Living in NYC, I’ve always had mixed feelings about the books thing, since we’ll never face the “last bookstore” issue, at least not as long as print books exist at all…
Not being a voracious reader of “modern fiction”, most of the indie bookstores weren’t of much use to me even way back when, and the few really specialized places tended to be wickedly expensive even before Manhattan-then-the-rest-of-NYC commercial rents started their stratospheric rise in the later 90s. (And almost all of the used bookstores I loved as a teenager - which were even then a remnant of their former hayday- were long gone by then.) Not to mention that I found the “dedicated, knowledgeable, book-loving” employees were… more often than not, actually just early twenty-something hipsters who had more attitude than they had any right to … (“here’s looking at you, Shakespeare and Co.” 
) (PS: Even I was a mid-twenty-something, so it wasn’t reverse ageism. 
)
And I felt no sympathy for Barnes & Noble, which had incurred my wrath well before before Amazon was a serious threat to them (a threat they almost willfully ignored, no less…) I certainly didn’t ask them to open (too many) stores all over town (and elsewhere), then drop their “traditional” discounts when they found themselves over-extended, then add insult to injury by instituting their own pre-Prime “membership” Thing to get back lower discounts than they’d offered when they were just the two stores on lower Fifth Avenue…
(Not to mention that “Amazon” wasn’t the only reason for the decline of the publishing industry in general, and the fall of the chain bookstores. This has largely been lost to the short attention span of The Public at Large (and partly drowned out by the bitching and moaning of the latest round of Former Upstarts now losing to the New Upstarts) but the totally unrealistic/unsustainable M&A/leveraged buyout mania of the mid-80s to mid-late 90s played a huge role in that, among other retail industry dramas, and at least initially, that had nothing to do with “the Internet”…)
