“I hope that the store will stay around, but I am in the buggy whip era. Know what that means? For a while, they made buggy whips because not everyone had a car. With buggies, you needed a whip to get the horse to trot. With the car, the buggy whip people went out of business slowly. So, that is me, slowly going out of business. Big book shops are closing down, and those two-faced bureaucratic Johnny Onenotes in the D.C. government scream out the window that they want to help small businesses, and then close the window. So, I have property taxes, Kindle, and Amazon working against me.” “I know it is just a matter of time before they push me out and make this another Starbucks, so that we can have more crap on every corner of this city.” Jim Toole is the owner of Capitol Hill Books at 657 C Street Southeast, Washington, DC
Full piece here.