simple guidelines like "local is better" are not always true.

No disagreement here. But

You need to look at each situation on a case-by-case basis and determine what makes the best economic sense in your personal situation.

The entire point of the "eat locally" movement is that economic sense -- and, particularly, immediate economic sense -- is not the only thing that consumers might want to consider. If the immediate price of an item is the sole factor on which you base the decision of where to buy it, buying from big-box stores (and from large manufacturers) is always going to be the answer: They have the clout to demand discounts from their suppliers, and a portion of those discounts gets passed on to the consumer. However, a world in which small producers and small merchants were entirely closed out would be a world...well, remember what tomatoes were like 25 years ago? When all one could buy were those artifically colored little hockey pucks that had been bred not for flavor or for nutrition but to pack and ship easily? All tomatoes would be like that again. Ditto every other consumer item.

>A commercial establishment is not community and we should never be fooled into thinking so.

You might want to tell that to the people who congregate at your local coffee shop or diner or bar or cafe. Or you could talk to some of our regular customers, many of whom come in every Friday night or every Thursday afternoon, etc. -- basing their decision in part on when their favorite clerk is likely to be working.

My library is community.

Your library is also a commercial establishment; the only difference is that the actual financial transaction, whereby you pay your taxes to the government, which turns around and uses some of that cash to support the library and employ people in your community, is removed from view. But for what it's worth, I'm a huge supporter of local libraries -- which, like local businesses, are struggling.

I am not harassed by obsequious staff ... I find so much value in the ... relative anonymity

If what you're seeking in a "bookstore experience" is anonymity and the freedom from discussing books with the staff, I'm not surprised that you haven't found a sense of community at your local bookstore.

I can even sit in a chair and read the entire book if I should so desire.

For what it's worth, my bookstore has a couple of chairs, a couch and coffee table, and even a fake fireplace (it hides the really ugly air-conditioning system). But no, we don't like it when people sit and read entire books without paying for them. Once a book has been read, it can no longer be sold as new. So we return it to the publisher for credit, but not full credit, since only the big-box stores can command that. So were we to allow you this pleasant experience of reading a book without paying for it, it would cost us roughly half the wholesale price of the book.

Yes, Barnes & Noble does permit you this pleasant experience; they merely pass the cost of your pleasant experience on to the publisher. Barnes & Noble demands full credit from the publisher -- and gets it -- meaning that your pleasant experience has cost the publisher the price of printing the book, the price of shipping the book to Barnes & Noble, the "opportunity cost" involved in having those sums tied up in inventory, the cost of having the now-unsellable book shipped back to the publisher, and the cost of pulping (i.e., destroying) the book.

Your pleasant experience comes at a high cost. True, the money isn't coming out of your pocket. But as I suggested above, whether money is coming out of your pocket may not be the sole criterion on which to base the decision of which stores and manufacturers to patronize.

when we say "local food" we mean "locally produced", not "locally sold".

I don't think that's necessarily true. "Buying locally" encompasses a very large range of issues. Reducing the amount of energy needed to ship product from its point of production to its point of sale -- that's the "locally produced" part of the equation, or...a part of it -- is one of the issues, but not the only one. The importance of small businesses, whether we're talking about farms or pharmacies, is another. Small businesses, IMO, are vital to the health of a community, and they are also vital to the health of the industry of which they are part: A monopolized industry, one run by the equivalent of "big box" stores, has no incentive to respond to customer needs and wants, and no incentive to cater to anything other than the lowest common denominator. For me, "buying locally" is as much about supporting the other businesspeople in my community as it is about reducing the distance a tomato travels between its mother-plant and my ball of delicious, still warm, dripping-with-milk mozzarella from Joe's Dairy on Sullivan Street.

I own an independent publisher and, in fact, PGW was wooing us very heavily until very shortly before AMS imploded. As it happens, I didn't like them much and wouldn't have signed, but I still feel as though we dodged a bullet.

there's an ultimate lesson. At some point, somebody's got to read this stuff.

Actually, that's not the lesson in this particular debacle. It's very much unclear why AMS fell apart; there are vague rumors of dirty dealings, but nothing concrete. Nobody, though, is claiming that Costco -- AMS's major customer -- had stopped buying books. And in fact, AMS's clients were mostly major publishers, the Harper Collins and Simon & Schusters of the world.

PGW didn't go down because readers were bypassing the books published by their indie clients. The company went down because it was a subsidiary of AMS.