Amazon says it will open a 4,000-square-foot store in Manhattan's Time Warner Center in New York in spring
Online retailing giant Amazon.com Inc. plans to open its first New York City bookstore in Manhattan's Time Warner Center, the company said late Wednesday.
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's move into physical retail started with its first Amazon Books store in Seattle's University Village in late 2015, stocked with 5K-6K titles curated from online ratings. The Time Warner Center location extends that playbook to its biggest urban market — and it isn't Amazon's first physical foothold in Manhattan, where Prime Now began delivering from local stores back in 2015.
First-order effects
- Manhattan shoppers get their first chance to browse Amazon's inventory in person, with the store doubling as a pickup and returns point inside Time Warner Center.
Second-order effects
- The small-format store proves out a template Amazon reuses in New York: eighteen months later it opens Amazon 4-star nearby, another roughly 4,000-square-foot NYC shop where shelf space is allocated by online ratings and prices match the website.
Third-order effects
- Physical stores become a data-and-advertising surface for Amazon rather than a standalone retail business — the same city where it later staffs a 2,000-person office largely for advertising jobs, suggesting the storefronts feed the machine-learning and merchandising engine more than they sell books.
The trend: The leading e-commerce company is converting its online purchase and rating data into small-format physical stores, using cities like New York as the testing ground.