One of the more curious aspects to Amazon’s wholesale slaughter of the brick-and-mortar retail book industry is Amazon’s apparent desire to revive the brick-and-mortar retail book industry. To that end, the Bay Area is about to join Seattle, Portland and San Diego in getting a physical Amazon retail location, as the San Francisco Business Times reports that a permanent Amazon book store is coming to the Broadway Plaza in Walnut Creek.
It will apparently be an Amazon Books store, according to a store page which is already up and running on the Broadway Plaza website.
This is technically not the Bay Area’s first-ever Amazon retail store. The UC Berkeley campus has an Amazon store, though it is more of a package pick-up and flatscreen TV lounge than a retail store. Additionally, there is an Amazon pop-up store in the Westfield Mall downtown that recently reopened after a remodel. But neither of these has the firepower of fully operational retail station in line with Amazon’s vision for a bookstore-slash-showroom, with shelves of books plus usable display models of Amazon Kindles, Echos, and the numerous Amazon products all redundantly called Fire.
Eater also notes that the Walnut Creek Amazon store will have a cafe, will be a roughly 6,500-square foot space, and is tabbed with an opening date of August 2017. The location is 1259 Broadway Plaza, in a space previously occupied by the shoes-and-handbags retailer Coach.
Do not scoff that Amazon’s store will be way out in Walnut Creek, as that suburb is an emerging luxury market. The East Bay Times notes that “Annual rental rates in downtown Walnut Creek averaged between $30 and $90 per square foot at the end of 2016, according to John Cumbelich and Associates, a Walnut Creek commercial real estate firm. Rents in Broadway Plaza, where Amazon will set up shop, are between $80 and $140 per square foot.”
It does not appear this Amazon store will incorporate any part of their Whole Foods acquisition. But if there are too many boxes in your cardboard recycling, perhaps this all merits a trip out to Walnut Creek.
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