[HN Gopher] Amazon to close all of its physical bookstores and '...
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Amazon to close all of its physical bookstores and '4-star' shops
Author : leephillips
Score : 177 points
Date : 2022-03-02 19:31 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| brownbag wrote:
| This is really amazing news
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| I guess they got tired of closing other people's physical
| bookstores!
| stevenally wrote:
| There were none left....
| CrazedGeek wrote:
| Shame, I liked the 4-star in Westfield Topanga. Nice selection of
| stuff in a pretty small space.
| rednerrus wrote:
| The physical bookstore is great.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| I never understood these stores. Worth a visit if passing and
| have time to see what they have or if your looking for a present
| for someone and don't know what to get. But I've never woken up
| and thought I need a four star product. The selection
| (particularly books) is too wide and shallow to be worth
| browsing.
| peter303 wrote:
| Both the bookstores and 4-star appeared cluttered- a mixture of
| all kinds of stuff. And ordered by popularity, not by kind.
| paxys wrote:
| It was a weird model. As close to a physical manifestation of the
| front page of Amazon.com as you can get, which doesn't really
| translate very well to the retail experience people are used to.
| Like, I have never in my life randomly gone to Amazon, browsed
| around their site, clicked through different categories, found
| something I liked and bought it. Their entire experience starts
| and ends at the search bar, and that's impossible to replicate in
| the physical world.
|
| It will be interesting to see how their grocery and convenience
| stores fare. I have some Amazon Go stores nearby and they never
| seem too busy.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Assuming that "Amazon Go" is the mini store with no cashiers, I
| used to get lunch there sometimes before the pandemic. Worked
| well, was a good experience. The email receipt would tell you
| how many minutes and seconds you'd spent in the store; it was
| trivially easy to get in and out in less than 2 minutes without
| trying to rush at all.
| yreg wrote:
| > I have never in my life randomly gone to Amazon, browsed
| around their site, clicked through different categories, found
| something I liked and bought it.
|
| Guilty as charged on consumerism front, but I do exactly this
| on black fridays.
| cbhl wrote:
| This seems like the opposite for me... every time I've walked
| into an Amazon Books I've found at least one thing that I've
| wanted to buy
|
| So much easier than hunting through a Barnes and Noble or doom-
| scrolling through online listings
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| I get you, but this is not the experience they are trying to
| recreate, they are trying to recreate the very experience you
| said the website is lacking by using the algorithm and data
| from there online sales to decide what it should sell in the
| first place.
| codeduck wrote:
| I can quite easily reproduce the Amazon search bar by walking
| into a local high street pound shop. Their search is incredibly
| poor, skewing strongly towards promoted, clone or amazon
| brands. It's rare that i can find what I'm looking for without
| getting creative.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Yeah but do you get "I see you have begun a collection of
| every pair of headphones ever made, would you like to add
| these three pairs to your cart to round out your purchase?"
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| I dread watching random videos on YouTube for the same
| reason. No, I have not suddenly kindled an ongoing interest
| in unclogging sinks! And I just wanted to see that one
| Billie Eilish song my kid mentioned...and no more!
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Yeah, I never got how that was supposed to work, exactly.
| Like, if I just bought a TV, I'm probably not going to buy
| another one for a while, so, don't keep showing me all the
| TVs I didn't buy. At least show me stuff like sound bars,
| mounting hardware, TV stands, _etc._ Even with consumables,
| where it makes sense to show me literally the exact same
| thing I just bought, maybe wait a while until those things
| might have actually been, you know, _consumed_?
|
| As always, I'm sure the explanation for why their search
| engine and recommendations are so bad is either that they
| don't think it would make them enough more money to be
| worth it to improve them. An even more sinister thought
| would be that they think it would make them _less_ money to
| give consumers better recommendations. I 'm not sure which
| it is, TBH.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| With how painless Amazon generally makes returns for
| regular customers, I could see it being a viable
| alternative to in-person browsing for one to buy several
| different brands of item and just return all but the
| least cheap-feeling one
| quesera wrote:
| > Like, if I just bought a TV, I'm probably not going to
| buy another one for a while, so, don't keep showing me
| all the TVs I didn't buy.
|
| Counterintuitively, you're wrong about this!
|
| Some astronomical number of Amazon purchases are
| returned. Like 10 or 15%. So anyone who has just bought a
| TV is extremely likely (compared to the ambient) to be
| buying a TV right now.
|
| It's algorithms all the way down.
| bb123 wrote:
| Argos in the U.K. replicates this pretty well
| tialaramex wrote:
| Just in case people have never seen this business, they've
| got a _lot_ of stuff but it 's all on racks accessible only
| to employees. For customers the experience is there are a lot
| of catalogs (these days electronic) listing everything they
| have, you pick what you want (now just touching it on the
| screen, but historically you write a number on a form) and
| then you go see a member of staff, they take your payment and
| meanwhile your items are fetched from the stores. The
| catalogs are also available to take home (and these days
| they're a web site).
|
| The biggest difference to Amazon is after I pick that I want
| an HDMI cable, a garden trowel and a high temperature
| incandescent bulb for an oven, it says ready to pick up in 5
| minutes and I can walk to the store (five minutes) and get it
| with no delivery surcharge. Also I could pay cash (but I
| don't).
|
| Obviously if you live 2+ hours from an Argos, Amazon is
| starting to look more competitive, but in the UK who lives
| two hours from an Argos? I don't buy much from Amazon.
| madrox wrote:
| At first I was surprised that these stores had survived this
| long, and then I remembered these were probably great write-offs
| to have around when the real goal was probably data collection on
| how people navigated certain kinds of physical stores. Amazon is
| great at paying no tax because it has a lot of operations that on
| the surface lose a lot of money but whose real purpose is to
| funnel data into other, more successful projects. I wouldn't be
| surprised if that's the fate of Whole Foods in the long run.
| codq wrote:
| Last weekend, I ordered a Nintendo Switch OLED from my apartment
| in NYC, and picked it up at the 4-Star store in SOHO less than 30
| minutes later.
|
| It was an awesome experience, and I'm sad that this might be the
| last time I get _immediate_ service like that from Amazon.
| kasperni wrote:
| We have an Amazon Hairdresser here in East London (Spitalfields).
| Don't think I've ever seen anyone in there.
| hammock wrote:
| Whoa. Here's more info https://blog.aboutamazon.co.uk/shopping-
| and-entertainment/in...
|
| Seems like a way to show off the AR capabilities Amazon is
| working on. Secondarily, many haircare products are only sold
| in salons and this effort could eventually be a way around
| those restrictions.
| gigatexal wrote:
| That sucks for both the workers and the customers. I really
| enjoyed being able to go in and discover a book and then get a
| good discount based on my prime membership.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| could this be the extinguish step of embrace, extend, extinguish?
| registeredcorn wrote:
| I'm not exactly _happy_ to hear this, but I 'm also not at all
| surprised.
|
| After reading through some of the comments here, apparently the
| thing that I went to was some kind of Amazon mall "kiosk", not a
| proper store. Whatever it was that I went to, it was just
| incredibly creepy. It was just a bunch of kindles and Alexa's
| crammed into this little area, with no one around, hidden away in
| a weird area of the mall.
|
| I imagine it was supposed to have "go" associated to it in some
| way? There was no information I saw anywhere indicating how any
| of it was supposed to work. I didn't any sort of cash register or
| obvious spot where an employee would be. The whole thing was
| really just gross. It felt like, if you were to see a purse in
| the middle of the street with fists full of dollar bills sticking
| out of it with no one around. It's like someone put it there,
| specifically with the intention of them _wanting_ you to take it.
| It 's like it's accusing you.
|
| It was this disgusting sensation of being monitored in a way that
| was outright nauseating. I can't really describe it. If you've
| ever gone to a gas station or some other place, and are trying to
| pay for something, and the cashier comes out 5 to 10 minutes
| later from the bathroom, it was kind of like that, but without
| the relief of seeing a human after a few minutes. Now picture
| that, but in a small square space without walls, or signs of
| life. It's like no one's been there in months. That's what that
| location felt like.
|
| Anyway, if these Amazon stores were anything like that, I'm
| hardly surprised they didn't do so well. I'm not a huge fan of
| the idea of being treated like a criminal, just by entering a
| store.
|
| The names sound like they could have used some serious
| rethinking, too. My first assumption after hearing the term
| Amazon "4-star" is that it's not supposed to be very good. 5
| stars is good, so if it's only 4 it's low quality products only.
| Was it meant to be a "high end" dollar store? If so, why wouldn't
| I just go to the dollar store instead?
|
| I'm sure they have their reasons, I'm not vain enough to think
| I'm smarter than the people who made these decisions, but I can't
| imagine why they bothered, or if in doing so, why they made such
| weird decisions.
| atourgates wrote:
| Amazon's bookstores were ... odd.
|
| They helped me realize that what I value about going to a good
| independent bookstore is curation. Not "highest rated" or "most
| popular" - but books I wouldn't get otherwise exposed to that an
| employee has selected to carry, and display.
|
| That and local-interest connections to the place the bookshop is
| located.
|
| Amazon's bookstores looked very much like a good independent
| bookstore (well, if you take away all the Ring Doorbells and
| stuff), but lacked that essential ingredient. Everything was just
| based on some "best seller" list for a specific category.
|
| If I already know what I want, Amazon is a really easy place to
| get it. If I'm casually browsing, both Amazon.com and Amazon's
| physical bookstores were really bad at helping me discover
| something new that I'm interested in.
|
| I'm physically incapable of visiting a good independent bookstore
| without buying something. Often far too much of something. It's
| an expensive disorder I have. I think the last time I walked into
| Elliott Bay Books with no intention of buying anything, I walked
| out about $300 poorer.
|
| I've probably stopped in to Amazon's bookstore at University
| Village in Seattle about a dozen times since it opened. I only
| ever bought something once. A charging cable.
| sdoering wrote:
| > I'm physically incapable of visiting a good independent
| bookstore without buying something.
|
| I'll join the club.
|
| In Japanese, there's a word for it: tsundoku. It describes a
| person who buys books and mostly doesn't read them.
|
| Often they pile up on the floor, on shelves, and assorted
| pieces of furniture.
|
| Virtually my Audible resembles this.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I bought an electric kettle once from an Amazon Bookstore, but
| that was it. I may have bought a coffee once or twice. Like
| you, I walked in about 20 times previously.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I absolutely loved the University Village Amazon bookstore.
| I've got a big list of reasons why. First of all, there was no
| need to absolutely pack the books. Each book was displayed
| cover out, with some space around it, with maybe an endorsement
| or a bit of a review under it. It made it easy to discover
| interesting stuff simply by looking around. As a sci fi nerd,
| I'm used to the sci fi section being a bunch of paperbacks
| squished together floor to ceiling with just a vague title and
| an author name facing me. This was a huge step up. I found more
| than one new book there, and knowing that I'd get the Amazon
| price for it when I checked out made purchasing it and walking
| out an easy call (unlike at another bookstore, where for a new
| release I would've had to choose between getting it today or
| getting it 30% off the "list price" on Amazon).
|
| That said, the whole reason this works as a store design is
| that the store has no particular motivation to have a big back
| catalog. If they don't have it, you're just gonna go get it on
| Amazon, so they haven't lost a sale anyway.
|
| The store did get worse over time, though. More and more of the
| floor space became focused on selling a bunch of stuff that
| worked with Alexa. Stop it. You're not an Apple Store. Just be
| a book store. And as much as the book selection was pretty
| great to me the first few times I went in, when I stopped in a
| year later and the book selections were mostly the same, it was
| a lot less great.
| weeblewobble wrote:
| yes, I'll +1 this. The Amazon Bookstore at U Village is
| (was?) great. Super helpful staff, roomy, good
| curations/recommendations, and way way cheaper than
| independent bookstores. I'll miss it
| paganel wrote:
| > Often far too much of something. It's an expensive disorder I
| have.
|
| We should form a support club or something, I'm the same as you
| even though I live half-way around the globe. Something tells
| me we're not the only ones.
| TillE wrote:
| The annoying thing is that this is basically all replicable
| online, except Amazon has apparently never even tried.
|
| Like, say I'm interested in 14th-15th century European history,
| maybe I have a couple good books already that I know. You could
| go to a university library and look them up on the shelves, and
| find a wealth of related books near them. Amazon won't even
| give you that level of browsing by library classification,
| using data which already exists. They have the same half-assed
| recommendation system which seems to have barely changed in the
| past 15-20 years.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Amazon used to do a lot in that space, they had a big focus
| on customers creating and sharing lists of products. Your
| list was almost a blog post where you could write
| descriptions of each item and why they were there, order
| them, etc. I remember in the mid-2000s these lists were some
| of the best ways to find good books and products--there were
| always great "here's a roundup of the best technical books
| for programming language X/Y/Z" lists that I would seek out
| for example.
|
| It looks like there's much less focus on Amazon lists these
| days. Maybe they got rid of it entirely--it's hard to tell,
| all I can find are wish lists and such now.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| When I visited Amazon's book stores they always had little end
| caps with curated selections of books. Employee picks,
| celebrities like Michelle Obama or Oprah Winfrey reading lists,
| etc. I agree independent stores have a lot more character but
| Amazon's store wasn't just a cold, sterile pile of books that
| an algorithm picked.
| deckard1 wrote:
| Human curation is something that is definitely missing these
| days and was severely undervalued with the growth of the
| internet. I rarely conduct a Google search without appending
| "reddit" to the query. Because I know I want actual human
| answers. We are, ironically, using Google today as if it were
| the Yahoo! curated catalog of 1997. Because we can't trust that
| the links Google returns aren't some autogenerated SEO-driven
| affiliate link garbage.
|
| The same applies to music. Spotify is missing that certain
| ingredient that local radios (before they were sold and
| cannibalized by Clear Channel/iHeartMedia) and early 1980s MTV
| really nailed. We want a knowledgeable human to guide us
| through the landscape of books, music, film, and everything
| else.
|
| > Not "highest rated" or "most popular" - but books I wouldn't
| get otherwise exposed to that an employee has selected carry,
| and display.
|
| In the past few years Netflix introduced their "Top 10" feature
| which is prominent near the top of their app. This was _the_
| reason I unsubscribed from Netflix. I had been a member since
| 2004. The "Top 10" feature reminded me on a daily basis that I
| have no interest in the content Netflix has. Previously I had
| assumed (because of their rather horrible discovery mechanisms)
| that Netflix had a much deeper catalog and I could find
| something to watch if I keep searching. The top 10 list made me
| finally realize their offerings simply were bad. The value of
| the service wasn't there.
| bwb wrote:
| I am trying to fix this with book browsing online, try
| shepherd.com and let me know (ben@shepherd.com). I go to
| authors and ask them to share 5 books around a topic/them
| they are passionate experts in, and then i try to connect it
| in different ways to make browsing fun :)
|
| Only 10 months old and trying to integrate genre now...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I'm sure you already know this, but "genre" boundaries are
| fuzzy. (Some people refute the concept entirely, which I
| think is a bit silly.) There are several different ways to
| define each genre. If you can do some magic with your genre
| data that lets me sort some books into what I think of as
| genre classifications (say, if I consider Star Wars a
| fantasy work), then automagically lets me filter by that...
| Not sure how useful, or possible, that actually is, but it
| seemed like a good idea when I started writing the comment.
|
| Apart from thinking that Minecraft was set in Washington
| D.C., it gave _multiple_ good-seeming suggestions for all
| the random topics I thought to put into it. That 's pretty
| impressive, especially given (or, perhaps, _because_ ) your
| data is manually curated. Have you considered supporting
| Bookwyrm-flavoured ActivityPub, for (potentially curated)
| reviews?
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Dude... This is really good! If I wasn't on the most
| limited budget I've ever been on, I would have just bought
| like 3 books without even blinking.
|
| I don't know how you managed to get such a large list of
| bookshelves already, but I'm impressed.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Spotify is missing that certain ingredient that local
| radios
|
| This was orignaly Pandora's big selling point.
|
| Every track sent to them was analyzed by someone with a
| degree in music to help build a recommendation engine. It was
| a combination of algorithms and people.
|
| I am not sure how well that scaled or if they still do that,
| for the longest time Pandora had a tiny selection of music
| and I presume the reason was their intake process.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > Spotify is missing that certain ingredient that local
| radios (before they were sold and cannibalized by Clear
| Channel/iHeartMedia) and early 1980s MTV really nailed.
|
| This is interesting to me, as someone who's played with
| Spotify and Tidal but mostly stuck with Apple Music. In part
| I think this is inertia -- if you stick with any of these
| streaming services for more than, say, half a year, then it's
| probably not worth switching unless there's a _really_
| compelling reason -- but all three of the services have both
| human-curated playlists and algorithmically generated ones,
| and it seems to me that Apple Music has the best curated
| playlists of any of those three. Spotify has the best
| algorithmically generated playlists of all three, but I find
| the best discovery trick for me is to let Apple 's algorithms
| recommend curated playlists. :)
|
| (Tidal, at least when I was last a regular user, was
| genuinely bad at algorithmically generated playlists and
| pretty mediocre with their curated ones. I'm not really sure
| what their unique strengths are beyond being willing to
| deeply integrate with virtually everyone and offering streams
| with MQA, which is basically a lossy hi-res format.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm glad I was able to satisfy my movie bucket list when
| Netflix still had a large catalog of DVDs.
|
| Netflix today also has weird gaps, like if a show had 5
| seasons, Netflix only has seasons 2 and 3 available.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| The Netflix DVD recommendation system was fantastic.
| Massive selection of films, rankings based on what you
| liked, nothing seemed to be actively pushed at you. I
| certainly liked it better than the way they have their
| streaming site laid out.
| nogridbag wrote:
| As someone who only reads technical books I enjoy the Amazon
| bookstore but primarily for books for my kids. Barnes and
| Noble's kids book section can be overwhelming. The Amazon
| Bookstore is smaller in scope and I can quickly grab a few
| popular books to filter through. For the same reason I like
| buying kids books directly from scholastic books website.
| They're pre-filtered for popular books at the right age/reading
| level.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| In the 90s, I credit a huge amount of my love and appreciation
| for electronica to the folks at my nearby Tower Records. That
| single store, with a single listening station in the Electronic
| Music section, holding only 6 CDs, exposed me to music I never
| would have heard before. It wasn't anything from the Billboard
| 100 or top streams on Spotify, it was just what some local
| electronic music nerds thought was new and cool and I am
| forever grateful to them for what they decided to share, as
| well as desperately mournful that I'll never have that kind of
| experience again.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The best independent bookstore I know of are the thrift stores.
| I find all kinds of unusual books there, and best of all,
| they're dirt cheap so if they don't work out, I just donate
| them back :-)
| [deleted]
| jfengel wrote:
| There's a joke: "Escape room idea: Just a well-stocked
| bookstore with clearly marked exits. You have one hour to get
| out. Good luck."
|
| Elliott Bay Books exemplifies that meme better than almost any
| place in the world. Not only does it do an almost preternatural
| job of putting books you might like in front of your face, but
| it's a literal warren that can be tricky to escape from after
| you've finally woken from your book-induced reverie.
| bokchoi wrote:
| Or Powell's in Portland. That place is a maze and it's fun
| getting lost.
| glfharris wrote:
| This is partly what's driven me to second hand/charity
| bookshops.
|
| No, they don't have exactly the book I've been looking for. But
| occasionally they have absolute gems that I'd never have found
| independently.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I wonder if this is why I've never found much joy in browsing
| at chain bookstores (Indigo, in Canada). It's all just
| bestsellers, and half the products aren't even books, they're
| like kitchy home-decor items, candles, blankets, cozy "reading"
| pajamas and whatnot. I guess it's lures intended to stimulate
| impulse purchases out of people who already know they're not
| going to read anything they buy anyway.
|
| Whereas you go to the indie store and there's an entire shelf
| in the back dedicated to heraldry, seemingly for no other
| reason than that it's an area of acute personal interest for
| the proprietor.
| mabbo wrote:
| A long time ago, I was a dev in Amazon's fulfillment org, and one
| day a lot of very smart people disappeared. The guy who had done
| some incredible pioneering work in computer vision for the
| warehouses; the only principal engineer the org had at the time;
| and a bunch of other people I know that we're just really clever
| people. And they joined an org called "JIHM". What's JIHM?
| They'll only tell you if you join. But it's going to be really
| cool. (I was in Toronto so I couldn't join- Seattle only).
|
| What I knew: these particular people had left for this project.
| The head of it was the guy who had lead the Kindle project- he
| had rejoined Amazon allegedly because Jeff asked him to lead this
| project. And for whatever reason, this JIHM org had all these new
| physical book store managers reporting up to them.
|
| Over lunch one day, I proposed a theory to my coworker: "they're
| going to make that IBM commercial from the 90s, where the sketchy
| dude grabs a bunch of stuff and puts it in his pockets, then just
| walks out the door and gets a receipt". It was a fun idea, and
| given the CV people they had pulled it may have even made sense.
| "What about the book stores?" My friend asked "It's a smoke
| screen. That same guy leading JIHM is legendary for leaking false
| reports that Amazon was going to build a PC to cover him hiring
| hardware engineer for the Kindle."
|
| 6 months later, Amazon Go with it's 'Just Walk Out' technology
| was publicly announced. The CV guy I knew was even in the
| commercial ("Holy shit, is that Danny?!").
|
| Maybe this is the final conclusion that those stores were just a
| cover.
|
| (Caveat: this is all wild speculation, rumours, and probably bad
| memory on my part, but it's a great story and I swear it's all
| true!)
| qwerpy wrote:
| I had a very similar experience there. A mysterious 4 letter
| acronym that made no sense even if you knew what it stood for.
| "Multi-billion dollar market!". Wouldn't tell me what it was
| until I joined. Above average team from internal transfers
| ("our hiring standards are way above Amazon's regular bar!")
| and external hires. I even got smugly booted from a team
| meeting where I had presented some code I had written, after
| some SDE 2 realized I hadn't yet signed the NDA or whatever.
|
| It ended up being Kindle ads for Amazon Local, the now defunct
| Groupon clone. So anti-climactic after all the cloak and
| daggers theatrics. At least Amazon Go is a much bigger deal
| with interesting tech behind it.
| morganslaw wrote:
| Is Amazon Go stores sticking around? It is confusing when they
| say "all physical stores" are closing, but even the Amazon Go
| ones?
| [deleted]
| meowkit wrote:
| Amazon Go is being absorbed/rebranded under Amazon Fresh,
| which is supposedly like Whole Foods lite/their delivery
| service.
|
| Might be wrong, this is just my observation in SEA/what I
| recall.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Amazon Go is being absorbed
|
| Resistance is futile.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I was an intern at Amazon in Seattle _in 2008_ and was
| ordering groceries and beer from Fresh. It looks like it 's
| a pretty big deal now in most major US cities, but I
| remember being surprised that year after year after year it
| seemed to just.... continue existing. Not going huge, but
| also not getting canned.
|
| On the other hand, maybe that's the real lesson of Grocery
| Gateway and "dot coms" who tried to do a hard burn on this
| back in the day-- it's a really hard thing to get right,
| and getting it right requires an extremely long horizon of
| slow and steady growth.
| strulovich wrote:
| Looks like they might go away as Amazon merges the technology
| into Whole Foods:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/technology/whole-foods-
| am...
|
| (Sorry for paywalled article)
| uejfiweun wrote:
| That's an interesting story, thanks for sharing. It strikes me
| that when Amazon decides to commit to a product, they rarely
| fail. They've had success in innovating with Alexa, AWS,
| Kindle, etc. So hopefully they will have similar success with
| this tech, and hopefully it will be sold to third parties. I
| think the post-checkout future sounds awesome and convenient,
| and I look forward to it.
| vidarh wrote:
| The post checkout future is delivery from robotic warehouses
| with ordering systems that predicts your weekly shop. I have
| hardly been to a grocery store for years, and some weeks I
| don't bother logging in to adjust my order.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Why would they buy whole foods if they're just going to sell
| their competitive advantage to their competitors?
| MathCodeLove wrote:
| Why would they invest in such great infrastructure for
| amazon.com if they're just going to sell that
| infrastructure to competitors?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Because they make more money selling ads than they do
| selling their own products? Can't sell the ads unless
| merchants are using the marketplace though. Whole foods
| isn't necessary to sell the camera tech to competitors.
| Uehreka wrote:
| Is _that_ even true though? I thought they frequently
| copied merchants' products as Amazon Basics if they were
| selling well? Because if that's true, it means they'd
| rather have the business themselves than advertise for
| someone else (at least in some categories).
| silisili wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Any inclination on what JIHM actually
| stood/stands for?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| JIHM is JIHM's interesting hidden meaning.
|
| (not true)
| elephantgambit wrote:
| A combination of the closing stores' code names (neither
| relate to the actual projects very much).
| apendleton wrote:
| It wouldn't have occurred to me to go into one of these stores to
| buy an actual book, but I will say I appreciated having a no-
| advanced-planning-needed way to get a $4 HDMI cable or
| rechargeable batteries, or whatever other things regular
| electronics stores usually mark way up because customers have no
| other choice. Maybe now that so much of this is available same-
| day for free from online-Amazon, that's less compelling?
| hughrr wrote:
| Good. The one at Westfield was a shit show of nothing useful.
| calrueb wrote:
| I'm no fan of Amazon, but I did walk through the 4-star shop in
| Mall of America while Christmas shopping last year, and I liked
| it. I thought it was a cool space, filled to the brim with
| various interesting oddities. There was a long line to get in
| (partially due to COVID reasons), but it seemed very popular.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Ah well. I'm going to miss the 34th street bookstore.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Huh. I didn't know Amazon had physical bookstores.
| fermentation wrote:
| They had covers facing forwards, which made it incredibly
| exhausting to browse due to overstimulation.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| The side effect of that is they had a much narrower selection
| than a typical bookstore of that size.
|
| It was pretty weird.
| stagger87 wrote:
| Yes, and they were quite fun to browse. They were laid out in a
| way that books next to each other would be "recommended" for
| each other. In that way, you would often find a group of books
| that were interesting to you.
|
| As others said, it was covers out, which in my opinion only had
| the downside of having limited shelf space.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That's too bad. The 4star shop near me is actually pretty good.
|
| The foot traffic seemed to be about people returning stuff and
| then converting to customers of random stuff.
| badRNG wrote:
| This shouldn't be confused with the retail locations currently
| pushing to unionize
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/workers-first-union-push-at-...
| benbenolson wrote:
| That's talking about the grocery stores, though, and the post
| is about the bookstores and 4-star stores.
| badRNG wrote:
| That's...that's literally the point my comment made
| z3c0 wrote:
| Violent agreement, as they say.
|
| I've been noticing this more and more lately, and it makes
| me curious as to whether there's any research into the
| psychology behind contradictions.
| showerst wrote:
| That's a shame, I liked their "covers out" model, and they often
| had a reasonably stocked tech book shelf, which is something
| indie bookstores never really do well.
| davidw wrote:
| > tech book shelf, which is something indie bookstores never
| really do well.
|
| RIP the Powell's technical book store. It was a very large book
| store with only technical books. I spent many a happy hour
| poking around and finding interesting books.
| stagger87 wrote:
| The top floor of Powell's now has a large technical section,
| but it's not quite a replacement.
| divbzero wrote:
| I liked it too. The best bookstores are good for their curation
| and Amazon Books did a reasonable job at it.
| gtm1260 wrote:
| Bummer! The bookstores are pretty nice, and the 4-star shops were
| so useful for the bizarre, algorithmically curated collection of
| product they contained. I remember pre-pandemic, I needed a ir
| thermometer and a gift wrapped coffee table book, randomly popped
| into my local 4-star (soho) and it had everything.
| philip1209 wrote:
| The name "4-star" still confuses me so much. It signals to me
| "mediocre - not quite 5-star".
|
| I realize they meant it as "everything 4 stars and above", but .
| . .
| Flux159 wrote:
| I wonder what the internal data showed on these stores - from
| what I remember, these stores mostly had kindle devices and some
| selection of books which you could more easily get online.
|
| Someone probably realized that Amazon Go & Whole Foods were
| better for foot traffic (since they sell groceries & other items)
| and investing more into selling Amazon Go walk out tech would be
| a better expansion plan than their own stores.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I don't think I ever saw one of their bookstores, but I do
| remember passing by one or two Amazon kiosks at a mall. All
| they really sold there were some Amazon hardware like Kindle,
| Kindle Fire, Alexa, or Fire TV boxes.
|
| I didn't really see the point, given that some places like Wal-
| Mart or Best Buy already have display models you can play with.
| Animats wrote:
| I wonder if Whole Foods will go. It seems they've been
| downsizing staff and accepting longer checkout lines. No more
| "N items or less" line, and the self-service checkout is still
| barcode-oriented, not Amazon Go technology. Meanwhile, I see
| huge numbers of Amazon vans driving around.
| np- wrote:
| That's probably just due to normal staff retention issues
| that everywhere seems to be experiencing right now. There are
| still plenty of brand new Whole Foods popping up, plus the
| Amazon Go technology has just begun to become integrated as
| of just a few days ago.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Isn't that just the general trend with grocery stores in
| general (long lines)? I don't know about eliminating express
| lanes, but I don't know how many years it's been since I've
| been in a grocery store and seen most of the lanes being
| staffed, even at peak times. It seems like they'd rather run
| 2 lanes out of 8, plus the self checkout, rather than even
| temporarily open up a couple extra lanes to clear out long
| lines.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Amazon is rolling out the just walk out technology in whole
| foods stores. Only a couple have it now, but I imagine it
| won't be long until the rest do too.
| torbTurret wrote:
| Don't see any comments mentioning inflation, but I'd assume that
| wavering consumer participation is a factor.
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| I went to one of the "four star shops" around the winter holidays
| looking for gifts, but left empty handed. It _felt_ like it was
| all the crap they wanted to push, almost like the store itself is
| an advertisement space. It was the first and last time I 'd been,
| so personally I'm not surprised to hear these are closing.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Isn't that what any store is? What the store wants to push
| (based on what they think people will want). If you didn't see
| anything you wanted it may just be that you are not the target
| market. That is true of many stores. The more specialized the
| narrower the target market. The Amazon stores seemed to stock a
| lot of what a general bookstore would stock with a few novelty
| items like in a gift store thrown in.
| bduerst wrote:
| Most big box retailers lease store space (by the sq ft) to
| OEMs now, instead of buying and distributing the goods
| themselves.
|
| Much less liability for the retailer, and puts the onus for
| sales on the manufacturer. I would be surprised if Amazon
| didn't try to do that with their 4-star shops.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| A store is proximity plus curation. Of all the 985 possible
| car stereos you could possibly buy they have 12 that will
| serve a variety of needs while filtering out useless inferior
| or poorly prices options rather than you having to evaluate
| the a much broader selection of options. It's likely that
| your interests and the stores are somewhat aligned. At the
| front end there is a bunch of overpriced candy, soda, and
| magazines. Therein your interests aren't aligned. All of it
| is terrible for you and terribly priced. The entire section
| is designed to manipulate and harm in a small fashion all the
| people it is dealing with hopefully fairly in the other
| section. Consider programming vs ads same difference.
|
| A store that lacks any direction, curation, and empathy is
| more like the front end or ad space than the body of the
| store or programming. It is not that they are focused on what
| they want to sell you of course they are. It's that they have
| put less thought in what they would want to buy if they put
| themselves in your place. An algorithm is a shit way to stock
| a store.
| [deleted]
| belval wrote:
| Never saw those in real life, but I don't get why a part of
| Amazon Retail is interested in having actual stores. Most (nearly
| all?) their customers use them because they can deliver 1-2 day
| shipping on a ton of items without having to go out to shop. Need
| some niche hydroponic nutrients, they have it. Need some precise
| book that your typical bookstore doesn't have, they have it.
|
| I don't see why I'd want to go to an Amazon Shop instead of Wal-
| mart, Canadian Tire, Target, whatever else already exists. It's a
| market with razor-thin margins that's absolutely doesn't fit
| their current approach and growth focus.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| I'm glad, only because their bookstore didn't accept cash.
|
| They were a convenient way to return incorrect products, though.
| Tagbert wrote:
| A lot of stores and shops either don't or are reluctant to
| accept cash right now. Partially due to people's COVID
| contamination concerns and partially because change is still
| hard to get.
| muffinman26 wrote:
| In the US where a lot of these stores were (Amazon usually
| starts its pilot programs near its headquarters), that was
| maybe true a year and a half ago, but now. Change is no
| longer hard to find, and the few stores that held on to never
| accepting cash have closed.
|
| If someone is willing to pay with a card, _especially_ if
| they 're worried about COVID contamination, why would they go
| to a store for something they can buy at Amazon in the first
| place? The reports seems to pretty consistently say that
| surface contamination is a much less likely vector for spread
| than human proximity, and going to a store still involves
| human proximity.
| relyks wrote:
| Yeah, being able to return products at physical locations like
| their stores and Kohl's without having to pay a shipping fee
| has been a godsend
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| It's great that Amazon is reducing its carbon footprint. Closing
| down physical bookstores is a step in right direction to fight
| climate change.
| servercobra wrote:
| I really liked the one in northern Chicago mostly because it had
| a nice coffee shop inside. But otherwise it seemed like a novelty
| and something I wouldn't use for actual shopping. Amazon Go on
| the other hand...
| dymk wrote:
| That's a bummer, their 4-Star shops were my go-to for gifts
| during the holiday season.
|
| I wonder how long they'll keep the Amazon Fresh brick-and-mortar
| experiment running.
| relyks wrote:
| The Amazon Go and Fresh stores are a lot more successful and
| they serve as distribution centers for Amazon Fresh online
| orders. It's unlikely they'll close them down
| trts wrote:
| They were pretty great for that purpose. Somehow visiting a
| 4-star store was more efficient than staying home and perusing
| 10 different 'best-of' lists across kitchen, electronics, book
| or game categories. I always found something interesting when I
| visited.
|
| It was a bit like a Sharper Image but instead of 80% of the
| items being useless gadgets it was more like 20%.
| ZainRiz wrote:
| The only good things about these stores was that you got to hold
| a kindle in your hands before deciding to buy one on amazon.com
| cs702 wrote:
| Off the bat, I can think of two reasons for this:
|
| 1. _Even Amazon 's own bricks-and-mortar stores_ find it
| impossible to compete against Amazon's online store.
|
| Or:
|
| 2. The physical stores were just a "front" necessary for
| developing and testing new technology (as suggested by mabbo
| elsewhere on this page
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30533453).
|
| My money is on #2.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| It was weird to step in one and say "eh, I'll just order it on
| Kindle later".
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| I actually liked the 4 star store when I visited. Because it
| stocked items that were highly reviewed it had the peculiar
| quality of being a showcase for tons of well-rated knock-off
| items. Like I saw no-name camping and kitchen gear that I had
| always wanted to get a close up look at to understand the quality
| and if it was worth the low price. These items were placed right
| next to bigger name brand stuff too which I'm sure infuriated
| their marketing and sales teams.
|
| So it might have been a doomed concept from the start, but I'll
| miss having a physical showcase for cheap knock-off and import
| goods.
| gleenn wrote:
| Seems that having the brick and mortar shop exposes how cheap
| the crap on Amazon is. I never regret going to a store for
| anything remotely expensive where I'm unsure of the quality.
| Amazon will always hover around just good enough and just cheap
| enough.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| I trust them for USB/HDMI/etc cables, but nothing else. But
| I'd rather order cables from Monoprice anyway.
| Kluny wrote:
| Yeah, that actually sounds like a cool concept.
| npunt wrote:
| I wish Amazon would try different shopping experiences online,
| versus the hellscape of overoptimization that is Amazon.com.
|
| Part of the appeal of a bookstore is to have a different shopping
| experience than what you get online or even at other physical
| stores. It's walking over to a section, picking up a book, seeing
| what resonates. It's 'browsing' in a slower, calmer form, closer
| to the reading experience itself.
|
| Why doesn't Amazon try to make that? Replicate that experience in
| a new brand, call it 'booklovers.com' or something. Make it a cut
| down subset of features and information, with the book's content
| more at the center of the experience and easier to browse, along
| with the books 'next to' it. More curated, less metadata.
|
| Being freed of physical world means we can have many very
| different experiences without dealing with the scarcity of real
| estate. Yet Amazon tries to standardize the shopping experience,
| to the detriment of many categories of products that deserve
| their own approach.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's funny I just spoke to a colleague about this a few hours
| ago. Anker.com is basically an Amazon storefront without the
| shitscape.
|
| Amazon makes so much money from bullshit at retail that they
| cannot enable basic features that even not so great physical
| retailers get right. Case in point: try buying windshield
| wipers for multiple cars. You'll get ads for incompatible
| blades and tricked into a subscription. It's literally worse
| than the 1980 experience of flipping through a torn, filthy
| book hanging from a shelf by a string.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Steam tried this with their curators feature. You can subscribe
| to ordinary users and see their personal
| recommendations/reviews. Not idea how well this feature is used
| but personally I found the general AI recommendations to be
| better and most of the curators to over blow everything and
| call a game literally unplayable because they could only get
| 59fps on one scene.
| philistine wrote:
| That curators feature was buried way too deep into the
| interface.
|
| What OP is proposing is the vision to divorce the URL from
| the warehouses. Allow some teams within Amazon to make
| websites to buy books or other stuff from bespoke URLs. I
| think at the scale that Amazon has, it would only help.
| bwb wrote:
| I am working on this :)! Shepherd.com, only 10 months old but i
| have a lot more formats planned as we get further along!
|
| I use NLP on the backend to tie books to Wikipedia topics and
| working to improve that and bring in genre filters/pages soon.
|
| Let me know what you think (ben@shepherd.com)
| erehweb wrote:
| I think abebooks.com is owned by Amazon - maybe they are trying
| something like that there.
| bckygldstn wrote:
| Amazon also owns bookdepository.com (and goodreads.com)
| fassssst wrote:
| There's a massive opportunity to make VR shopping experiences.
| Just try Redfin VR and see how cool it is for shopping for
| houses. I want to shop for other big purchases that way.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Houses is an interesting one. It would massively improve the
| experience if they just took some more photos or used one of
| those products which builds a 3D scan of the property. But
| they seem to sell fast with 3 photos and an inaccurate
| floorplan so why bother I guess. Maybe we need to just cut
| out the agent and get home owners to list their own
| properties and build the scans with lidar on their phones.
| scotuswroteus wrote:
| I hated these places. The one I walked into was literally the
| opposite of the vibe of the kind of bookstore I like, whether
| it's independent or even a Barnes and Noble. It was a soulless
| operation, where they follow you around the store if you don't
| look rich and in a hurry to leave. Good riddance.
| balls187 wrote:
| Ah, sucks. I really liked the 4-star store.
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