The irony is almost painful. Sure, it’s a “who’da thunk” moment, wrapped in the mysteries of the greatest disruptive retail operation of the past half-century. Amazon takes the very thing, a store, that it invested every fiber of its being in making irrelevant, and, wait for it, opens one itself! The impulse to plant a foot in the space-time continuum has proven irresistible.

So what does it all mean?

Let’s see. This new initiative opens the retailer Amazon to the scourge of “showrooming”–folks can go to the bookstore, pick out a book, and then order it from Barnes and Noble on their phones! (Try it!)

There is no URL for this particular resource, by the way. This particular store uses an entirely different Resource Locator, called an “address.” An “address” is a series of numbers and letters that can be used to find a store in the real world, on a street, say, in a town or city. In a state. In a country. In this case, the store can be found at this address: 4601 26th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105. It is near other “stores,” in a place called “Seattle.”

It is near other physical environments named “Pottery Barn” and “Nike.”

Now one of the “innovations” for this store opening is that Amazon will use the big data it collects on readers’ interests, on trending titles, and on “people who like this also like this” patterns to stock the shelves of its store. But, wait. Isn’t all that stuff easy to do online but hard to do in a store? I mean, you can only stack so many books next to other related books. And then you have to stack books related to the related books, and so on and so on. Of course, you can set up a search station that provides all that contextual information, and customers can use the station to search, but they might be left wondering why they are standing there in their snow boots and parkas to perform a search they could have performed an hour ago on the couch. Knausgaard talks about the Baroque penchant for “the play within the play”; one has to think that this little corner of the Amazon universe is exactly that, a perfect little doll’s house model of an interior that is increasingly short supply (with apologies to independent bookstores everywhere).

On top of that, Store Amazon suggests that booksellers are at a disadvantage in terms of the data available to run their stores effectively. Not so. Most independent bookstores that I go into today, every used book has a printout from AbeBooks (yes, an Amazon company) inside the front cover showing the current value of the book. (So much for the opportunity to make that amazing find of a first edition Fitzgerald, or even a first Modern Library edition, languishing on the bargain shelf.) In fact, there must be a bunch of blog posts out there titled “Optimizing Your Bookstore with Information from the Amazon Website.” Just launching a search for an author or a title at Amazon shows you what people are looking for.

So, the store can only do worse what the website does better, it incurs a lot of expenses like real estate and a physical plant tend to do, and it is inaccessible if you are not in or near the 98105 zip code area. In fact, the very presence of this store is a reminder to get off your butt and head over to someplace where they put books on shelves, give you a comfy chair to sit in, and prepare a hot drink to go with that. Someplace like Barnes and Noble, or Books-a-Million. Maybe Jeff just wanted a place, a real place, to call home.