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Amazon Eyes Its Own Convenience Stores In Addition To Drive-Up Grocery Sites (geekwire.com)
Amazon's next push into the grocery business could be convenience stores as well as curbside pickup locations, reports WSJ. The Seattle-based company aims to build small brick and mortar stores that would sell things like milk, meat and other perishable items (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled;
alternate source). GeekWire adds: But the convenience stores are a new twist. The WSJ says Amazon "aims to build small brick-and-mortar stores that would sell produce, milk, meats and other perishable items that customers can take home," according to its sources. "Primarily using their mobile phones or, possibly, touch screens around the store, customers could also order peanut butter, cereal and other goods with longer shelf lives for same-day delivery." However, the report cautions, the convenience stores "may take a year or more to open while Amazon scouts locations, and may be shelved because of financial or operational concerns, the people said."Interesting move from Amazon, a company that has run many convenience stores out of business with its online business.
without lottery tickets
Is it or isn't it paywalled?
The brick and mortar market is already at saturation.
Walmart is already starting to offer in-store pickup and drive up pickup.
Amazon would be better off investing in drone delivery as it has a much better chance of being profitable.
Oh and little stores that sell milk and stuff? Walmart already tried that with "walmart express" it didn't work.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Let me guess, if you don't subscribe to Prime or spend $49 in one purchase you can't have a free plastic bag to carry your groceries to your car in; instead you have to buy one for $15.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I love my neighborhood convenience store. Forget the fact that I can get a bag of Funyums, a lotto ticket and a 40 oz King Cobra there at 3am. The owner is a great guy whose family of immigrants (and now citizens) has been an essential part of the neighborhood. They work their asses off, keep that part of the street clean and are their own neighborhood watch program. The oldest son is in med school now.
When I walk past the place, I'll go in just to say hello and talk sports with the owner, who can tell you Jake Arrieta's pitch count from last night and how he didn't have the usual movement on his fastball, and why the Carolina Panthers have utterly collapsed. And this is a guy who grew up watching cricket and didn't see a baseball game until about 1990.
All I want from Amazon is to leave the box at my door and keep their brick and mortar footprint out of the neighborhood.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Bodegazon?
Amadega?
Amazega?
Quicky-Zon?
Mart-A-Zon?
Am-A-mart?
"The scene of last night's robbery"?
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The brick and mortar market is already at saturation.
And yet new ones open up all the time, many of which manage to turn a profit. Curious definition of saturation you have there.
Walmart is already starting to offer in-store pickup and drive up pickup.
So what? It doesn't follow that Amazon couldn't do some physical store fronts in a profitable manner just because Walmart has stores too. I don't think Amazon is dumb enough to try to model their business after Walmart. Furthermore Walmart isn't in a lot of places, particularly dense urban areas and Walmart's business model doesn't work well there. Amazon on the other hand has a business model much more compatible with dense urban locations so a small store might make some sense depending on exactly what they do with it.
Amazon would be better off investing in drone delivery as it has a much better chance of being profitable.
Two problems with that argument. 1) Nobody has proven that drone delivery is economically viable. 2) Innumerable brick and mortar stores continue to be profitable despite repeated predictions of their impending demise.
Oh and little stores that sell milk and stuff? Walmart already tried that with "walmart express" it didn't work.
Again, so what? Just because Walmart tried a model that didn't work doesn't mean there aren't small store models that can work.
They should have already been experimenting with this sort of thing, even setting aside a large refrigerator to store perishables. Best part is, they'd be entirely justified in setting a 1 hour waiting period before your food is restocked and you get dinged with a restocking fee of 10%. I'm surprised that higher end brands like Whole Foods and Wegmans haven't done this. They are precisely the sort of stores my wife would trust to pick meat and produce for her as opposed to most of the mid to lower end brands.
How are they going to compete with the 100's of convenience stores around each city and usually several with in a block of each other.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Finally I'll have somewhere to get fresh milk, instead of waiting two days for it to get delivered on prime.
Amazon's worth $250 billion, 7-Eleven about $7 billion. Seems like a fine match. Just add drive thru's for order pickup.
How are they going to compete with the 100's of convenience stores around each city and usually several with in a block of each other.
All of those convenience stores are getting their groceries from a very small number of distributors. This is why all convenience stores sell the same stuff. Amazon is really competing with the distributors, they are short-circuiting them out of the system. This way amazon can establish a presence without "playing nice" or "making deals" with the existing players.
How are they going to compete with the 100's of convenience stores around each city and usually several with in a block of each other.
Presumably by offering something those stores cannot. I don't think they would be looking to open up a store identical to your local quickie-mart. There would be little point or profit in doing that.
They're called 7-11's, White Hen, Stop 'n Go, Casey's General Store, etc.
Easy enough for Amazon to just buy one of these rather than building net-new from the ground up.
But then, Amazon has primarily had a build-over-buy model.
Seriously - if they truly want to make a major dent... buy British Petrol outright. You have everything from oil wells to a zillion distribution points. Sorta like Henry Ford and Jack Tramiel - don't just make the product... own the entire distribution chain from raw materials to the end sale.
If they do this, I'm going to go into one every day, ask tons of questions of the few staff available, then say "that's OK, i'm going to order from Walmart Online" .
When I was a kid in a suburb of Los Angeles there was a dairy company who had a drive through operation where you could buy milk and eggs and bread and things. We went there a fair amount because of the convenience of not having to get out of the car just to get a few things.
The Amazon Locker program (where packages get delivered to a secure drop off point) depends on good relationships with c-stores. Personally, I'd rather have a nearby Locker than an Amazon c-store.
Drive up grocery stores are an innovative solution to a modern problem: that one cannot legally open a regular grocery store without building a formula-derived number of parking spaces, even when it isn't cost effective to build them. Where land is cheap, this isn't a problem, but in expensive areas, established grocery stores will have trouble competing with Amazon. We've all but over-regulated bookstores out of business, and it looks like the grocery store will be next to be crushed under the boot of our unique brand of Socialism.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Tesco has a superior deployment and delivery mechanism allowing direct use of QR-codes from ads posted in subway stations mimicking grocery aisles. Check here and here. Amazon is behind the times worse than Slashdot running copied stories from ArsTechnica.
Where's Wall-E?
There used to be these drive up stores called Farm Stores back when I lived in FL. You could get beer, smokes, ice cream, milk, diapers, etc. without ever leaving your car. Walmart Express is nothing like Farm Stores.
The GeekWire article says that these stores will be exclusively available to Amazon Fresh subscribers. This makes the use for them look to me like a place to keep Amazon Fresh deliveries when the recipient can't be home to accept them during delivery hours.