We all know that traditional retail is dying because Amazon can deliver anything to your front door. Now, in a strange irony, Amazon is opening some physical stores.
Last year, Amazon opened its first physical bookstore in the University Village shopping mall in Seattle. The store features thousands of books, a tiny sampling of those on Amazon’s website, most of them with customer ratings of four stars and above.
The books sell for the same price in the store as they do on Amazon’s site. Because book prices regularly change on the site, visitors to the store scan books using a mobile app to find out how much they cost.
Although the store is called Amazon Books, it prominently features a growing array of Amazon-made devices, including the Kindle tablet, the Fire TV set-top device and Echo, its home speaker and virtual assistant.