Amazon takes a page from bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Here’s what it’s like inside

Allyson reads to her daughter Claire during a soft opening of Chicago's first Amazon store Saturday March 18, 2017. (Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune/TNS)

CHICAGO: Amazon Books on Southport Avenue, the fifth physical store from the Seattle online giant, and its first in the Midwest, is a deeply, unsettlingly normal place, a soulless, antiseptic 6,000 square feet, a stone's throw from a J. Crew and a SoulCycle. 

It has the personality of an airport bookstore and conveys all the charm of its stone floor. Shopping there is as frictionless as a one-click purchase. There are no quirks, no attempts at warmth. There is no store cat. There are no handwritten notes about what the staff loves. The only difference between the children's section and the rest of the store is that the children's section has a rug. It is, in business speak, a bricks-and-mortar presence, so unimaginative its façade is brick.