Amazon stores coming to a city near you?

Amazon stores will open in Seattle, according to a new report. Can the online powerhouse pivot to create successful bricks-and-mortar Amazon stores?

|
Amazon via VentureBeat
Amazon stores in Seattle? A new report says that at least one is on the way.

Amazon, long the king of online retail, might finally be ready to take on real-world retailers with a brick-and-mortar store.

The store, which has been confirmed by unnamed sources close to the process, is reportedly opening its doors in Seattle sometime in the next few months and most definitely before the end of the year.

The store, the sources say, would be a pilot and, if successful, would lead to a chain of Amazon stores.

Rather than being a high-inventory big box on a Target or Walmart scale, the Amazon store was said to be planned as a boutique carrying high-end, high-profit-margin items as well as the brand’s Kindle line and accessories.

In a way, it would be a bit like the Apple stores one sees in every shopping mall these days, with a few big-ticket goodies in other verticals, as well.

The sources said Amazon would also be selling physical books at the stores.

We can see stores like this being popular additions to shopping centers, especially at airports, where bored and captive passengers would gladly throw down for a new book or a new book-reading, game-running gadget.

Amazon recently reported lower than expected profits for Q4 2011, in spite of record high sales numbers for e-readers and tablets. The company’s Kindle Fire, which was available for pre-order starting last September, has been the star of the show, selling as many as 6 million units in the final quarter of the year.

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut. And don’t forget to sign up for the weekly BizTech newsletter.

Next Story: Join VentureBeat and Kleiner Perkins at our DEMO meetup party this week
Previous Story: Online retail spending surged to $50B in Q4

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Amazon stores coming to a city near you?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2012/0206/Amazon-stores-coming-to-a-city-near-you
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe