Maybe Amazon’s Just Not Very Good At This.
So, almost immediately after I posted last week, Amazon announced that it would be CLOSING ALL OF ITS AMAZON BOOKS and 4-star stores. (No, I don’t think there was a connection). Since then, it’s been fascinating to watch the industry recast this defeat as yet an example of Amazon’s genius, its singular capacity for learning and iterating, its near-mystical ability to derive value in ways we mere mortals cannot possibly understand. Talk about failing upwards! I do not deny that it is a brilliant company in so many ways or that it might be able to make use of the “learnings” from this experience, but let’s call a spade a spade. After 6 1/2 years of learning, Amazon Books was never able to find traction, at a time when independent bookshops have continued to grow in number, even during the pandemic — from roughly 1,800 in 2019 to 2,500 in 2021 — and Barnes & Noble, with a more community-oriented strategy put in place by expert bookseller James Daunt, has been showing signs of revival, according to Placer.ai data. Now, as I noted in last week’s post, Amazon has a different business model than most retailers, and perhaps these stores succeeded in selling a whole lot of Echo devices or Fire tablets that then fed its ecosystem or “flywheel.” I suspect not, but the reality is that we just don’t know. My larger point is that just because Amazon has been clairvoyant in the past does not mean we should suspend our critical faculties and throw up our hands as if to say, “oh well, it looks bad from the outside, but they must know what they’re doing.” The other, more intriguing possibility is that maybe, just maybe, in the irony of ironies, Amazon simply could not figure out in the end how to compete with rivals it had supposedly once vanquished.