There are several good independent bookstores in Madison, WI, the medium-sized college town near which I live, and I'm happy to say that most seem to be well-supplied with customers who actually buy books, and have not resorted to the shenanigans this article describes.
One of my favorites, Leopold's, does have a small coffee shop that serves the best coffee in town. That's not what makes me love it, though: its small collection is arranged by country (or in some cases region), and it's exquisitely selected. Every time I go in, I find several books that I would never have noticed or thought to search for in a more traditionally-arranged bookstore: Turkish religious wisdom stories, a history of the Russian revolution, a volume of Sholom Aleichem's stories, the autobiography of a woman who lost her family to the Khmer Rouge — it's a treasure of a collection. I expect to keep going back there for a long time.
I wonder if other bookstores could stand out like that by structuring their collections in a way that helps their customers find interesting things they might not otherwise look for. I think — though I'm no expert — that most people go into a bookstore thinking not, "I need to find a copy of X," but "I hope I find something good to read!" A bookstore that solves the second problem connects better with actual customers.
A quibble with the article:
> “Browsing” itself is an agricultural term, he points out, in one of his book’s many divagations, often entertaining but sometimes a bit twee, on the culture and language of bibliophilia: it’s what cows do in a field, and only started to be used to describe reading habits in the nineteenth century.
Cows don't browse; they graze, evenly cutting the omnipresent grass. Goats are browsers, picking bits of what they believe are the tastiest, most nourishing plants, and leaving the ones they don't care for.