24 ms·

Amazon to close all of its physical bookstores and '4-star' shops

298 points by leephillips 5y ago

codq 5y ago
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.
kayodelycaon 5y ago
Huh. I didn't know Amazon had physical bookstores.
- fermentation 5y ago
  They had covers facing forwards, which made it incredibly exhausting to browse due to overstimulation.
  - coffeefirst 5y ago
    The side effect of that is they had a much narrower selection than a typical bookstore of that size. It was pretty weird.
- stagger87 5y ago
  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.
- giobox 5y ago
  Their design and layout (the "4-star" stores too) borrowed heavily from popular late 90s/2000s UK bookstore chain "Waterstones" IMO. I've always found the physical similarity of Amazon's own retail store efforts to Waterstone's curious, as Amazon actually tried a partnership with Waterstones to sell Kindles and such years before opening their first stores back in 2012... First Amazon book store with remarkably similar design and layout to a Waterstones followed in 2015. As a UK expat living in the US my first thoughts on entering an Amazon Book store here was just how much it was like Waterstones. Could just be coincidence! > https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/waterstones-unveils-partnership-with-amazon-7770050.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/waterstones... > https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/2/9661556/amazon-books-first-physical-bookstore-opening-seattle https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/2/9661556/amazon-books-firs...
Spooky23 5y ago
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 5y ago
This shouldn't be confused with the retail locations currently pushing to unionize https://www.businessinsider.com/workers-first-union-push-at-amazon-retail-store-want-25hr-2022-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/workers-first-union-push-at-...
- benbenolson 5y ago
  That's talking about the grocery stores, though, and the post is about the bookstores and 4-star stores.
  - badRNG 5y ago
    That's...that's literally the point my comment made
    - z3c0 5y ago
      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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    The top floor of Powell's now has a large technical section, but it's not quite a replacement.
- divbzero 5y ago
  I liked it too. The best bookstores are good for their curation and Amazon Books did a reasonable job at it.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  University bookstores used to have some really great and obscure technical books. Not sure if they still do, but they were worth browsing, some you can’t do online. B&N and Border would occasionally have something interesting in their technical sections, but they increasingly got stuffed with dummy books and just people trying to milk a certain gravy train (never write those books).
Flux159 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    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.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      How does just walk out work with produce?
      - dylan604 5y ago
        Could they do something where each bin of produce is on a scale so that the system charges you for the weight no longer present rather than making you weigh the specific selection?
0x0000000 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
[deleted]
SamReidHughes 5y ago
I'm glad, only because their bookstore didn't accept cash. They were a convenient way to return incorrect products, though.
- relyks 5y ago
  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
- Tagbert 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
dymk 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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
paxys 5y ago
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.
- bb123 5y ago
  Argos in the U.K. replicates this pretty well
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    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.
    - bb123 5y ago
      Yeah I really like it. It’s like Amazon but faster and without all the counterfeit junk.
- ChildOfChaos 5y ago
gigatexal 5y ago
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.
hughrr 5y ago
Good. The one at Westfield was a shit show of nothing useful.
calrueb 5y ago
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.
gtm1260 5y ago
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.
joshgachnang 5y ago
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...
- wenc 5y ago
  I used to frequent the Amazon Bookstore on Southport in the Lakeview neighborhood because and it was actually pretty good for new title discovery. I always ended up getting books from there. The location was great with lots of nice shops surrounding it. The 4-star store out at Oakbrook Mall though — I didn’t find as interesting but I’m not in the demographic that shops for gifts for others. It was pretty busy though.
thenerdhead 5y ago
It was weird to step in one and say “eh, I’ll just order it on Kindle later”.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    I trust them for USB/HDMI/etc cables, but nothing else. But I’d rather order cables from Monoprice anyway.
- Kluny 5y ago
  Yeah, that actually sounds like a cool concept.
- bentcorner 5y ago
  I found it weird they named it "4 star". I get that it's 4 stars and above rated items, but the name gives the impression of "mostly ok, but not perfect".
rednerrus 5y ago
The physical bookstore is great.
johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
It's great that Amazon is reducing its carbon footprint. Closing down physical bookstores is a step in right direction to fight climate change.
npunt 5y ago
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.
- fassssst 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
- erehweb 5y ago
  I think abebooks.com is owned by Amazon - maybe they are trying something like that there.
  - bckygldstn 5y ago
    Amazon also owns bookdepository.com (and goodreads.com)
xanaxagoras 5y ago
I guess they got tired of closing other people's physical bookstores!
- _hcuq 5y ago
  There were none left….
registeredcorn 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.
- asimpletune 5y ago
  I feel like in the future, or maybe even now, there will be an opportunity to have something like a super nice, independent book store, but with the value proposition being more about the experience. Since people can always actually buy the book online, brick and mortar stores should shift to something that can't be replicated online. This would be particularly attractive for people who live in a city, where they may want somewhere warm and aesthetically pleasing to hang out, that's semi-social. I think coffee shops demonstrate this in a way, but they don't go far enough, compared to what I'm thinking of. I imagine somewhere that has comfortable places to sit, read, and even some food, but primarily what you're paying for would be like a monthly membership. When I travel, for example, I prefer now to stay in hostels over airbnb's, just because I like having an easy way to hangout and meet other people. I can still be online and do work, but at certain hours there's also more social activity and I appreciate both aspects.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
scotuswroteus 5y ago
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.
brownbag 5y ago
This is really amazing news
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
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.
kasperni 5y ago
We have an Amazon Hairdresser here in East London (Spitalfields). Don't think I've ever seen anyone in there.
- hammock 5y ago
  Whoa. Here's more info https://blog.aboutamazon.co.uk/shopping-and-entertainment/introducing-amazon-salon 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.
apendleton 5y ago
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?
- cma 5y ago
  Sounds like RadioShack.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    RadioShack is one of my favorite examples of a company that just couldn't evolve. They could have been a leader in the online electronics doodads market. They already had distribution warehouses to stock the local stores. One could have been converted to a pick&pull warehouse easily (in my non-experienced logistics point of view). They couldn't even do cell phones well.
belval 5y ago
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.
- __float 5y ago
  I go to amazon.com to search for and buy a specific thing. The occasional time I'd stop by a 4 Star or Books store, it was to _browse_, and.. honestly, probably buy things I didn't need.
CrazedGeek 5y ago
Shame, I liked the 4-star in Westfield Topanga. Nice selection of stuff in a pretty small space.
2-718-281-828 5y ago
could this be the extinguish step of embrace, extend, extinguish?
mabbo 5y ago
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!)
- angarg12 5y ago
  I was under NDA for that stupid robot that was announced recently. Had to bite my tongue for 3 years until I could tell people about that silly secret project.
- morganslaw 5y ago
  Is Amazon Go stores sticking around? It is confusing when they say "all physical stores" are closing, but even the Amazon Go ones?
  - meowkit 5y ago
    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.
peter303 5y ago
Both the bookstores and 4-star appeared cluttered- a mixture of all kinds of stuff. And ordered by popularity, not by kind.
madrox 5y ago
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.
booleandilemma 5y ago
Ah well. I'm going to miss the 34th street bookstore.
cs702 5y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30533453). My money is on #2.
balls187 5y ago
Ah, sucks. I really liked the 4-star store.
philip1209 5y ago
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 . . .
- probably_wrong 5y ago
  Oooooohh... now I get it. I thought they were closing all but their best-performing stores.
torbTurret 5y ago
Don’t see any comments mentioning inflation, but I’d assume that wavering consumer participation is a factor.
stuckkeys 5y ago
Have you guys tried your local public libraries? Most of them include perks to extra resources. It is pretty nice.
thecosas 5y ago
Amazon will close its 4-star, pop up and bookstore locations on various dates and *notify customers via signage*. I walked past the Amazon Book Store in San Diego this past weekend and there was a handwritten sign saying something along the lines of "closed due to system outage". Remember thinking at the time that it was odd, but makes way more sense now.
seanosaur 5y ago
I've purchased maybe one book from the brick & mortar store in Chicago, and it was one my kid just didn't want to give up. Beyond that, I've only ever used them as a quick way to return an item to the warehouse.

298 points by leephillips 5y ago

codq 5y ago

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.

kayodelycaon 5y ago

Huh. I didn't know Amazon had physical bookstores.

fermentation 5y ago
They had covers facing forwards, which made it incredibly exhausting to browse due to overstimulation.
- coffeefirst 5y ago
  The side effect of that is they had a much narrower selection than a typical bookstore of that size. It was pretty weird.
stagger87 5y ago
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.
giobox 5y ago
Their design and layout (the "4-star" stores too) borrowed heavily from popular late 90s/2000s UK bookstore chain "Waterstones" IMO. I've always found the physical similarity of Amazon's own retail store efforts to Waterstone's curious, as Amazon actually tried a partnership with Waterstones to sell Kindles and such years before opening their first stores back in 2012... First Amazon book store with remarkably similar design and layout to a Waterstones followed in 2015. As a UK expat living in the US my first thoughts on entering an Amazon Book store here was just how much it was like Waterstones. Could just be coincidence! > https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/waterstones-unveils-partnership-with-amazon-7770050.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/waterstones... > https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/2/9661556/amazon-books-first-physical-bookstore-opening-seattle https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/2/9661556/amazon-books-firs...

Spooky23 5y ago

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 5y ago

This shouldn't be confused with the retail locations currently pushing to unionize https://www.businessinsider.com/workers-first-union-push-at-amazon-retail-store-want-25hr-2022-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/workers-first-union-push-at-...

benbenolson 5y ago
That's talking about the grocery stores, though, and the post is about the bookstores and 4-star stores.
- badRNG 5y ago
  That's...that's literally the point my comment made
  - z3c0 5y ago
    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 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  The top floor of Powell's now has a large technical section, but it's not quite a replacement.
divbzero 5y ago
I liked it too. The best bookstores are good for their curation and Amazon Books did a reasonable job at it.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
University bookstores used to have some really great and obscure technical books. Not sure if they still do, but they were worth browsing, some you can’t do online. B&N and Border would occasionally have something interesting in their technical sections, but they increasingly got stuffed with dummy books and just people trying to milk a certain gravy train (never write those books).

Flux159 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  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.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    How does just walk out work with produce?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Could they do something where each bin of produce is on a scale so that the system charges you for the weight no longer present rather than making you weigh the specific selection?

0x0000000 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.

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SamReidHughes 5y ago

I'm glad, only because their bookstore didn't accept cash. They were a convenient way to return incorrect products, though.

relyks 5y ago
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
Tagbert 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.

dymk 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
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 5y ago

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

paxys 5y ago

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.

bb123 5y ago
Argos in the U.K. replicates this pretty well
- tialaramex 5y ago
  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.
  - bb123 5y ago
    Yeah I really like it. It’s like Amazon but faster and without all the counterfeit junk.
ChildOfChaos 5y ago

gigatexal 5y ago

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.

hughrr 5y ago

Good. The one at Westfield was a shit show of nothing useful.

calrueb 5y ago

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.

gtm1260 5y ago

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.

joshgachnang 5y ago

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...

wenc 5y ago
I used to frequent the Amazon Bookstore on Southport in the Lakeview neighborhood because and it was actually pretty good for new title discovery. I always ended up getting books from there. The location was great with lots of nice shops surrounding it. The 4-star store out at Oakbrook Mall though — I didn’t find as interesting but I’m not in the demographic that shops for gifts for others. It was pretty busy though.

thenerdhead 5y ago

It was weird to step in one and say “eh, I’ll just order it on Kindle later”.

qbasic_forever 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I trust them for USB/HDMI/etc cables, but nothing else. But I’d rather order cables from Monoprice anyway.
Kluny 5y ago
Yeah, that actually sounds like a cool concept.
bentcorner 5y ago
I found it weird they named it "4 star". I get that it's 4 stars and above rated items, but the name gives the impression of "mostly ok, but not perfect".

rednerrus 5y ago

The physical bookstore is great.

johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago

It's great that Amazon is reducing its carbon footprint. Closing down physical bookstores is a step in right direction to fight climate change.

npunt 5y ago

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.

fassssst 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
erehweb 5y ago
I think abebooks.com is owned by Amazon - maybe they are trying something like that there.
- bckygldstn 5y ago
  Amazon also owns bookdepository.com (and goodreads.com)

xanaxagoras 5y ago

I guess they got tired of closing other people's physical bookstores!

_hcuq 5y ago
There were none left….

registeredcorn 5y ago

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 5y ago

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.

asimpletune 5y ago
I feel like in the future, or maybe even now, there will be an opportunity to have something like a super nice, independent book store, but with the value proposition being more about the experience. Since people can always actually buy the book online, brick and mortar stores should shift to something that can't be replicated online. This would be particularly attractive for people who live in a city, where they may want somewhere warm and aesthetically pleasing to hang out, that's semi-social. I think coffee shops demonstrate this in a way, but they don't go far enough, compared to what I'm thinking of. I imagine somewhere that has comfortable places to sit, read, and even some food, but primarily what you're paying for would be like a monthly membership. When I travel, for example, I prefer now to stay in hostels over airbnb's, just because I like having an easy way to hangout and meet other people. I can still be online and do work, but at certain hours there's also more social activity and I appreciate both aspects.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

scotuswroteus 5y ago

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.

brownbag 5y ago

This is really amazing news

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

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.

kasperni 5y ago

We have an Amazon Hairdresser here in East London (Spitalfields). Don't think I've ever seen anyone in there.

hammock 5y ago
Whoa. Here's more info https://blog.aboutamazon.co.uk/shopping-and-entertainment/introducing-amazon-salon 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.

apendleton 5y ago

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?

cma 5y ago
Sounds like RadioShack.
- dylan604 5y ago
  RadioShack is one of my favorite examples of a company that just couldn't evolve. They could have been a leader in the online electronics doodads market. They already had distribution warehouses to stock the local stores. One could have been converted to a pick&pull warehouse easily (in my non-experienced logistics point of view). They couldn't even do cell phones well.

belval 5y ago

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.

__float 5y ago
I go to amazon.com to search for and buy a specific thing. The occasional time I'd stop by a 4 Star or Books store, it was to _browse_, and.. honestly, probably buy things I didn't need.

CrazedGeek 5y ago

Shame, I liked the 4-star in Westfield Topanga. Nice selection of stuff in a pretty small space.

2-718-281-828 5y ago

could this be the extinguish step of embrace, extend, extinguish?

mabbo 5y ago

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!)

angarg12 5y ago
I was under NDA for that stupid robot that was announced recently. Had to bite my tongue for 3 years until I could tell people about that silly secret project.
morganslaw 5y ago
Is Amazon Go stores sticking around? It is confusing when they say "all physical stores" are closing, but even the Amazon Go ones?
- meowkit 5y ago
  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.

peter303 5y ago

Both the bookstores and 4-star appeared cluttered- a mixture of all kinds of stuff. And ordered by popularity, not by kind.

madrox 5y ago

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.

booleandilemma 5y ago

Ah well. I'm going to miss the 34th street bookstore.

cs702 5y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30533453). My money is on #2.

balls187 5y ago

Ah, sucks. I really liked the 4-star store.

philip1209 5y ago

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 . . .

probably_wrong 5y ago
Oooooohh... now I get it. I thought they were closing all but their best-performing stores.

torbTurret 5y ago

Don’t see any comments mentioning inflation, but I’d assume that wavering consumer participation is a factor.

stuckkeys 5y ago

Have you guys tried your local public libraries? Most of them include perks to extra resources. It is pretty nice.

thecosas 5y ago

Amazon will close its 4-star, pop up and bookstore locations on various dates and *notify customers via signage*. I walked past the Amazon Book Store in San Diego this past weekend and there was a handwritten sign saying something along the lines of "closed due to system outage". Remember thinking at the time that it was odd, but makes way more sense now.

seanosaur 5y ago

I've purchased maybe one book from the brick & mortar store in Chicago, and it was one my kid just didn't want to give up. Beyond that, I've only ever used them as a quick way to return an item to the warehouse.