I like shopping in book stores. There’s something about wandering the aisles and waiting for a book to jump out at you that I can’t get shopping online. Unfortunately, whenever I compare the price of a book Amazon has every in-person store beat, often pricing their offerings 30%-50% lower (or around $10/book in my experience) even when I go to a large chain like Barnes and Noble.
How is it that Amazon is able to afford to offer the books so much cheaper and also support all of the infrastructure involved in shipping it to my doorstep compared with in-person stores?
I don’t know the full details, but part of it:
- In the store you can walk between the books. This takes loads of room. In the Amazon warehouse, this can be veeery cramped.
- The land value of the store is probably mich higher than the Amazon warehouse land.
- They sell much more, so all costs can be shared across a million orders, instead of across just 10 books sold.
don’t forget taxes evasions
All the solid answers posted plus they’re now a massive store - they can live on, say, $0.10 profit on a book because they made plenty more on the backpack and tire patch kit and deodorant you also added to your cart because convenience.
Plus no retail rent, no retail staff to pay.
It’s like gas stations barely breaking even on gas, but making bank on snacks. Bookstores usually won’t have those other product categories to fall back on like Amazon does.