Amazon made its name selling goods online, but more recently it has started to embrace physical retail locations and apparently department stores are next on the company's hit list.
As The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal reports, people familiar with Amazon's plans believe several large department stores are going to be opened across the US. Each store will be around 30,000 square feet in size and stock a range of "top consumer brands," but there are no details yet on what categories of goods will appear. The most likely choices are electronics, household items, and clothing.
The locations for these new stores is unknown, but Ohio and California were mentioned. It also seems likely Amazon would want to use as much of its retail tech as possible in these new retail destinations, which would mean cashierless stores, Amazon One palm payment machines, and potentially different prices dependent on whether you're a Prime subscriber or not.
Bricks-and-mortar retail has suffered over the past decade, most recently because of the COVID-19 pandemic (even Microsoft permanently closed its retail stores), but before that, cheaper and more convenient online shopping kept consumers away. Now it looks as though one of the companies that instigated the shift online may be attempting to make physical retail locations popular again.