A new college semester will begin soon, and UC Berkeley has a new January transfer: Amazon is opening yet another staffed pickup point on a college campus. The facilities are meant to promote the Amazon brand and alleviate the strain on campus mail services that are flooded with Amazon packages, and there’s something interesting in the Berkeley version: students can sample Kindle devices at an in-store counter.
The new pickup location is called “Amazon@ASUC Student Union,” because when you add the @ symbol to something, that automatically makes it hip and relevant. People who want to use the center as a pickup point can simply add it as a delivery address to their Amazon account, then pick their package up when convenient.
The Amazon store that’s not a store has a counter for pickups, and it has actual merchandise. It’s not clear whether you can buy devices from the company’s Kindle family while inside the store, but you can play with e-readers, Fire tablets, and the Fire TV inside the center.
Same-day pickup will be available for users who belong to Amazon Student or Prime. It’s not clear whether community members who aren’t affiliated with the college will have access to the building to use the center, or whether it’s limited to students, faculty, and staff only.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist