We have posted on this blog many pictures of bookstores, and lamented the fact that brick-and-mortar bookstores are becoming rare and possibly extinct in certain cities. In the US, this trend is driven largely by the advent of e-books sold online. Amazon started their global online business with this retail concept.
By chance, we came across an Amazon bookstore in California, in Walnut Creek, a suburb of San Francisco. It has a store front and live employees inside.
It looks like a normal bookstore but with far fewer books on display. They display multiple copiess of a select few books on the shelf. The front covers are displayed rather than the spine.
Let’s take a look around. The books are displayed according to the subject and its popularity by some measure.
There were 3 full shelves of cookbooks compared to one shelf of Art & Design or Computers & Coding.
Surprisingly, they have a small section for Dungeon and Dragon tabletop games as well as graphic novels.
We suspect what was on display was determined by analytics of the local customers. Just showing what your neighbors are reading. This is Amazon where data drives everything. By the way, we visited the store in 2019, so the best sellers shown here are out of date.
The review written by Amazon customers are reproduced along with star ratings and the number of reviews to convince you to buy – similar to the online experience.
Did you know that even the highlights you made in a Kindle could be used by Amazon to sell books ? They are monetizing your attention and recollection. Instead of having a knowledgeable employee in store, they are leveraging Kindle readers. Amazon is the only company that have access to such unique data.
The store also sells their Amazon-branded products, particularly electronic goods, like tablets and smart home gadgets.
The store also sell other products that are popular on Amazon, e.g., travel essentials.
Yes, they have a coffee shop inside as well.
The store has a cashier, presumably accepting cash for payment.
This is clearly an experiment on the future of retailing: how to extract synergy from a brick-and-mortar store format when it owns the biggest online store in the world. Amazon is not hesitating to disrupt itself for the future.