At first glance, the physical place that Amazon created with all its data is anticlimactic. The bookstore is not some through-the-looking-glass swoopy physical incarnation of the ineffable clouds of computerized memory. Instead, the books are all shelved cover-out, just as they appear on Amazon, and the relative prominence, proportion of stock, and pricing of best-sellers and recommended titles, including the little cardboard signs excerpting each book’s online user reviews and ratings, are calibrated to correspond exactly to what you would find online.

Other than that, the store looks sort of like a Starbucks—and, at least, the coffee chain’s latest look as developed by its in-house designer Liz Muller for the company’s upscale Reserve branches—one of which also opened in November right across the mall promenade from Amazon’s new bookstore. The look is a mash-up of a New England Barn and a Second World War submarine. It features wood that looks like it’s been salvaged from a shipyard. Black metal abounds, whether in the sign-holders, the window trim, the pipes and ducts up in the blacked-out ceiling above the overhead lights, or the lamps just inside the windows that, with their bulbous shades and pipe-like tubular mountings, look like something that would be attached to a drill press in a nineteen-forties machinist’s workshop.

It’s a style that’s been called Heritage Modern or Warm Industrial—a sleeker take on the neo-Victoriana waxed-mustache-and-varietal-pickle aesthetic of Edison lightbulbs, taxidermy, and gray metal stools that during the late aughts represented hipster chic, from Williamsburg to Portland. In home decoration, the look has been perfected by the Restoration Hardware chain of furniture stores, now known as R.H., where you can buy desks that look like parts of nineteen-thirties ribs-and-rivets airplanes and lamps that look like eighteen-nineties surveyors’ tripods, alongside monumental sofas and cabinets in leather and teak. As it happens, a Restoration Hardware store shares Amazon’s mall building, just two doors down. You could argue that this part of the mall isn’t so much selling books or chairs or cappuccinos but, rather, a particular look. And selling whatever this look does to soothe and stir the anxieties and ambitions of this moment in our culture.

The machine-age era that this look references, from the late eighteen-nineties to the late nineteen-forties, represents a precise period in the history of technology: post-electric and pre-atomic. This was a time in which radically new electromagnetic tools—gramophone, telephone, radio, radar, cinema, television—shattered our centuries-old expectations about how information and image are located and transported across space. And yet the objects embodying these technologies had, to today’s eyes, an appealingly heavy and clunky presence: wooden cases that opened and closed, Bakelite switches that turned on and off. These devices didn’t continuously communicate with one another and without us; or record our behavior for the corporations that made them; or insinuate themselves into our clothes and bodies; or, with some sly reversal of utility by hacker or terrorist, do us harm. So those machinists’ lamps descending from the ceiling of Amazon’s bookstore represent, in our age of pattern-recognition algorithms and drone deliveries, a specific kind of nostalgia—not for some lamplit pre-industrial era but for an earlier high-technology moment in which our machines were still uncannily powerful, but were more legible, more tangible, and more compliant.

This look, with its taste for rivets and gaskets and tubular steel, also provides a kind of aesthetically retroactive continuity for all the junky infrastructural odds and ends—the sprinklers, the pipes, the ducts, the conduits, the wires, the cables, the brackets, the beams—that until recently would have been hidden behind hung ceilings and maintenance panels. At Amazon’s bookstore, much of these overhead mechanicals are open to view but painted black, rather like the lighting grid or stage machinery in a small theatre. Something about those slender pipe-like lamp arms below makes all the preëxisting mess of pipes above seem more intentional, more interesting, more palatable.

At Amazon’s bookstore, this carefully staged view of the architectural backstage serves as an acknowledgement, conscious or not, of the online retailer’s own back-of-house. The real way that Amazon makes physical places out of all its data is in the form of its vast exurban fulfillment centers: the hundred or so warehouses around the globe, each about a million or more square feet in size and staffed by a thousand or more personnel, where it stores and sorts and sends all its stuff. These facilities are a kind of limit condition of big-box retail: endless steel shelves under florescent lights and steel trusses, in which the shoppers are elsewhere, their avatars now the stockers and pickers who fulfill orders, unshelving goods to a complex network of carts and chutes and conveyor belts to be packaged and delivered.

Seattle’s University Village mall, built over a drained marsh in the fifties and updated in the nineties, already represents an attempt at domesticating the big box. The mall’s former anchor tenant, a fifty-thousand-square-foot Barnes & Noble bookstore, lasted sixteen years before shuttering, in 2011. This mall is neither a university nor a village, but its layout rewards the kind of pedestrian stroll you might take across a campus or small town. It’s an outdoor mall, meaning that, past a ring of parking, its half-dozen big warehouse-like structures are wrapped in smaller storefronts that offer mall-goers the incomplete illusion of walking through a picturesque neighborhood made of freestanding buildings. Look past the brick cornice of Amazon’s bookstore and you’ll see, immediately behind, the higher blank stucco wall of the big box it’s really situated in, the big box that also houses and services the neighboring Restoration Hardware. From a drone’s-eye view, the top and back of this kind of big box, with its factory-like rooftop air-handling units and its loading docks, is indistinguishable from an Amazon fulfillment center.

If Amazon’s intention had been a miniature masquerade, to pose as the kind of downtown community bookstore that it (like Barnes & Noble before it) is conventionally said to have displaced, then plenty of actual neighborhood storefronts were available in Seattle. A wave of smaller online retailers—especially clothiers and accessories-makers like Bonobos, Frank & Oak, and Warby Parker, for whom in-person trying-on is a thing—has done just that, recently opening bricks-and-mortar storefronts in urban downtowns from New York to San Francisco. Amazon’s decision to occupy a pseudo-neighborhood psuedo-storefront is, intentionally or inadvertently, more interesting.

One of the entertainments of Blue C Sushi, the restaurant whose space Amazon took over and that moved to another part of the University Village mall, is those miniature conveyor belts that bring sashimi to your tabletop—a charming little extension, domesticated in scale, of all the industry of belts and docks and wheels involved in shipping flash-frozen tuna across the Pacific. “Our proprietary digital tracking technology,” Blue C’s promotional materials read, “lets us monitor every item on our delivery belt, determining how long it’s been on display and alerting the chefs when it’s time to refresh.” One of the entertainments of Restoration Hardware is simultaneously seeing a domestic vignette—sofas and tables and carpets arranged to make a scene of tasteful domesticity—and the stagecraft behind the vignette: the lighting grid holding the spotlights above, the fabric scrim that might masquerade as a wall, everything that holds everything in place. You see the scenes and behind the scenes. The back is made to look as good, in its own way, as the front.

The Amazon bookstore does something similar: suspended somewhere between a tangible (albeit exquisitely staged) reality of paper and wood, and a perceptible (albeit artfully obscured) reality of pipes and machinery, the bookstore customer is able to experience a curated version of the ethical and visceral tension between front-of-house and back-of-house—between the sleek one-click seamlessness of the screen and the unceasing labor of the fulfillment center—as a kind of pleasure. In our global moment of high-tech fabrication and doorstep delivery, we are gradually becoming more aware of distant factories and warehouses, from urban China to exurban America, and of the dispossessed lives of the faraway people who make and move our possessions. Can it be a coincidence that this awareness parallels the emergence of an aesthetic that seems, somehow, to remind us of warehouses and factories—but, with all that burnished wood and polished metal, of warehouses and factories at rest, from another time, at their most impossibly beautiful?

The first thing Amazon did to the building that would become its first bricks-and-mortar bookstore was add bricks and mortar. The store, located in Seattle’s University Village shopping mall, opened in early November. Amazon’s new bricks, mottled in color from chalky yellow to dusky near-purple, look thoroughly artisanal. Their irregular texture and wide mortar gaps, along with the casement-like black metal mullions of the new windows, make the bookstore appear much older than the storefronts around it. “We’re taking the data we have, and we’re creating physical places with it,” the Amazon Books vice-president Jennifer Cast told the Seattle Times when the bookstore opened.

On Tuesday, Sandeep Mathrani, the chief executive of a national shopping-mall operator, said during an earnings call that Amazon.comwas planning to open as many as four hundred physical bookstores in the next few years. At first, the news, which was reported in the Wall Street Journal but wasn’t confirmed by the company, sounded almost too strange to be true. Amazon opened its first retail bookstore, in Seattle, only this past November, and, although book sales form the historical core of its business, it now makes the vast majority of its money off of its highly profitable Web-services division. Moreover, Amazon’s identity is so tied to e-commerce that a purported plan to create its own version of the defunct Borders chain defied our expectations of ongoing digital progress.The Times, citing an anonymous source, has since confirmed that the company plans to expand its physical presence, albeit at a much more modest scale than Mathrani suggested. But even four hundred stores might have been one of the most logical moves that Amazon has ever made, not to mention one that other online-first retailers, such as Warby Parker, Blue Nile, and Birchbox, have already cleared the way for. Amazon is unrivalled in its ability to sell and ship people books and other goods more cheaply and smoothly than anyone else, but, long after it established itself as the world’s de-facto bookseller, Amazon has failed (if purposefully, in many respects) to fulfill the simplest promise of the digital-commerce revolution: making a profit by selling goods online.

When Amazon began selling books in 1995, its business model seemed brilliantly simple. Without the costs and hassles of physical stores and their staff, and with limitless capacity for inventory, it was able to offer books at lower prices than other competitors could, including big chains such as Barnes & Noble, whose deep discounts had already threatened independent booksellers. Amazon could also grow more quickly than physical retailers, and, because of this, achieve unmatched economies of scale. The company’s success kicked off a revolution in online retailing, with countless startups and traditional retailers selling every possible product online. E-commerce transactions now make up close to ten per cent of all retail transactions in the United States, and that number continues to grow annually.

Launching an e-commerce business is relatively simple, especially when compared with opening a brick-and-mortar store. But it has proven to be difficult to make a profit from selling stuff online—a problem that is rarely acknowledged by the technology industry. E-commerce companies tend to point to sales, revenues, and other markers of growth, while eliding figures that speak to the most basic goal of retail: selling things for more than they cost. Most e-commerce startups fail to turn any profit at all, and those that eventually do succeed operate with extremely slim margins. This is why a company such as Gilt Groupe, which was once valued at more than a billion dollars, just sold to a traditional department-store chain for two hundred and fifty million dollars.

There are strong economic reasons that e-commerce struggles to make a profit. One is pricing. Deprived of most of the tools that physical stores can rely on (the presence of the object, nice locations, window displays, salespeople), online retailers rely heavily on offering the lowest possible price. And competition on price is intense, because a better offer is always just a click away (often, to Amazon’s vast digital catalog).

Then there’s shipping. Here, too, Amazon has established a difficult standard for the market, by offering discounted and free shipping on its products, and free returns as well. Most other e-commerce companies have been forced to follow Amazon’s lead. But as the retail consultant, onetime e-commerce entrepreneur (of the failed gift retailer Red Envelope), and New York University professor Scott Galloway pointed out in a widely discussed talk last year, all of this shipping costs tremendous amounts of money. That is, there is no such thing as “free” shipping. The U.P.S. driver doesn’t work for free, and the gas in the truck isn’t free, either. Amazon and other online retailers must absorb these costs, cutting into their potential profits and placing further stress on their pricing strategies.

To reduce these costs, many traditional retailers with e-commerce divisions, including Walmart, Macy’s, and Best Buy, have rolled out “click and collect” services, which allow customers to pick up online purchases in physical stores, saving both the customer and the retailer the cost of shipping that purchase. Amazon has already started to do this, with Amazon Locker, paving the way for a potential larger investment in a national brick-and-mortar retail chain. Amazon stores would serve as local warehouses, distribution centers, and someday, perhaps, drone-delivery airports.

The move from e-commerce to physical retail makes sense for deeply human reasons, too. Shopping has never been purely a transactional exchange of cash for goods. It’s also what we do on vacation, on weekends, and when we walk down a street. We shop to be with people, to have a place to go, to touch things, to indulge our consumption fantasies. Online shopping can offer a kind of digital mimesis of these things, but it doesn’t reward consumers in the same way as a physical store. Right now, Amazon might be the best place to find any book on Earth and purchase it at the lowest possible price, but the experience of shopping there remains impoverished. Even with all of the resources at its disposal, the company’s Web site is a morass of scattered graphics, random reviews, and predictable recommendations. (I just read a book about the history of Detroit—I don’t need ten more.)

The report of new Amazon stores comes at a time when independent bookstores are experiencing a surprisingly robust resurgence. According to the American Booksellers Association, the number of new bookstores in the U.S. has grown by more than twenty-five per cent in the past six years, while in-store sales have also grown. In New York, neighborhood stores such as Greenlight and Book Culture have added locations in the past few years to meet demand, selling books to their customers at prices that are often markedly higher than Amazon’s.

Aware of the advantages of physical space, some e-commerce companies are already opening stores or deepening their investments. Some are putting tremendous effort into making their shops as pleasurable as possible. Warby Parker’s showrooms have turned the act of purchasing eyeglasses into a sort of Wes Anderson–approved theme-park ride, complete with attendants in custom-designed blue smocks, photo booths, and jars of free pencils and school erasers. And while the stores look beautiful, and have been leased, designed, and staffed at a great cost, according to the company they’re also making money.

The great secret, too, for e-commerce companies with physical spaces, is that the stores can be arranged to offer the benefits of both the retail location and online shopping, drawing people in but driving online sales, too. This is what Amazon appears to have done with its test store in Seattle, integrating consumer product reviews on its shelf displays, stocking books that sell well online (including self-published titles), allowing for instant payment with Amazon technology, and offering unified online and in-store pricing.

These advantages, coupled with Amazon’s size, suggest a potentially fascinating development in the retail industry, and one that would make a good deal of sense for the company, especially given all the cash it has on hand. We would also see the company continue to tacitly admit that, for all the advantages of selling things online, you can’t be an everything store without actually having a shop or two.

Amazon Studios is producing a New Yorker series in partnership with Condé Nast Entertainment.