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Narrator: Amazon helped kill bookstore chains. Now it's trying to become one. The company since 2015 has been opening a handful of physical bookstores in places like Seattle, San Diego, and Chicago. And it just opened its seventh location in an upscale mall in New York City.
Employee: People aren't moving away from buying physical books. We sell a lot of physical books on amazon.com, and we wanted to give them a new way to discover books. You know, the desire to find a book you love is a desire that is very common. And we felt like we could make it easier, make it more delightful for customers in the physical space.
Narrator: All the books in the store our bestsellers or rated four stars or above by Amazon's online book buyers. There are sections for books that large numbers of people have added to their Amazon wish lists online. And there are no prices listed on the book titles-- you can open the Amazon app on your phone and scan the book cover to get a price, or take the book to a scanning station inside the store.
But Amazon is also using its bookstores to get people to bring more of Amazon into their homes. There's a big section for people to test drive the company's gadgets, like the Kindle Fire TV box to stream web videos to your TV. There are also Kindle e-readers, Amazon's line of voice activated home speakers called the Echo, and other home electronics.
Employee: Customers have asked for it. Customers want to try it out. They want to see what does a smart home looks like? What can I do to make my home smarter? How does the Amazon Music interact with the Echo? What kinds of things can I ask Alexa? They want to see it in person, and they want to talk to experts about it. And so we have brought that into the store.
Narrator: It's still not exactly clear why Amazon is bothering with physical stores at all. Its website is already the biggest bookseller in the world, and the popularity of shopping for books and much more on amazon.com has crushed bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders, which went out of business a few years ago. Amazon doesn't disclose sales in its handful of stores, but it's probably a tiny fraction of the company's $140 billion in annual revenue.
And just one final note of irony here-- before Borders went belly up, it had a bookstore in the very same mall that's now home to Amazon Books.