Neither curious readers nor competitors were inspired by the truth of Amazon Books. Their choir when they checked it?” It’s not a bookstore. “That is, visitors discovered that the things that other people pass by to a bookstore (the community, the non-public environment, the exclusive wisdom of the staff, and the staff-led selection) were not provided in a physical clone of a virtual store, even though it tried to transfer its online benefits to the physical world.
Amazon Books and its similar brick-and-mortar experiences, Amazon Four-Star and Amazon Pop-Up, shut down two years ago. More recently, it was announced that Amazon Fresh grocery retail outlets were ditching the Just Walk Out generation in favor of the more technologically modest Dash Cart; Another tacit acknowledgment of flying too close to the sun. The most shocking thing about this latest news is that Amazon is moving away from Just Walk Out; it’s the revelation I mistook for an April Fool’s joke: In at least some cases, there was a guy behind the curtain of so-called tech wizardry: Payments Journal cited an original report by The Information, which found that 700 of each 1,000 transactions were made in 2022. The data sent through JWO was not fully automated, but was surreptitiously reviewed and verified by a team of workers in India.
I guess state-of-the-art automation is rarely what it seems. Let me know if you hear someone who opened the hood of a self-driving car and discovered a guy there holding a compass and turning a crank.
JWO is the only wall the tech giant has touched with Amazon Fresh. Amazon halted grocery expansion, closed stores and continued its restructuring in an effort to differentiate itself from the rest of the market.
I wonder if Amazon Fresh hasn’t suffered from the fact that the Amazon logo provides it with the kind of differentiation. If I wasn’t writing about retail, I’d assume I’d be looking for a signal from Amazon Fresh that, given Amazon’s reputation as a tech company, the store demanded something extra from me. That would require a subscription, an account, or anything too confusing — an unideal vibe for a concept that touts visitor convenience as its price.
All of those struggles show where Amazon stands when it comes to brick-and-mortar retail and where it could succeed with a new Whole Foods concept.
Signs at the Whole Foods Market store in San Ramon, California, reading “We’re developing something. . . [ ] of good,” announcing the acquisition of Whole Foods Market through the Amazon online store, on August 28, 2017. On August 28, 2017, Amazon finalized the acquisition of the high-end supermarket chain. (Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
A chance to succeed, to upset?
The Daily Shop store concept, as described in the press release, will offer an assortment of grab-and-go items, must-have foods, meats and seafood, local produce, and Whole Foods 365 personal-branded products. In part, it revisits a concept born before Amazon’s acquisition in 2017 and defected shortly after; Whole Foods introduced a small store concept centered on its Whole Foods 365 line of personal labels in 2015, and put the brakes on it in 2019 after opening 12 outlets nationwide.
The first planned location on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is planned to be 7,000 to 14,000 square feet, even smaller than the 25,000 to 30,000 square feet of the 365 defunct retail outlets, and in line with or smaller than the smallest of the small-format ones. Target. Amazon/Whole Foods plans to open more Daily Shop retail outlets in New York City and then expand to other cities.
The Most Important Factor for a Whole Foods
I’m not sure a small Whole Foods has the same appeal as a micro-Target. You can find an offer in Target. Si there’s a kind of power that the Whole Foods logo doesn’t give off, it’s the “economic” one. The press release does not specify whether the value of the new store will differ from that of Whole Foods’ major retail stores, and if so, by how much.
The concept of Whole Foods 365 was a discount chain, and ironically, Whole Foods founder and former CEO John Mackey pointed to the lower costs of Whole Foods under Amazon’s ownership, avoiding the need for a discount banner, as the reason for the murder. I think it would be sensible for Amazon to cut costs in the Daily Store, otherwise, the biggest challenge I foresee with a mini-Whole Foods is for it to be a Whole Foods. Despite Mackey’s statement to cut costs after the acquisition, Whole Foods has never been able to shake off its reputation as a “Whole Paycheck,” and while a small, flexible concept that’s expensive and practical can play its part in economically physically powerful times, pricing considerations still matter. . the minds of many right now. In cities, cash-strapped consumers still facing inflationary food costs are more price-conscious than ever.
The Daily Shop logo says that the chain benefits from the appeal of smaller retail establishments for walk-in shopping, that a small-format store is suitable for fast commuting and pedestrians. But on those days, value is so convenient. (I recently saw a Walgreens and a micro-Target that sells basic, PL and logo products at lower prices than the local supermarket chain. )
In the past, in its strategy toward brick-and-mortar commerce, Amazon has occasionally viewed innovation as an aspiration in itself, rather than an innovation to meet an existing need of visitors, and its brick-and-mortar retail ambitions have taken a hit in the long run. The new small-format Whole Foods concept has the ability to be where the visitor is, with a logo they understand and a product they want at the price they can: a better strategy for physical retail for Amazon.