Author: Jon Caramanica / Source: New York Times
The new Amazon 4 Star store on Spring Street in Manhattan.
I have a faint memory of an article I read some years back detailing the grim life of a shelf picker in an Amazon warehouse. It described the arrangement of products on shelves — unlikely juxtapositions determined wholly by algorithm.
A worker’s life was disorienting; you never knew where anything might be. Nail clippers might be next to stone humidifiers or HVAC filters or picture frames. The worker was given a product location and ran to it. Then another. And again. The warehouse was a game, the products little more than flippers in search of a pinball to thwack.
This holiday season, you are the pinball.
Amazon has recently opened Amazon 4-Star, a catchall gift shop in SoHo — about 100 feet from Balthazar and the MoMA Design Store — that’s part of the company’s slow seep into physical retail. It is grim. A permanent store with the harried, colorless mood of a hastily assembled clearance-sale pop-up. Lot-Less Closeouts stores have more vim and charm.
Amazon 4-Star asks what would happen if the logic of the warehouse writ raw was applied to a traditional storefront. Who needs a warehouse picker when the customers can do the work themselves?
Spending time browsing here was among my most dismal shopping experiences in recent memory: joyless, arbitrary, spiritually empty. And that was before a 20-something guy bounded into the store and started screaming: “Alexa! Alexa! Alexa!”
Some of the items Amazon 4-Star hawks are Amazon products, naturally: the Amazon Echo home assistant (which ordinarily answers to “Alexa”), the Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet, the Amazon Fire TV Stick, plenty of AmazonBasics items, including a five-way headphone splitter ($9.49, $8.07 for Prime; 4.4 rating). Run-of-the-mill vertical integration stuff. Not my ecosystem, but fine.
Some sections are arranged logically: children’s toys, kitchen items, smart-home tools. (I use “section” very loosely. On the wall, each one is perhaps a couple of feet wide.) And each item tag has a price, a lower price for Amazon Prime members (sometimes) and an average star rating (along with the number of customers who rated it).
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