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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 1624846" data-attributes="member: 18549">Hmm...[rant]As far as selfish captialism goes, there's a reason you might want to shop locally...to help keep your local economy healthy.  I don't know about you, but I don't enjoy living in those suburb areas in which the only shops around are the enormous big box stores that cluster near the highways.I live in Montreal, and one of the best things about living here is that the local economy still exists.  There are many small shops around that have many unique and interesting products and services for sale.  I don't have to go halfway across town to get my shoe fixed or my keys cut, because there's a place in my neighbourhood to do it in.  They add character and convenience to my neighbourhood.And the money I spend at these shops goes back into the community.  Instead of buying something at Wal-mart, who will take the money and send it off to head office, I buy it at the local hardware store, or the local furniture store, or the local whatever store.  The local shops generally have better quality stuff, because they're not trying to sell for as low as they possibly can (Wal-mart and other big chains tend to choose bottom-of-the-barrel products in order to increase their profit margin).  And the money I spend goes into the pockets of the people in my community.If some big chain stores moved in (and they are threatening to), and everyone abandoned the local shops for the big stores, the people who now make a decent living running their own shops would be driven out of business.  And while they might be able to get jobs at the chain stores, they'd probably be making minimum wage.  So the income level of my neighbourhood would go down.  Lower incomes means more social problems, especially when people previously had more money.  So the quality of life in my neighbourhood goes down.  And I suffer, because I didn't shop locally.Big chains like Wal-mart and others (but Wal-mart is the paradigm case) have been sucking the economy out of small towns across America for years now.  Empirically, we know how the system will play itself out.  They eventually drain all the money out of a community because they aren't paying the money back into the pockets of the people there, which would be the case with small business.  Eventually, the amount they skim off the top (and that's a pretty large amount) gets shuffled off to corporate headquarters, and isn't returned to the area.  So the local economy shrinks over time.This is not such a large problem in a large city, where a big box store may feed the economy in other ways (eg. local head offices providing management jobs).  However, for a niche market like RPGs, it's probably very important to make sure you're giving people an incentive to carry the products you want.[/rant]</blockquote>

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