All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Five years ago, Amazon sold no physical merchandise of its own. Today, it sells five Kindle devices — more, if you count models with or without advertising or 3G wireless — plus a wide range of cables and accessories, both for the Kindle and now, for other devices. Amazon's shift from electronics retailer to electronics manufacturer was scoffed at by many at the time, but it's since transformed the company.
Nevertheless, Amazon still has nowhere near as much company-branded hardware as Apple or even Microsoft. It sells the bulk of its Kindles through its own online superstore. It's managed to get Kindle readers into retail stores all over the U.S. without hanging up a single shingle. So why would Amazon be interested in opening up a boutique shop of its own?
On Saturday, Good EReader's Michael Kozlowski reported that Amazon is considering precisely that:
We've heard rumors of an Amazon retail store before. In 2009, the company received a patent for a small store design, probably intended for pick-ups of Amazon deliveries, much like its Amazon Locker service now.
In December, Jason Calacanis heard from "a credible source" that Amazon would open a retail store, but wrote that it would be giant, warehouse-sized affairs showing off a little bit of everything that Amazon sells: "It could be Consumer Reports meets the Apple Store on crack!"
These rumors do have new bite in part because bookstores are beginning to push back against Amazon's excursions into both e-books and print publishing. Last week, first Barnes & Noble and then Canada's Indigo Books (Kobo's first and founding retail partner) announced that they would not stock Amazon Publishing print titles unless Amazon agreed to make those books available on other e-book platforms besides Kindle. This is why Good EReader's Kozlowski suggests that the store will be a bookstore, stocking Amazon Publishing titles as well as Kindles and Kindle accessories — more like a small Barnes & Noble than an "Apple Store on crack."
As electrifying as both of those visions sound, let me propose something a little less, um, ambitious. Amazon's model here should not be the Apple Store. Amazon's model should be the Apple Shop.
Apple Shops are "stores within stores" featuring Apple products and (in some stores) specially trained salesperson/consultants. The shops started at Best Buy, then branched out into Target. They offer premium placement and a chance for users to give devices a hands-on tryout and ask questions about them.
Really, this is all Amazon needs in order to sell Kindles and Kindle accessories. And the kinds of stores that would feature Amazon Shops are exactly the stores where Amazon needs to place its print books: not Barnes & Noble or Indigo, but Target, Walmart, Best Buy — the big box stores who will devour your local bookstore regardless of anything that Amazon does.
Amazon can experiment with selling its books and electronics at its stores in Washington (where it already pays sales tax), then partner up with its existing retail outlets to transfer that knowledge to them and train their employees. Target puts up the shingle, Target pays the sales tax, Target gets you to walk out with a Kindle Fire when all you wanted to buy were tube socks.
Apple has been successful with its retail stores for reasons that are almost entirely specific to Apple. There is no reason, besides ego, for any company to mimic Apple's approach unless that approach is a good fit for their business. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has plenty of ego, but he isn't foolish.
Consider this from Ron Johnson, who built the Apple Store before becoming CEO of JC Penney:
Amazon simply doesn't make enough of its own merchandise, even including books, to justify anything with a larger footprint than that — especially when it's already probably selling most Kindles at break-even or a loss.
The only way it could work, given Amazon's current product line, is if Amazon used the stores to sell all electronics that feature Amazon services — for instance, smart TVs, game consoles and media players that connect to Amazon Video on Demand.
There's one other possibility: Amazon could be planning to substantially expand its product line before the end of the year — smartphones, set-top boxes, an iPad-sized tablet — anything that could justify an Apple-sized investment in physical retail. Since we're just talking about rumors anyways, let's go ahead and get that one started right now.
