What I Learned Visiting Amazon’s Store

I recently braved the rain in Seattle to visit Amazon’s first physical retail store, Amazon Books. At first blush, it didn’t seem all that different from the Borders or Barnes & Noble stores that Amazon maimed: It’s a mid-sized corporate bookstore in a generic outdoor shopping mall surrounded by national chains.

But on closer inspection, the details about how you shop in this store say a lot about how Amazon might proceed into physical retail after two decades selling online. Everything from the way shoppers learn about books and their prices to the way the company allots floorspace speaks to its heavy use of data.