amazon ends some of its retail experiments, this has been confirmed to the agency Reuters. The American company wants close 68 physical stores in the US and UK. This includes your bookstores amazon-books and its 4 star storeswhere customers can shop for popular and highly rated products on Amazon.com.
We all know how Amazon began as an e-commerce book store (it was called Cadabra back then), but it wasn’t until 2015 that it opened its first physical bookstore in Seattle. Then it was including new locations in the US and going abroad. Over time, the company has developed different models of stores where they sell other products, for example, convenience stores without cashiers, a format called “4-star” and recently they talked about opening hypermarkets and clothing stores.
Closing dates are not yet known. It will be communicated in each store as the chosen date approaches.
Amazon has its eye on the grocery market
Whole Foods, supermarket chain, has been one of the great acquisitions in the history of Amazon. Since then the company has invested heavily in its business within this sector. As reported ReutersAmazon has communicated to them that the store closures are intended to focus more “in its grocery markets and in a future department store concept.«
Something that we have already been seeing in recent months when I announce the introduction of its technology Just Walk Out at Whole Foods and the expansion of AmazonFresh.
Amazon’s retail business is tiny
COVID-19 hit brick-and-mortar stores with great force, as it caused them to close on numerous occasions. However, Amazon stores have never had a great weight in the company’s total income. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the company reported that net sales from its physical retail business generated $4,688 million, up from $4,269 million in the prior year quarter. These are only about 2% of your total income.
