It’s fanmail Friday on Thursday! We’ve got great thoughts and expert takes from folks in the audience about Amazon shipping, Apple’s rumored iPhone 5SE, Yahoo prospects and more!
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What amazon is aiming for is an old retail concept the Catalog merchant closer to Best and Service Merchandise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalog_merchant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Products
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise
Specifically the Amazon Books store concept seems to be an modernized version of the Service Merchandise store configuration with books in place of jewelry to quote the wiki article “For non-jewelry orders, customers would enter the showroom and receive a tablet which included an order form to record the catalog numbers of desired items. Items were displayed in working order in the showroom, allowing customers to test products as they shopped. Current Service Merchandise catalogs were placed in strategic locations throughout the store to allow customers to shop for items that were not on display. When ready to place their orders, customers would take the tablet to a clerk who would act as a cashier and submit the order to the store’s stockroom (this process was altered in the late 1980s to allow customers to place their own orders with a self-service computer terminal named “Silent Sam”, which later was renamed “Service Express”). The customer would then move to the “Merchandise Pickup Area” near the exit, where the order would emerge from the stockroom on a conveyor belt.
In addition to jewelry and catalog showroom display items, Service Merchandise also had several self-service items, which were located on shelves, and taken to the checkout to be paid for as in a traditional retail store. These items included many of those in the toy department as well as smaller, low priced items (such as batteries, film, and video cassettes).”
Generally the store kept most merchandise in the warehouse and you collected sku codes on an tablet later replaced by UPC pull slips and checked out then you went to an pickup station where the items on on floor were picked and conveyed out to you. ironically the rise of Wal-Mart and Kmart killed the concept while sears and JCPenny moved to an more standard department store concept. leave it to amazon to raise the dead and upgrade it after all they revived catalog shopping with eCommerce.
That may ultimately be true but it is definitely not what they’re prototype book store in Seattle is like.