From an essay by Sonja Anderson, in the NYT, "The City That Never Sleeps … or Shops in Person."
OK, then bring back the days when I could walk through my neighborhood and find a large number of small useful shops to buy from. I used to live in the West Village, and I could walk to a stationary store, a hardware store, a lumber store, all right there on 8th Ave, among other small retailers. They were all pushed out by high rents. What’s there now? Purses, high end clothing, jewelry, and in the meat packing area, big box stores full of stuff I don’t need in my daily life. Oh and CVS and banks. That’s Manhattan nowadays. There’s nothing affordable, useful, or even quirky anymore. So I shop online. I’m not lazy, landlords were greedy.
The author refers to people who shop online as lazy. Maybe some are, but many New Yorkers are overwhelmed working at stressful jobs and then coming home to children who need their time. On the weekends, many city kids need to be taken to various activities by those same hard working parents. I wouldn't be so quick to judge others' motivations. Online ordering helps to keep many people relatively sane.
And:
This isn’t about laziness. The price for a carton of 90 dishwasher pods at my local Morton Williams? Last time I checked? About $25. On Amazon? Currently $17.20. A package of four rolls of paper towels? Almost $20 at the MW, but I can pay the same price for 8 rolls online. Don’t even get me started on the price of kitty litter at my local target. Far easier to get that on Chewy, along with kitty food that my vet doesn’t even stock anymore because they don’t have the space to store it. Toothpaste! I can get three boxes of Sensodyne online for the price of one in CVS....
Maybe there are people who have an "addiction" to shopping who'd be slowed down if they had to get out of the house and go places to get their new stuff and carry it home. But to say that is to concede that on-line shopping saves an immense amount of time. It's not lazy to want to use your time efficiently. And though there may be plenty of people who might enjoy using their time to shop in person, there might not be a nearby store that sells what they need, such as appropriate clothing in their size or the precise item of hardware that fits their project. And they might have children to supervise, who are better off playing or doing homework than getting dragged along on another shopping trip. Some people are waiting for phone calls or keeping their pets company or soaking up the peace and tranquility of home.
Shopping may be a classic component of city life for many people. But it's not for everyone. Personally, I find it dull and even dehumanizing much of the time, and I quietly celebrate to myself when I can go on Amazon and accomplish the replenishment of dishwasher pods and paper towels and toothpaste in less than 1 minute or I find the exact replacement hinges that fit into the circles drilled into my kitchen cabinets 30 years ago or — also in 1 minute — I reorder the hard red winter wheat berries Meade likes to grind up for his waffle mix. And, of course, there's an element of bias here. That last link is an Amazon Associates link, and if you use it I will earn a commission.
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63 comments:
Not me. Sounds like fake news.
"shopping on line is, pretty much, a mental problem"
Yes it is, and my wife is afflicted with it.
I detest shopping. It's a huge time sink. On-line shopping is a godsend.
Talk about your First World problems! But I believe the peak is behind us now.
A few years ago I remarked to my S.I.L. that the future would regard the time around 2018 - 2020 as the pinnacle of western consumerism because of the relative ease of purchasing & delivery and the plethora of goods to choose from, at least in the US but probably worldwide.
The supply chain problems arising out of COVID-19 have persisted even today, so the peak has been in for some time. Goods are not as plentiful or as readily-available. Consumers have been faced with diminished choices, and I believe a diminished overall product quality, ever since. The shipping experience has deteriorated too, in fact all aspects of consumer satisfaction have been degraded as the online retailers chop away at their inflating costs in ways that preserve their margins, but at the expense of service delivery and customer satisfaction. And all of this, in the face of a deteriorating world economy, threats to peace, rising fuel costs, etc - which is going to make it all that much more difficult to recover.
Trump gets some credit for creating the favorable conditions, but certainly not all. Biden gets some of the blame for gutting them, but not all.
G7 GDP per capita growth 2016-2023:
US: 10.77%
Italy: 6.94%
France: 5.74%
Japan: 3.95%
Germany: 3.40%
Canada: 2.63%
UK: 0.46%*
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1370625/g7-country-gdp-levels-per-capita/
4.9% GDP growth is an almost incomprehensibly high number for a large, mature, growing, high-income economy like the US. Three months of 4.9% GDP growth to the US' $25 trillion economy basically adds more to the US GDP than the entire economy of 14 of the EU's 27 member states (yes, in the three months ending in September, the US essentially added more to its GDP than the entire economy of Finland). Or it adds more to US GDP than the respective/entire GDPs of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland — and pretty close (83%) to the sum of all three. As an economic accomplishment, it's pretty eye-popping.
The US economy never fails to impress. Such a powerhouse!
Like many others, this NYT piece is just pompous preening. And, I would put real money on her using online shopping.
NONE of this would be happening, if we'd just legalize Heroin..
Then people wouldn't be Wasting their hard earned money on frivolous things..
They'd be pumping it into their arms..
Quit Wasting your money on goods and services! Use that money for scag!!
Definitely off-topic but I needs to vent - we're better off with Matthew Perry now gonso. Sick of the nonsense. How about the same on anything to do with Taylor Swift and any one of her antics.
My wife used to love to shop in person, and living in Manhattan for a couple of years allowed her to indulge that to the fullest. But over the decades, slowly at first, she has come to view most shopping the way I do--as a bore at best.
I would say that she has an addiction to her smartphone, but she doesn't shop with it that much.
A few times a year I might want to order a book from Amazon (I try to remember to use the Althouse route) and let her do it with her device.
This is extremely stupid. Defunding the police and Soros backed DA's have ensured that on-line shopping will be the wave of the future.
"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." - George Orwell
Most everything that people do out of choice light up similar "pleasure" brain areas. Does that mean it's all addiction?
Lazlo Toth, in his first volume of Lazlo Letters (1975+), had a Whip Inflation Now idea, skeched out, of large malls on wheels coming around to homes every week to save gas, like milkmen.
"Forget it, Ann. It's The Atlantic."
I shop online at Homedepot.com for tools and building supplies. The online store has more choices than I can find in the store. Some of them are available in the store, and the HD staff will gather my items and have them ready for me at either the customer service desk or in a locker. If it's not available at the store, they'll ship it to me for usually no cost and for the sales tax rate at my home (8.7% vs. 10.1%).
Lumber I want to buy in person. Some items I want to see in the store.
Also, The Atlantic just had an article that they think will tar Mike Johnson as a [fill in the blank] because he's a descendant of Confederate soldier. All the twitter comments mocked them and were running 3-1 against the likes. The neobarbarians of The Atlantic will do anything to smear Republicans and Conservatives, including run such stupid articles. They have earned the Joe Biden Intergalactic Stupidity award. Congratulations to them.
You will never see a sentence in the NYT that starts with "Americans..." that doesn't go on to tell us were doing something wrong because of our character defects.
Tomorrow they will print an article accusing Americans of self-indulgence and careless indifference claiming we choose to shop in person when we could do it online and help save the planet.
Shopping online is a great help to those who are house bound. My wife and I are an example. Yesterday a case of beef barley soup was delivered, her favorite. We have been ordering equipment for our mobility. In better times she does a lot of online looking, which floods my email box with ads.
I used to love doing the grocery shopping. A supermarket is a celebration of infinite possibilities. But now for a surprisingly minimal fee and a tip, they'll do it for me, and all I have to do is swing by and pick it up. That's two hours I've saved. I'm never switching back; I don't understand why everyone doesn't do this.
"...grueling Apple Pay tap."
Online at Amazon and other retail sites you find a review of the products and suggestions for alternate products as well as lower prices. At a store you usually find salespeople with no knowledge of the product. I have identified stores-where-they-know and I go to my special Ace hardware and pay their high prices in exchange for advice and information. Otherwise, no. Yes, shopping is very pleasant these days. This new generation is very sweet and would-be-helpful - they smile and text their buddies at the store to find where things are. Then, I smile and don't buy.
“I detest shopping. It's a huge time sink. On-line shopping is a godsend”
Absolutely. And while I realize we’re creating a faceless dystopia, etc., etc., the access to relatively obscure items has been one of the true wonders of the internet age. In the last week I’ve fixed a chair, a 105 year-old revolver, and a gas stove remote, all with bits ordered off the internet almost in passing. Freakin’ miraculous to anyone who entered adulthood prior to the mid-‘90’s.
"It's not lazy to want to use your time efficiently."
None of that clicking twice either. One Click! That's all.
You need me to click twice? I don't even want it anymore.
Doc K is correct. There are lots of positives in online shopping. There are downsides. My wife is always on her cellphone looking for deals/sales/sites/favorite brands, whatever. Gets tiring from my perspective, but all I can do is grin and bear it.
This sentence seemed odd to me:
They worsen already high concentrations of traffic-related pollution in poor neighborhoods, which suffer the most.
Does that mean that the people in the poor neighborhoods are doing the most online shopping? Nah, couldn't be. The big delivery trucks just keep parking in the poor neighborhoods, while the people staffing them just hike the goods over to Central Park West. Makes perfect sense!
Me, I shop online because I have little choice.
(1) The things I want really aren't in neighborhood stores, and wouldn't be even in Manhattan. Things like classical CDs. Or clothes from the likes of Carbon2Cobalt. Or books of the kind you won't find at your local Barnes and Noble (musicological books for the most part, but also obscure mysteries and Chesterton and such). Or violin and viola strings, gut and otherwise, wolf mutes, chin rests and shoulder rests, cello end-pin retainers, and the like. Or instruments, full stop! Or, as one of the NYT commenters complained, specialized pet food that is easier to find at Chewy than at the local vet.
Most of this, btw, doesn't come through Amazon. The books do, for the most part (though Advanced Book Exchange is also in there; even Amazon doesn't stock Gerard's Boccherini catalog!). But the CDs are mostly from prestoclassical.com; the clothes from the manufacturer; the strings and stuff mostly from southweststrings.com (though I once ordered my husband a pile of gut violin strings from Damian Dlugolecki, who is in Troutdale, so we could theoretically zoom over there and meet him); the instruments from everything from eBay to Tarisio (an auction house).
(2) I don't drive, and in addition I broke my right tibia last March, so walking the hilly 35 minutes it takes to get to retail-land is more like an expedition to the North Pole than the jaunt it used to be. So I take advantage of Fred Meyer's delivery service for groceries most of the time.
I ought also to mention Pinch Spices, who make terrific blends. (Penzey's Spices is close-ish, in Portland, but after they started proclaiming that anyone who voted for Trump was persona non grata, I begged off. Their store was irritating, anyway, designed to look like a high-end jewelry store.) And ishopIndian.com.
I don't think any of this is frivolous or even particularly abnormal. You buy online when whatever you want isn't otherwise available, or when it's difficult for you to get to even local places where it is available.
Depends on what you are shopping for. It may be one thing to shop in Manhattan; but if you live in a spread out megalopolis like Los Angeles, shopping can take on the aspects of a long distance safari. Food and booze easy enough--there are local nearby stores for that.
But depending upon what you are shopping for--like say an odd mechanical bit, you may know where you can buy it (if they have it in stock) but the store may be twenty or thirty miles away. Or the item can be twenty seconds away on Amazon at your desktop computer. Now if you made the sixty mile round trip it might be on your work bench quicker than Amazon. But if Amazon takes two or three days to get it to you, you've saved a couple of hours out of your life.
Depends on what you are shopping for. It may be one thing to shop in Manhattan; but if you live in a spread out megalopolis like Los Angeles, shopping can take on the aspects of a long distance safari. Food and booze easy enough--there are local nearby stores for that.
But depending upon what you are shopping for--like say an odd mechanical bit, you may know where you can buy it (if they have it in stock) but the store may be twenty or thirty miles away. Or the item can be twenty seconds away on Amazon at your desktop computer. Now if you made the sixty mile round trip it might be on your work bench quicker than Amazon. But if Amazon takes two or three days to get it to you, you've saved a couple of hours out of your life.
Definitely appreciate online shopping and have for years. Lately, I have grown tired of buying things sight unseen.
"I don't understand why everyone doesn't do this."
I don't want to buy meat and produce I haven't seen and I don't want somebody else picking it out for me. I'm generally in and out of the market in less than 30 minutes, I can't imagine making my selections online would save much time. But then, that's just me.
“I detest shopping. It's a huge time sink. On-line shopping is a godsend”
Yesterday, my partner’s sister sent us photos of a robe she had just bought from Ross. Their fall inventory had apparently just arrived. We rushed out, and the only ones left were sized XL on up. Luckily said partner is only an M, though she still thinks that she can fit into some S’s. Then, we went into Dollar Tree, a couple doors down, for AAA batteries and paper towels. Nope. Bought the only package of AAAs in the store, and no towels. Went back in for a lighter. Nope again.
Meanwhile, Monday I received a super effective pet vacuum (Bissell, of course, Pet Pro Revolution). Worked great, and cost less than it would have cost to get it professionally done - plus I have the vacuum, for any future degradations to our carpets by our dog. Took me maybe an hour of research, online, reading reviews, and the like, then clicking a couple times on the Amazon app. Far easier to research that way, than in a store, and with far better results. And did I mention that it just showed up at the door? My partner was too embarrassed to allow her sister to visit us here, with the urine caked carpet. Finished her room yesterday, and the invitation was sent.
Then, there are my Levi’s. Been wearing them daily since maybe 1965, when I didn’t have to wear dress clothes and the like. They are cheapest at Costco and Sam’s Club, but Costco only has the even sizes. Used to check out Sam’s Clubs for the 33x30 sizes, buying them whenever I could find them. Not in the stores recently, so have started buying them online at their web site. Delivered downstairs, where I have to pick them up from the Bell Desk, but they know me, and tell me when something arrives. Also bought a Generac generator from them this spring. Delivery was a bit problematic, since they had to bring a semi into our subdivision in MT. But it got done. I compared prices with Home Depot (online). And by going online I could get the exact size I needed (it wasn’t the initial cost of overbuying that worried me, but rather the running cost over time).
Here in Las Vegas, we have Macy’s, Saks, Nordstrom, etc right across the street. The Japanese, etc love shopping there. For me, everything there is grossly overpriced, and too trendy. I just use these store to get into and out of the mall to get to the restaurants there, esp in the summer, when midday temps exceed 100°.
Pre-pandemic (the olden times) there were all sorts of great shops in Manhattan.
But the ones I saw were on the Upper East Side surrounded by very wealthy residents who can afford to pay top dollar for trinkets.
I only use online shopping when it is something that I cannot get locally. It's not like this is a new phenomenon. "Mail order" has been around for hundreds of years. It's just that the internet makes it a little quicker and easier.
If I need oil for my truck, I'll buy that locally. If I need a door handle, I'll buy that online because I can't get that locally. Even if I go to the local Nissan dealership, they won't have the door handle in stock. They'll have to order it and it's quicker and cheaper to get a generic knock off online.
I actually like going out shopping. It's a much better sensory experience than shopping online.
gspencer said...
"Definitely off-topic but I needs to vent - we're better off with Matthew Perry now gonso..."
This was a terrible thing to say and you should be ashamed of yourself.
In NYC, Bloomberg's is located right across the street from Home Depot. I always feel vaguely virtuous when I go to Home Depot. I'm buying something to improve the apartment, and I'm doing it myself. That's real pioneer shit...Sometimes I go across the street to Bloomingdale's. Not to shop, but to look at the pretty women. That's a vaguely decadent experience. Did you know that you can buy t-shirts for upwards of two hundred dollars. To me eyes they are indistinguishable from anything at Gap, but there they are and people buy them. Not necessarily a sign of end times, but I wouldn't want to set up a sod house on the prairie with someone wearing a two hundred dollar t-shirt.
Bruce Hayden,
Bissell! For my birthday, my spouse bought me . . . exclusively cat-related things: Two cute food bowls with ears; four silicone lids for small cans; a container for litter-box scoopings; and a bunch of Bissell wipes, where apparently you stomp on them and cat barf/pee disappears. I have tried them out a few times, and they are decent. My birthday was 10/16.
But since my birthday, one of the cats has died, and we haven't much heart to talk about them. I only hope that Lili will be OK; she's Charlie's age, and I fear for her.
"G7 GDP per capita growth 2016-2023:
US: 10.77%"
It is easy to make a stagnant economy look like it is growing- all you need to do is understate inflation year after year.
I live in Red America, so the stores haven't yet had to lock down all the merchandise, thus I still do most of my buying by walking into a store, putting the item in the cart and paying for at the front of the store. The only items I buy on-line are specialty items that you can't find in a local store- for example, I have purchased about 5000 pages of graph paper in the last 3 years.
Something of a tangent to start but I'll get to topic in a minute.
Lots of people assume that given a Carrington event or other widespread disruption would force us back to maybe 1950s technology.
Nope. None of that tech exists in useable form (see the telephone post). More importantly, none of the infrastructure that existed to make and support that tech exists, either. We'd be luck to stop our descent at 1850s tech.
Back to topic, once small general purpose stores and the infrastructure (distributors and wholesalers) to serve them leave, they aren't coming back without significant effort, and Amazon is not going to cannibalize their own sales to support them.
Samuel Johnson says that a man is seldom more innocently occupied than when he's making money. The same could be said about shopping and spending money. It lacks high moral purpose, but that is its saving grace. Avoid if at all possible activities that are spiritually fulfilling and require determination and grit.... Take the Israelis and the Palestinians. They're filled with high moral purpose. They don't waste their time shopping or clicking around on Amazon. They're engaged in something all encompassing and demanding of their best efforts....I'd rather live in a place where people are frivolous and mildly decadent than in a land where everyone's committed to some high ideal and doesn't mind dying to fulfill it.
I find good deals online. I like a certain brand of pants (stumbled on them once at Tijuana J. Maxx) -- and I wait for them to go on sale. I also like clothing from a couple purveyors around the country that I don't find in stores.
There are some things I like to see/touch before buying though.
Damn. I need to add Garrett Wade and The Best Brushes. There are things there that I can't find anywhere else. Nor could you, I expect. The last item I inquired about (haven't bought, yet) from Garrett Wade was a spiral iron door hook. I wanted that to seal my Little Free Library -- another thing that you can't just go down to the local store for. Meanwhile The Best Brushes has -- well, a lot of brushes, of course, but also things like cool birdhouses. I bought one from them two years ago.
The point is that you simply can't get everything from the corner store any more. This doesn't make the corner store less valuable; quite the contrary. But it does mean that "lazy" folk like myself aren't going to be shamed for going directly to the people who will supply what we need, rather than traipsing endlessly through stores designed specifically to make us want what we don't.
Public debt is out of control
Personal debt it out of control.
A strong GDP means nothing.
My one experience with online grocery shopping during Covid was terrible; the store didn't have a third of what I ordered and substituted stuff that I would never buy.
I live 45 seconds (two blocks) from Publix, and I enjoy going through the store when they open at 7. Walmart opens at 6, although I'll walk out if the self-checkout registers aren't open.
There's no substitute for picking out your own produce and meat.
...and the worst part about online buying is that after you buy, you get a whole slew of ads for the thing you just bought! As if you need to buy more of it. Yeah, no.
Wilbur,
You might join a CSA, as I have. They send you stuff, true; but if you trust their judgment, it can be worth it. I have been a client of Moomaw Family Farms in OR for a few years (suspended at the moment b/c tibia fracture), and they supply excellent meat, esp. lamb. Plus supplying foods they don't themselves stock, like seafood. And various offal, like bones, livers, hearts. It's quite the adventure, shopping there.
Shopping cuts into time I could be using to think about the Roman Empire.
Maybe more New Yorkers would shop nearby if NYC weren't such a crime-ridden hellhole and shops weren't closing up left and right due that and the spiraling homeless population.
This is your city on Democrats.
I shop for groceries almost daily, I find it reduces waste buying just what I need for each day. It also allows me to make the trips on my bicycle, which saves me on gas and gives me some exercise. For hard goods, it's tough to beat the price and convenience of the Althouse Amazon Prime Portal experience.
Store-shopping is easy and abundant in upstate SC. A Lowe's home improvement store is a short drive from our house. I go there for a variety of things about once a month. We are also situated about equidistant between two big nice grocery stores (Publix and Ingles).
But we also shop online for some things (media, computer gadgetry, clothes). Depends on the need though, e.g. I've never needed a new computer so urgently that I went to a Best Buy or Apple Store to purchase one. That's always an online thing.
“ I stand w Isreal. Leftists, Mullahs, Hamas-Palistinian terrorists can suck it said...
Public debt is out of control
Personal debt it out of control.
A strong GDP means nothing.”
GDP includes government spending. The money spent by the government must first be either taken out of the economy by taxation or borrowing, or invented from whole cloth by increasing the money supply. It’s the Broken Window Fallacy writ very large - the seen (government spending) versus the unseen (the effects of the money taken out of the economy by the government).
Currently, the US federal government is spending about 6 trillion a year, with $1.7 trillion being deficit spending. Add in many billions more in state and local government spending. So long as government spending is counted in the GDP figures, it’s easy to make a weak economy look better than it actually is. This is as true in China as it is in the US.
"Shopping cuts into time I could be using to think about the Roman Empire."
The only correct answer.
I am old enough to recall when we used to ship a 12 dozen egg crate to the family farm downstate by Railway Express and it would come back with 12 dozen eggs. 1940s online shopping.
My oldest brother is severely handicapped. Among other issues, he only has limited use of his left hand. He has no use of his right hand. I’ve spent hours both in person and online trying to find computer keyboards and trackpads that he can use. I’ve only been able to find a limited selection anywhere. You can find wireless keyboards with trackpads on the right side but it appears no one sells a left-handed version. I found a bluetooth keyboard that had a trackpad in the middle but it quit working after about 2 weeks. I bought him a new wireless trackpad and took it to him today. I can only hope it lasts. I’m running out of options. Online shopping is my only hope of finding the specialized items my brother needs.
Simplify, simplify. As online shopping simplifies my life (which it does), it is a blessing. As online shopping helps me more easily fill my home with unnecessary things and unrecycled boxes, it is a problem. Though it's a problem of my own making.
If I need one or two items, it's not worth the gas money ($4.73 a gallon today) to drive to the store.
Many things are so much cheaper online. I recently bought 3.6kg of chicken stock powder and 780g of MSG from Amazon for about $40.00. At the grocery store, this quantity would have cost me many hundreds of dollars. This will last me a few years. I also buy running shoes online. Recently I purchased 5 pairs on clearance for only $90/pair. These will last me until next summer if I run 500 miles on each pair. At a running store, I would have paid $170/pair. I buy fresh food in person daily. Everything else comes from the Internet.
Jim at said...
If I need one or two items, it's not worth the gas money ($4.73 a gallon today) to drive to the store.
I don't know where you are at, Jim but Sam's Club just charged me $3.00/gal for 87 octane gas and deposited 5% (15 cents per gallon) of the purchase into my Sam's Club member account to be deducted from a future in-store purchase.
Michelle Dulak Thomson (11:57am):
Thanks for the recommendations, especially prestoclassical.com. I'd never heard of the site, it looks very good, and I would like to buy CDs somewhere other than Amazon or (if used) eBay. I already buy (and sell) most of my books on ABE.
Everyone:
Here's another category of things that can be better bought on-line, but not on Amazon. My next-door neighbor collects and uses fountain pens, other pens, fancy inks, journals, and such. She recommends jetpens.com and gouletpens.com, and I've found both of them excellent (good prices and very fast delivery) for my occasional indulgence in fancy writing supplies.
On the other hand, one thing I buy in person is cigar boxes, though I don't smoke at all. My local cigar store is 3 blocks away and sells all their empties for $3 (if cardboard with paper hinges) or $5 (if wood, usually with metal hinges). Many of them are gorgeous, many are just the right size for storing and organizing journals and other things, and quite a few are both.
Example of the last: Socrates boxes are mostly 4" x 6" x ~1.5" inside, which is perfect for holding up to 8 of the smallest Moleskine notebooks (3.5" x 5.5" - you need the extra 1/2" for your fingers). Conveniently stackable, and they have a handsome color picture of Socrates on the front.
I think about the Roman Empire at the grocery store, picking up garum.
Not to brag.
What if people are ordering online so they can use the time they save to do their art, etc., as Hillary and others said about a basic income. Time spent going to the store is time you can't spend writing or painting. New Yorkers have their writer and artist dreams, right?
As far as I can tell, neither Anderson nor Klapow has a spouse and certainly not children. They are both Exciting Media People, whose contacts are not the least representative of the American population. They get to curate interesting experiences for their lives which includes shopping at places that don't have a lot of single moms, blacks, blue-collar workers, or less-abled seniors. Shopping at Whole Foods is hoi polloi for them.
MDT,
"... Carbon2Cobalt ..."
Hmmmm are you an alchemist?
Dr. Weevil,
Until quite recently, prestoclassical.com was prestoclassical.co.uk. They are still UK-based, though. They are easily the best source for classical recordings that I know of; since Tower and Virgin died on me, no physical store stocks anything but Universal and Warner.
Re: pens, I have ordered a few fancy-schmancy ones from Fahrney's. They now do have a walk-in store (in NYC I think), but most of their business is catalog/online. For pencils, I see that The Best Brushes stocks Blackwing pencils. Those are the absolute best for marking instrumental parts. Haven't ordered a batch, but am thinking about it.
@gadfly
Washington state. Where 50 cents is popped onto every gallon due to Inslee's carbon tax. Not to mention the third-highest gas tax (behind CA and PA) in the nation at 49 more cents per gal.
Thanks for the pointer to prestoclassical. I haven't seen a CD in a store (not that I look much) in ages, still less do they offer anything earlier than Michael Jackson or Celine Dion.
OTOH the MPL and the U still have pretty good collections, and they are a short drive away; I think sometime I'm the only one enjoying those riches.
Oh, hell, why not another plug or two? Novica (www.novica.com) is a site that distributes, worldwide, the work of local artisans. They have an Amazon linky-thingy, but can also be reached direct. I have bought several things from them: an Irish-made sweater for my Dad, for instance, and a marvelous Thai-made silver necklace of flowers and leaves for myself. The sheer scope of things they sell is incredible. They have rotating specials, India one day, South America the next, Indonesia the day after that. Everything is beautiful, and super-well-made.
Big Dipper Wax Works (bigdipperwaxworks.com) is a beeswax-only candlemaker. They have fantastic things, from simple tapers and pillars to fancier stuff. I bought a lotus-shaped candle from them that has finally died on me, but I just bought a large pillar to replace it.
These are things you can't just drop by the corner store for. I like the corner store -- there's a used bookstore nearby, for example, that is a mystery/sci-fi/horror Mecca the likes of which I haven't seen elsewhere -- but no place in Salem will supply, say, a Bird of Time. (R/C glider, 3-meter wingspan, bloody fantastic. Another thing I want but haven't bought, yet.)
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