Amazon continues to expand its physical retail footprint, with The Washington Post reporting on a new bookstore in Washington D.C. that is yet to open.
The store, which would be on the same block as a now-closed Barnes & Noble, would be Amazon’s 13th bookstore; six are currently open in Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Chicago, and the Boston area. The company is also currently working on additional sites in New York, Chicago, New Jersey, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
The first brick-and-mortar Amazon Books opened in Seattle’s University Village in 2015. Amazon bookstores take a slightly different approach to retail. All book titles face outward, making it easy for customers to browse. Also, none of the books have price tags. Instead, customers wave the barcode on the book under a scanner in order to determine the price; Prime members get discounted prices that books sell for on Amazon.com.
The stores also showcase a healthy slate of Amazon devices, including the popular Kindle e-readers.
In an interview with GeekWire in 2015, just before Amazon opened its first location in Seattle, Amazon Books’ head Jennifer Cast hinted that more stores might be on the way.
“We hope that if this goes well, if customers love it, we’d love to do it in other places,” Cast said.
Bookstores are only one part of a multi-pronged brick-and-mortar push for Amazon, which spent its first 20 years helping define and dominating the online retail world. The company also has pop-up shops in malls around the country, and it is building and testing multiple grocery models, including drive-up stores and the Amazon Go convenience store concept.
