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Is this what an Amazon.com store shelf would look like?
E-tail giant and major bookseller Amazon may be headed to a neighborhood near you if a rumor published online proves true. Question is: Would it be good or bad for the book publishing industry?
In a blog post titled “Rumor: Amazon Retail Stores Coming & Predatory Pricing Channel Destruction,” Jason Calacanis wrote, “Just heard an interesting piece of gossip from a very credible source: Amazon is going to open retail stores and will start making its own branded merchandise.”
It’s the one thing that Amazon hasn’t tried in order to serve its customers better, points out David Streitfeld in a blog post at the New York Times. Amazon has relentlessly cut down on the time that most people have to wait between ordering something and receiving it. But, “Until we achieve the teleportation of objects, there is only one way to immediately get physical goods. It is called a store,” Streitfeld wrote.
Streitfeld went on to compare a possible Amazon.com bricks-and-mortar play to Apple opening its own stores in the early 2000s. A hi-tech company opening old-fashioned stores? It will never work, analysts crowed. Those same analysts later ate crow as the move has been one of the most successful in the company’s storied history.
According to reporting by FINS.com (a website for which the author was an editor), in 2010, Apple stores accounted for $10 billion of the company’s $65 billion in revenue. Its stores averaged $4,000 of annual sales per square foot, five times that of Best Buy. The Apple flagship store generated about $35,000 per square foot that year, double that of nearby Tiffany’s, the luxury jeweler.
Things are different with Amazon, however. The Apple store stocks and sells a limited kind of item: Apple electronics, software and accessories. The Amazon store would conceivably be Costco plus Whole Foods plus Barnes & Noble, but bigger.
Full story here.
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