• by Aaron Baar , Staff Writer, April 5, 2017

Well, that was … a bookstore. 

Last weekend, with a few hours to spare, I ventured to Chicago’s North Side (not quite the Wrigleyville area, but close) to visit Amazon Books, the e-retailer’s first brick-and-mortar outlet outside of a mall, to see what all the hubbub was about. And it was comfortingly familiar.

Those of us from a pre-Millennial age remember what these things were like: shelves stacked with books made of paper and cardboard. Touchable, browsable, purchasable. There were chairs to sit in, tables of best sellers and new arrivals and even a coffee bar for loitering.

Sure, this store was different. A good portion in the center of the store is dedicated to Amazon’s electronic offerings. There were Amazon Echoes for trial, Fire-sticks attached to TVs and Kindles galore. There was a shelf of top-selling non-book products (like a blender), popular on the company’s broader website. And below every book was a customer star-rating, telling you what others thought of the book. As far as I could tell, there were no books rated less than four stars. 

It was a bit like a Barnes & Noble without the overwhelming breadth of offering. You most likely weren’t going to find that obscure title a friend had told you about (unless many other people liked it too, which reduces its obscurity). Nor were you going to find 500 gluten-free cookbooks. After all, you could probably find those online … on Amazon. 

That’s the conundrum of this store. Amazon may have started by selling books on the Web, but these days breadth of offering is what we’re looking for, is it not? At this point, Amazon is more a competitor to Wal-Mart than it is Barnes & Noble. If you can’t find it on Amazon, it may not be worth having. And with two-day shipping, a little planning saves you a trip to the store, whether that be the grocery store, clothing store, electronics store or even a book store. 

And yet … Amazon Books was surprisingly crowded on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I was constantly bumping into people while moving from one section of the store to the other, often repeating apologies as I passed in front of them or behind them as they browsed. A staffer behind the checkout counter told me this was one of the slower periods the store had seen since opening four days prior. On my way out, a woman was telling her compatriots that they needed to go into the store because it was the first time she had seen it so empty all week. When was the last time you heard that standing outside a bookstore? 

It may be true that Amazon Books is just another corporate entity stealing personality from local neighborhoods, and it does lack the personal touch of your local, independent bookseller. (Several independent stores in Chicago have recently banded together to figure out a way to compete with the encroacher.) But, having lived in the general vicinity of Amazon Books for a decade, I can say with some certainty that this one store isn’t luring customers from any independent on the block. There hasn’t been one of those in the neighborhood for at least 15 years, if not longer. 

I’m honestly doubtful “selling” is the name of the game at Amazon Books anyway. The checkout counter is hard-to-find (more than one person had to ask a wandering staffer where to go to buy something). Transactions are cashless, and they’re made even easier by simply paying through Amazon’s app. Indeed, the only reason I made a purchase was because I could use my outstanding gift card balance to pay right there in the store. 

I’d been told years ago that Chicago was a great place for a business to try out a new retail offering or restaurant. Something about the affordable real estate and level-headed midwestern  consumer was a decent indicator of whether a concept had legs nationally. A week after its official opening, it’s way too soon to tell whether this Amazon Books (the first outside of a mall setting) will be a success. But it will be worth checking back in six months or a year to see if they’re still bringing in customers. If so, you can probably bet on a lot of them sprouting up all over the country.