An Amazon Superstore, IRL?
A Chicago-area real estate story about Amazon buying a 35-acre retail parcel in a south suburban retail hub turns out to be a mind-blowing plan for a real, physical, bricks and mortar Amazon Superstore. So far, the facts are limited to what Amazon shared with the local zoning and planning folks.
Apparently, Amazon plans to build a huge retail facility, bigger than the average Walmart superstore, with “a limited warehouse component”, so this is not a sub-same-day delivery facility with a store added on. There are a million questions, or at least 229,000 square feet of questions, including how will Amazon merchandise the latest and largest IRL Amazon store.
What is Amazon thinking? Of course, Amazon has already experimented with retail formats - from bookstores to 4-Star stores (best seller gifts and gadgets) to Go stores (walkout technology convenience stores) to Whole Foods and various iterations of Fresh grocery stores. This could just be another experiment, but as experiments go, it reveals a degree of Walmart jealousy that we didn’t expect.
In our quarterly survey of recent Amazon customers, we ask where else they shop. Almost all of them (93%) have shopped at Walmart at some point (Chart 1). More than three-quarters have shopped at Target. We don’t even ask about local and regional chain grocery stores, since the answer would be virtually 100%.