And that was before a 20-something guy bounded into the store and started screaming: ‘Alexa! Alexa! Alexa!’” read a New York Times review of the 4-Star store in Soho. Both book and housewares stores were panned: “Spending time browsing here was among my most dismal shopping experiences in recent memory: joyless, arbitrary, spiritually empty. The stores did offer instant gratification - although so does Amazon same-day delivery, pretty nearly - and little else. But would the stores offer what the brick-and-mortars they’d put out of business had? “The instant gratification of owning an item the second it was purchased, as well as the personal touch of a knowledgeable sales clerk,” in the words of the Seattle Times. “These are fantastic books! Most have been rated 4 stars or above, and many are award-winners,” Amazon Books vice-president Jennifer Cast said when the first one opened. This translated to stocking shops with books that had high online ratings, displayed with reviews from the Amazon website. The bookstores aimed to bring the online experience of shopping for books at Amazon to a physical store. Seven years after Amazon opened its first location, in Seattle, Reuters reports that the company is shuttering all of its book and 4-Star stores, the latter a weird grab bag of well-reviewed toys and household products arranged with all the logic of an Amazon warehouse. (The Seattle Times, Amazon’s hometown paper, noted the inherent irony.) At the time the company seemed confident that this, too, was something they could best the competition at, another opportunity to nudge Barnes & Noble into its grave (although, amazingly, Barnes & Noble isn’t quite dead yet). It was a strange experiment to begin with: Amazon, which had gloried in the elimination of the balky traditions and expense of brick-and-mortar bookstores, decided to open its own brick-and-mortar bookstores. Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

Amazon bookstore