Inside the Amazon 4-star store in New York

Last week, with no fanfare, Amazon opened a brand new brick and mortar concept in Manhattan's SoHo commercial district, called the Amazon 4-Star store. The premise is as its name suggests: every item in the store has a rating of 4 stars or more on Amazon.com, with the exception of a few new items and trends.

Inside, the store looks like a mess. But that's nice.

The 4-star store is "designed to be a place where customers can discover the products they love," Yahoo Finance told Amazon vice president of physical distribution the day it opened. "It's a highly organized product selection … supposed to reflect our customers."

Translation: C & # 39; is a physical showroom for Amazon.com.

There is an obvious irony here. For years, as Amazon grew, the physical stores complained of "showrooming" customers – browsing a store, taking notes or photos on their phones, and then returning home to order it online at a lower price.

Now, Amazon encourages customers to show up in their own store. In the 4-star store, you can buy the items and take them out or remove them and order them from Amazon if you do not want to run them on site. Senior members get the preferential price, but non-core members can also shop in the store and pay the retail price. The only thing you can not do is pay for the registration and have items delivered to you, this is the method of payment that online retailers like Bonobos use in their stores.

Amazon 4-Star is only the latest example of Amazon's push towards brick and mortar, but it's certainly the strangest. In addition to owning Whole Foods now, Amazon has opened more than 20 physical bookstores in major cities, as well as a handful of Amazon Go stores, where customers pass their phones when they enter, pick up the products they want and go out without ever going to a cashier. Amazon 4-Star has cashiers.

The store is a strange mishmash. There are sections for electronics, toys, cooking and cooking, books, bathroom, pets; and organized sections based on website features, such as New Listings and Trends or Most Added to Wish Lists. One table, Top Selling Around NYC, contained paperback books, a blender, hand sanitizers and a water filter pitcher.

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"It looks like someone who does not know how to assemble a store has managed to get the store together," said Dan Howley, of Yahoo Finance, during our live broadcast of the Final Round.

But what looks like a mess hides a methodical curation, said Janes. "We have a team of curators and they look at all kinds of information – obviously about sales, ratings and reviews, but they also look at things like: What do people put on their wish list? What pre-order people? What is selling in the area?

The store is an effort of Amazon to show that humans work at Amazon. Janes is complaining that people say that Amazon's physical bookstores "are all organized by computer algorithms. This is not the case. And here too, it is very well organized.

It's half true. The bookstores feature many items strictly based on digital metrics such as sales rankings and popularity by genre or region, as well as some bizarre groupings chosen by Amazon's human curators. The 4-star store seems to have a more quirky curation than bookstores, but remains limited to top-rated items, as well as new Amazon.com items that show a good trend and are therefore likely to be quickly assigned a rating of 4 stars. anyway.

Of course, there are many more articles on Amazon.com than on the Amazon team site. They select the elements of the shop according to various criteria.

But it is likely that the store will have a self-fulfilling effect: items already popular on Amazon will make the same items more popular.

The story continues