The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Amazon opens first store in state
NORWALK — The first Amazon 4-star store in Connecticut opens Wednesday morning at The SoNo Collection, selling the toprated, best-selling and otherwise trending products on its website in any given week.
“We take a lot of cues from what works and what people love about Amazon.com — the physical experience you see in our store is very intentionally related to that,” said Drew Sheriff, director of Amazon stores who previously spent a decade with Starbucks. “Amazon 4-Star is really all about discovery. We’re trying to make it a fun and exciting way for customers to discover a new product we think they’ll love.”
Amazon 4-star is the latest in a series of arrivals at The SoNo Collection, which opened in October with only a small selection of stores along with Nordstrom. Bloomingdale’s followed in November, then the Pinstripes bowling-bocce bistro in December and a sprinkling of others new to Connecticut like Camp, an rapidly expanding chain with an experiential toy store concept.
Still to come are a few more mall mainstays like Apple; Connecticut newcomers like EQ3, which sells modernist furnishings; and the mall’s cornerstone restaurant row on West Avenue just off Interstate 95, which will include the Yard House sports bar, the Southern cuisine eatery Jacob’s Pickles and famed New Haven pizzeria Sally’s Apizza.
Amazon has hired 20 people for Amazon 4-star in Norwalk, with the store opening at 10 a.m. Wednesday.
The Norwalk location is the 10th Amazon 4-Star store, with another 10 in the pipeline, including one for the massive American Dream retail and entertainment center in East Rutherford, N.J., which opened in late October to bring to an end to The SoNo Collection’s brief status as America’s newest mall.
Amazon 4-star is one of a handful of experimental retail store concepts from the dot-com giant, along with Amazon Books, and Amazon Go grab-and-go convenience stores in which customers are charged wirelessly as they leave the premises with items in hand.
Amazon 4-star approximates most closely the online Amazon experience, with shelves and tables crammed with an eclectic array of products, with tags listing prices (some at discounts for Amazon Prime members), online review counts and average ratings. Amazon 4-star accepts returns on qualifying items purchased on Amazon.com, as is the case at Kohl’s in a service that has been popular.
Books, gadgets, games, gifts — to the first-time visitor, it amounts to a mashup of As Seen
On TV, Best Buy, Toys ‘R’ Us, Williams Sonoma and any number of more retailers. Like the website, banners identify product categories throughout the store, with the Norwalk location having more than 2,000 items on display.
“Every time you visit, I would expect you to find a new selection of products,” Sheriff said. “What we are really doing is we are listening to our customers and their feedback in terms of what they are buying, what they are loving, what are the newest products that are trending. And so we have a team of curators who are looking at all this information ... to select the products you see there.”
The initial slate of products includes more than a few from Connecticut companies, including kitchen appliances from the Cuisinart subsidiary of Stamfordbased Conair and toys from Wilton-based Melissa & Doug.
And propped on a bookshelf out front is the children’s version of “Principles for Success” by Ray Dalio, the Greenwich billionaire who is Connecticut’s wealthiest resident — not that the world’s richest man in Amazon founder Jeff Bezos needs the advice.
Amazon is coming off another record quarter to close out the 2019 holiday season, with sales up 21 percent to $87.4 billion, with profits totaling $3.3 billion even as the company absorbed extra costs in converting Amazon Prime to one-day shipping. Amazon also has been working to expand Whole Foods Market’s capabilities since acquiring the grocery giant in 2017.
Over the last 12 months, Amazon has added 150,000 employees to give it nearly 800,000 in all exiting the 2019 holiday season, including at a new fulfillment center in North Haven supporting more than 2,000 jobs. Another center is planned for Stratford.
“It’s advantageous — from a cost and transportation standpoint — to have that inventory closer to the customer, so we’re in the middle of that transition,” Brian Olsavsky, chief financial officer of Amazon, said on a recent conference call. “As we shift inventory to be more local, it will enable local deliveries to hit shorter cutoff times . ... We will have to scale our fulfillment center network further.”