I served a lot of time in bookshops back in the day, and can remember when we used microfiche to see if the distributor had that copy of The Joy of Sex in Braille in stock.
It's hard not to rhapsodize about consumer choice when all of us here are consumers, though I sympathise with shops having to compete with the likes of Amazon, where I buy my chains because they're almost half the price. Can this cognitive dissonance be cured by retail therapy?