There will be any number of other factors pushing a customer to choose a store or another.

On a personal level, delivery network was a big one, and Amazon wasn't the best on this as you can't choose in most cases (delivery guys randomly calling on my phone because they got lost in another town...). But everyone will have their pet peeve, some people will just chose on how warm they feel about the company.

> It just removes the price out of the equation.

I too welcome our post-scarcity future :)

This feels like a joke, but deciding on where/how to buy something completely ignoring the price (same everywhere) is refreshing.

There's few similar experiences, perhaps movie theaters before they started monthly plans/membership programs. I can't think of any other day to day instance where price comparison is explicitly rendered moot.

In situations like this the end user typically pays dears for that "luxury'.

Similar to cell phone service in Canada. Prices are carefully negotiated with carriers and as a results Canadians pay some of the highest cell phone fee in the world.

Or with more stores, longer hours, free shipping....

All these fall into "having the best service" IMO.

Sure they can sell more books if open longer, have more resources, etc.

But one thing is for certain: if you buy from a retail store you will actually get the real book, not some cheap fake garbage.

Getting fake or low quality garbage from Amazon has made me stop using their product most entirely. I have 0 faith in it and I will gladly pay the inconvenience of driving or 5-10% more for a retail store brand.

There's some percentage of people that always want to pay the lowest price and if the product turns out to be fake they return it. Say you order 100 things over a month and 5% turn out to be fake the only cost is time (Amazon pays for shipping if the product is fake I believe). That's compared to paying 10% more on every product plus the time it takes to go to the store.

Honestly if I can’t trust that a company is delivering a real product or not I’m OUT. That’s a violation of trust. And it’s happened to me multiple times on Amazon—nowhere else.

Well, no free shipping anymore ...

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