Amazon Opens U Village Store & More News
The top Seattle news stories you should be reading today
By Lauren Mang November 2, 2015
After the swirl of rumors, Amazon has finally announced that it will open a physical retail store–a bookstore called Amazon Books–in University Village. The store will be Amazon’s first-ever brick-and-mortar bookstore, Geekwire reports, and will “sell top-rated books that are available on Amazon’s website and also feature Amazon hardware,” all at the same price points as it does on the website. A letter to Amazon customers noted the pricing is “so you’ll never need to compare our online and in-store prices.” Amazon Books will open its U Village doors to swarms of book-loving customers today (November 3) right next to Banana Republic and across the street from Joey Kitchen.
A new survey out today by Eastlake-based Porch.com and local real estate company Redfin says that Seattle ranks 10th in the U.S. as the Best Place to Own a Home. The survey queried more than 10,000 homeowners in 11 subcategories. Along with netting the number 10 spot on the list, Seattle homeowners also ranked their city number 8 out of 67 cities for Best Climate, number 8 out of 67 cities for Healthiness, 25 for commute and interestingly a below-average 46 for security and safety. Cities with similar rankings included Miami, San Jose and Denver.
Our famous Gum Wall at Pike Place Market will receive a good cleaning, KING 5 News reports. All of the gum will be removed from the walls for the first time in 20 years and once it’s clean “people will be allowed to put gum back up again.” Steam cleaning of the wad-covered walls begins November 10 and is expected to take several days.
A new AOL Instant Messaging-inspired chat game seeks to take us all back to the pre-social media glory days of the early 2000s, Wired reports. Emily is Away, developed by Kyle Seeley, is a game that simulates the AIM chat experience (oh, how I remember cryptic away messages and assigning certain sounds to alert me when certain people were online) by letting you create a screenname and an avatar and then chat in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style with your friend, Emily. Memories.
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