I grew up in a time and place where people who worked in bookstores did so because they liked books and were knowledgeable about the book industry as both distributors and consumers. Chain stores like Borders preferred to hire young and cheap and make stocking decisions centrally. The staff could probably have been swapped with a completely different retail establishment, and both outlets would have run in much the same way.

Free market advocates like to go on about the self-corrective nature of 'real' capitalism/competition, but never seem to have any answer for the existence of franchises or their tendency to crowd out other participants in a market by having a much deeper pool of capital to use as leverage. The idealistic models of perfect competition and price equilibrium only work well under elusive conditions and for fungible commodities.