I went to Powell's on Sunday with no list and no intention of buying anything. I left with a used book about typography and a paperback I already own in hardcover.
The Blue Room was crowded. A guy sat on the floor in Poetry with three books open around him like he was building something. Someone was halfway up a ladder in the Rose Room. A staff member walked a tourist to the exact shelf instead of pointing at it.
Every book in that building was available on my phone, faster and cheaper, the entire time I stood there.
Nobody cared. I did not care either.
Powell's did not beat Amazon on catalog, because nobody beats Amazon on catalog. It survived by being a place you go, which is a category Amazon cannot enter.
Three things it does that most retail brands will not do.
One, it puts used and new copies on the same shelf, next to each other, at different prices. That is a merchandising decision that costs margin and buys trust. You are not being upsold. You are being shown the options and left alone.
Two, the store is organized by color rooms rather than by anything intuitive, and you have to learn it. Orange is history. Blue is fiction and the front door. The map is mild friction, and mild friction is how a customer becomes a regular. Knowing where the Purple Room is feels like membership, because it is.
Three, the staff recommendation cards are signed. A name, a handwritten sentence, an actual opinion somebody could turn out to be wrong about. No algorithm has ever risked being wrong about you in its own handwriting.
All last year the trade press ran the retail apocalypse story on a loop, counting store closures like storm damage. The chains that closed were mostly the ones that had spent a decade making their stores faster, tidier, and less specific, which is to say worse versions of a website. If your physical location is only a slower checkout, of course the checkout wins.
The retailers doing fine here are places. Salt & Straw has a line down the block in February, in the rain, in Portland, for ice cream, because standing in that line with strangers is most of the product. I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where somebody always suggests we reduce the wait time. Reduce the wait and you have sold a scoop.
It survived by being a place you go, which is a category Amazon cannot enter.
The typography book is on my living room floor right now because Barnaby pushed it off the arm of the couch while Truffles watched. Neither of them has an opinion about retail strategy. Both of them understand that a thing gets more interesting once it is somewhere.