Alex wrote:
>I guess Borders and Barnes & Noble differ from
store to store. In my
>neck of the woods, they're the only places that
stock the "left" press.
>Before I subscribed, I used to pick up NLR at
Borders, which carries it
>regularly. Ditto MR, CAQ, The Nation, In These
Times, The Baffler, etc.
Yes, very true. I like to pop into these stores in different places whenever I travel. In Syracuse. Border and B&N were the places to get these periodicals. In Clearwater FL, you can't find as much leftish stuff. However, I hear that the stores near the USF campus in Tamps do stock them. Simple marketing logic: they do demographic research on subscriptions and political positions and the like in order to figure out who buys what in each area and who might be interested in what sorts of topics. Flexible Capitalism, you know. It's important, especially re periodicals: not as much mark up. I take my media and society class on a field trip every semester so they can 'discover' (hands on) how conglomeration and cross promotion works in the publishing industry, so I quiz the tour staff and find out these things.
The most humorous demonstrate of just how flexible they want to be and the lengths to which they'll go to gratify professorial egos: they always carry even the most obscure and sometimes even out of print books published by the profs in the local unis. No kiddin'.
I have a more serious query that I'd like to ask in the form of a poll, Greg Nowell style: How many people would say that the sexuality section grows by leaps and bounds and is *the* most popular location in the store? I speculate that this is a universal phenom and does not vary by region or political appetites.
SnitgrrRl