All-New Kindle Family
In addition to Amazon.com, customers will be able to find, discover and purchase the $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch, $149 Kindle Touch 3G, and $199 Kindle Fire at Best Buy, Target, Walmart and more
Context & Ripple Effects
The September announcement of the $199 Kindle Fire and the three-tier e-reader lineup set the prices; today's news is about placement. Amazon is putting all four devices — the $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch, $149 Kindle Touch 3G, and $199 Fire — onto shelves at Best Buy, Target, Walmart and other retailers heading into the holiday quarter.
Distribution is the strategic wrinkle: Amazon is asking its biggest retail rivals to stock its hardware. Walmart has been building its own e-commerce push, including the April Kosmix acquisition and confirmed plans for new e-commerce projects this holiday season, while still carrying the Fire. The $79 price point also extends the ad-supported pricing template Amazon established in April, when it priced an ad-supported Kindle 18% below the ad-free version.
First-order effects
- Best Buy, Target and Walmart gain a sub-$200 tablet and a $79 e-reader for their holiday assortments, giving physical shoppers a Kindle alternative without going through Amazon.com.
- Amazon converts its September price announcements into shelf presence, widening the funnel for device sales beyond its own site during the highest-volume retail window of the year.
Second-order effects
- Walmart and Target are simultaneously stocking Amazon hardware and investing in their own e-commerce capabilities — Walmart via Kosmix-based projects — so every Fire sold on their shelves also seeds a customer relationship with a direct competitor.
- Retailers carrying the lineup face margin pressure at the $79 tier, where Amazon has already demonstrated it will trade hardware margin for ad inventory and content sales.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, tablets and e-readers become loss-leader-adjacent commodity hardware sold everywhere, with the real economics migrating to content, advertising, and the storefront behind the device — a structure where retailers distributing the hardware compete with its maker for the follow-on spend.
The trend: Consumer hardware is shifting toward sub-$200 price points distributed through mass retail, with vendors like Amazon treating devices as gateways to content and advertising rather than profit centers.