Amazon, an electronic commerce and cloud computing company, is seeking to expand into other realms of business by opening 2,000 grocery stores over the next decade.
While the plan is preliminary, Amazon has also set a more modest goal of establishing 20 brick-and-mortar grocery stores over the next two years, according to Business Insider.
Some of the potential locations for these stores are Seattle, Miami, New York, Las Vegas, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Amazon wants to employ pilot programs first in order to test out what works.
But Amazon, which is known for innovative projects, doesn’t want to create only 10 traditional stores. The company aims to integrate its already strong supply-chain management infrastructure by creating 10 “click and collect” drive-up sites for customers to pick up online orders.
The company is exhibiting a pattern of trying to create more tangible services and products. Amazon is currently experimenting with physical bookstores (different than the virtual ones it purveys) and is pleased with the progress so far. (RELATED: Corporate Dream Team Forms To Solve Tech’s Biggest Innovation)
The company’s grocery-delivery service, Amazon Fresh, is not expanding very fast, with 18 total locations roughly a decade after it launched in 2007.
“Amazon Fresh will only succeed as a grocery retailer if they can sell more groceries and selling more groceries requires attracting and delighting as many customers as possible through all available channels,” Brittain Ladd, a consultant for Deloitte, wrote in a report.
He argues that they need to implement new features in order to bring in customers who usually don’t deviate from their usual grocery stores or don’t want to travel far. The physical grocery store may help pick up Amazon Fresh’s slack.
True to it’s innovative streak, Amazon is considering things like membership-only access, in-store kiosks, and license-plate scanning, according to documents viewed by Business Insider (a publication Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, invests in).
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