In what has become the dark side of the internet mail-order revolution, another small town store is going out of business. H&H Anglers is/was the fishing and hunting store here in Bellingham. It was a quality place with decent prices and a lot of years of local knowledge. It’s not like I was a long time customer, or even a big spender. But I did enjoy shopping there and specifically tried to make sure that my fly-fishing $$ got spent with them. But apparently the money just wasn’t there. Between the internet and stores like G.I. Joes, the small fishing store is going the way of the local bookstore, camera store, and record shop.

The coolest thing about a local store is the knowledge and experience you get from the people who run the place. It’s the sort of thing that makes paying a little more worth the trouble. To say nothing of the fact that you can go in and handle the stuff that you are looking to buy. My problem is that once I know a lot about a subject (cameras for example), I don’t need anyone in local store to give me any advice. Nor do I really need to hold a particular piece of gear in my hands. I know what Canon lens I want and I know what it is going to look and feel like. So I have a hard time convincing myself to pay that 10-20% premium in price.

But this is exactly what drives the small stores out of business. I dunno, it’s easy to talk about ‘buying local’ in theory, and in some situations it’s easy to put in practice. But who can say that they are able to always stick to their guns on the subject. Now that I live away from Watermark, I have found myself buying more books from Amazon. Mostly because I haven’t gotten around to finding a good Bellingham bookstore. And hey, the Amazon books show up on my door in two days. *sigh* A sinner I am.