Oh, man, Christopher. I was out for the afternoon, but I just can't let this go: Your response to Sam's Amazon story is in dire need of some unpacking.

It is true that businesses exist to make money. Nobody would create a business with the intent to lose money unless that person is either A) a scam artist or B) the government. But the economic issues that we're dealing with right now seem to prove (to me, at least) that successful businesses will keep making money until they become too huge to be healthy for the rest of us. They don't have an "OK, that's enough money" valve. It's a complex issue. We used to have monopoly and antitrust laws to protect the public from giant companies going bad or getting too goddamned big, but the government has pretty much been defanged in that respect.

And as to this paragraph:

Cuz, like, the thing Amazon does? It's a pretty amazing thing, when you think about it. You have two choices: (1) you can get in your car and go to the store to get something, or (2) you can sit down in your own home in front of a magic but intuitively designed portal that remembers who you are, shows you everything you could want to know about a product, including what other people who bought it thought of it, and then at the click of a button will send you whatever it is cheaper than you could get it if you went out and got it yourself.

You know? Except for plane tickets, I'm not a big fan of buying things online. I'm just not. You know what I think is more amazing than the Amazon experience? Living in a city with a bunch of neighborhoods and a great selection of businesses. Unless you pay out the nose for Amazon's speedy shipping (or what the fuck ever it's called), most of Amazon's books, I believe, will arrive within two to four days. Do you know when most bookstores can get a book for you? About the same amount of time. True, there are some books that take longer, but about half the time, those books will take longer for Amazon, too. Because they're ridiculously rare. Everybody has a story about going into a bookstore and ordering a book and hearing it'll take a month and a half to get there, but that's actually a tiny percentage of the time. Amazon is a miracle for rural book lovers. Our abundance of great bookstores are what we should be thankful for.

Now there are two main issues with Amazon that booksellers struggle with: 1) The enormous selection coupled with the 24/7 availability and 2) the discounted prices. No brick and mortar bookstore is available all day, every day, and no one physical location can contain all the books that Amazon has on its website. That's why I will sometimes browse on Amazon when I'm looking up books about a specific topic and then go find the books in a real store. The number of books that I've positively had to have within 12 hours of learning of their existence is really very small.

And I consider the prices I have to pay at bookstores—not actually inflated prices, but the actual price listed on the book, and a price that is not actually that much higher than the bookstore has to pay for the book—part of the "urban tax" on having all these wonderful places nearby for me to enjoy. Amazon has never recommended a book to me that has changed my life, but real, living booksellers do this all the time. Amazon recommends similar books and books that other people moved on to. It's a lateral recommendation system, and it simply can't take the glorious leaps that sometimes happen when you engage a real person in a real human interaction.

This is a real word bomb, so I'm putting the rest, including the true problem with Amazon and the way they handled all this, after the jump.

I've not been as heavily invested as some in the Amazon story over the last few days, simply because it seemed like a glitch or an outside error from the beginning. But the one thing that Amazon has revealed to a whole lot of the world is something that I discovered when I wrote about them (and that Paul Collins found out when he wrote about Amazon recently on Slate) is that Amazon is staggeringly arrogant when it comes to negative criticism. Their only response is no response. I requested a Kindle a year ago and Amazon's PR got back to me immediately. I'm still, a year later, waiting for a response on their lack of local arts support. I'm kind of shocked that they've gone as far to refer to their "ham-fisted" mistake this time around. That's a rare show of self deprecation for them. But the company still hasn't really addressed the issue directly or explained what's happened.

And I know that many people complain that Amazon doesn't owe us transparency. That's very true; they don't owe anybody anything. But they're a customer service-based company, and transparency is a wise tack to take when you're involved in customer service. Any waiter or retail employee can tell you that when your company deals directly with the public, the public feels as though they have an ownership stake in the company. When your employees have to go anonymous to do the job your PR isn't allowed to do, that's a serious fucking problem.

All the finger-pointing on Twitter was overreacting, but that's Amazon's fault for not responding to the problem until the third day of the customer service crisis. And this weakness in the system has hopefully made a lot of people a lot more skeptical about storing their information with Amazon and treating their database as an encyclopedia of all the world's books. They're clearly fallible, and they make bad decisions. Just like any business.