How Amazon’s Bricks-and-Mortar Dreams Hit a Wall
Amazon once had audacious plans for remaking physical retail, including a secret effort to take on Target. Now it’s closing stores and pausing the opening of ones that have already been completed. That’s putting pressure on the company to prove its giant bet on groceries can pay off.
If Amazon’s ambitious vision for becoming a power in bricks-and-mortar retail had gone to plan, last month would have been a big milestone for the company.
As recently as late 2021, Amazon had set January 2023 as the target date for a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its first ever big-box store. It would have been a bit smaller than a Target and stocked with groceries, apparel and other goods, according to a former Amazon employee with direct knowledge of the plan, which hasn’t been previously reported. Members of the team working on the project, code-named Reese, had come up with store mockups, though they hadn’t yet picked a location for the first store. Amazon planned to use a high-tech system from its Amazon Go convenience chain in the store so customers could breeze through the checkout process without stopping at cash registers, the former employee said.
That was then. Last spring, a reckoning began for Amazon’s store ambitions when the company shuttered 68 bookstores, 4-star stores and pop-up shops. While Amazon says it remains bullish about grocery stores, new openings of its Amazon Fresh stores in the U.S. have ground to a halt, as The Information previously reported. Last month, it closed one of two drive-up grocery stores it had operated for years in Seattle. And it’s no longer working on Reese, the big-box store.