This morning came the news that Amazon is opening department stores. You remember department stores, perhaps. They were found in every city and almost every suburb; spacious buildings that had within them small boutique-like areas that showed off clothing, jewelry, housewares, bedding, and the like.
Though pleasant and convenient to shop in, they proved no match for “the everything store,” and after a decade of declining sales, they were dealt a death blow by the pandemic.
Amazon has capitalized on this by throwing dead malls into its shopping cart and using them as fulfillment centers. Now it’s prepared to be more aggressive, taking on some of the few retail spaces that have done well during the pandemic: Walmart and Target. Both companies have been an economic bright spot, with tremendous earnings for each over the past year and a half.
While these big-box retailers are not exactly the department stores of memory, they do serve as the closest thing most of America has to that retail model. They also offer many of the most popular items that Amazon shoppers pick up. So it makes sense that Amazon has decided to take them on in a more offline way. According to reports, Amazon plans on selling clothing, household goods, electronics, and other items.
The thing is, though, Amazon has never succeeded in recreating what it has destroyed—or in its parlance, disrupted. While fashion retail was floundering, Amazon repeatedly tried to enter the market. It hired a president for Amazon Fashion, Cathay Beaudoin, who formed partnerships with the Council of Fashion Designers of America that went nowhere. After Beaudoin’s departure, it tried Amazon Luxury, an attempt at a high-end, invitation-only boutique that began by selling Oscar de la Renta gowns and hasn’t progressed much further.
After burning down bookstores across the country, Amazon decided to build brick-and-mortar bookstores of its own. Amazon Books are soulless, even compared to corporate giants like Barnes & Noble and the now-shuttered Borders, and their stock is made up of what’s most popular on Amazon, creating a feedback loop of blandness.
Building on this concept are Amazon 4-star stores, which are a jumble of items from Amazon that customers have given four stars or more. Walking into one is like entering a more chaotic and even cheesier Hammacher Schlemmer (which has only one physical store left). They are mostly in malls, which not so long ago saw the sudden arrival and almost as fast removal of Amazon pop-up stores that sold things like Echo Dots and Kindles.
Amazon’s most successful store is one it acquired, Whole Foods. Yet even there it has managed to tarnish the image of the market, adding more conventional foods than it carried prior to the sale and treating employees in a way that's at odds with the ethos of a customer who shops there for its fair-trade selections. All the while tracking every purchase with an app that gives Prime members a discount.
Based on the performance of these forays, Amazon is likely to fail with its department store plans. The reason Amazon.com does so well is that despite the site being a frustrating experience, it contains a seemingly endless array of available products that can land on a doorstop in days. Though much is made of its algorithm, it is best at suggesting things you have already bought and doesn't seem to understand what it is you like about what you’ve already purchased. The company itself is programmed in much the same way. It doesn’t understand what it means to be human and to shop in a human way.