A Tour of Amazon’s 4-Star Store, a Retail Oddity
An Amazon store where everything for sale is rated 4 stars and above, is a top seller, or is new and trending on Amazon.com in SoHo neighborhood of New York.
Photographer: JIM WATSON/AFPAs we waited last week for an announcement of the location(s) of Amazon’s much-ballyhooed HQ2, I drove across the Bay Bridge to visit a different kind of Amazon outpost—its new 4-Star Store on Fourth Street in Berkeley, California. Like most things from Amazon, it’s much more than it appears.
4-Star is the newest and strangest entry in Amazon.com Inc.’s lineup of small-format physical retail stores. The company now operates 18 bookstores, a few dozen Amazon Pop-Up stores selling mostly Kindles and Echo speakers and a growing number of Amazon Go cashier-less convenience stores, in addition to nearly 500 Whole Foods Markets in the U.S. and U.K.