The point of going to the bookstore is to experience its glorious inefficiency, its Romantic signaling of something transcendent, its countercultural cultivation of quietude and dignity. 

The preservation of these qualities, the qualities which the remnant of independent local bookstores represent, ought to preoccupy conservatives. It is we, those who most ardently resist the values of our age, who ought to be about the business of actively cultivating all that the small, independent bookstore betokens. Regardless of what they stock, such places serve as an outpost of ideas and attitudes our culture has rejected, an oasis of value in a copious sea of junk.

Unfortunately, we conservatives are too often in the grip of the kind of free-market fanaticism that fetishizes global competition and its twin evil, efficiency. In this, as in so many other things, conservatives have operated in ways counter to our professed goals. Like everything else in modern America, our conservatism is shallow, geared not toward the active cultivation of institutions which, like the neighborhood bookstore, propound in their very being lasting values, but rather geared toward reflexive hatred of Democrats and kneeling football players. 

For this reason, movement conservatism has something dire in common with the local, independent bookstore: Both could disappear. Preventing that will require turning conservatives’ attention away from the daily convulsions of the mainstream media and back to deep reflection on the lasting virtues of the true, the good, and the beautiful. We must deepen our hearts and refine our minds if we desire a future that reflects all we hold dear. Such a change can only happen, of course, on the individual level by those willing to sit a while, willing to read and consider, willing to be quiet and inefficient.

Dean Abbott, "The Glorious Inefficiency of Local Bookstores"