How do you get newly minted adults hooked on your service for life? If you’re Amazon, the secret is to provide them with everything that they need at a discount, and deliver it as quickly as possible. The combination of discounted Prime service and easy on-campus pickup is meant to hook college students on Prime during their formative years, and it’s turning out to be very effective.

After all, Amazon now wants to get into the business of selling everything, now including fashionable clothes and fresh groceries. Prime Student costs half of what the grown-up version costs, and the company will have pickup counters including pickup lockers, or just dedicated Amazon lockers, on college campuses serving 500,000 students soon.

“Even though it’s just a dorm room, college students are setting up a new household for the first time and doing their own laundry and getting their own groceries,” an expert from market research firm Cassandra told Bloomberg Technology. It’s a bit like credit card companies’ former strategy of signing up 18-year-olds on campus to hook them indefinitely.

Amazon will keep expanding its campus pickup centers (which aren’t stores, since you can’t actually buy anything there) wherever colleges and universities will have them. The benefit to universities is largely to campus mail services, which don’t have to deal with an influx of packages from Amazon, especially at the beginning of the semester. The service isn’t meant to replace the campus bookstore, but it often does.

Amazon Wants to Get College Students Addicted to Prime [Bloomberg Technology]

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