Back in 2014, Amazon signed a 17-year lease on office space with some retail floors across from the Empire State Building in Manhattan, and that led to delighted speculation that the company might open a real-life store to sell its own products and let local customers pick up their packages. Instead, the office space is just boring old office space. Now, reports are circlulating that a deal for an Amazon bookstore in Manhattan has been or will be signed.
Since that planned store didn’t happen in New York, Amazon has been busy opening pickup point stores on college campuses, and has also stealthily planned bookstores in Seattle, San Diego, and Portland.
Those stores, logically named Amazon Books, are an interesting hybrid of real-life and online shopping: customers have to scan barcodes to find out how much anything costs, but can buy the books on the spot.
The New York Post reports that Amazon plans to make a real-life store part of a mixed-use development called Hudson Yards. The store wouldn’t open until 2018 or maybe 2019, when the rest of the stores in the development are supposed to open. Other stores could open in the interim, especially if Amazon goes into stealth mode as they did for the West Coast stores.
Amazon set to rival NYC’s bookstores with Hudson Yards spot [New York Post]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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