Amazon will Prove the Retail Apocalypse wrong in the 2020s

There’s every indication Amazon will scale into brick-and-mortar retail in the years to come. With a rumored 3,000 AmazonGo stores by 2021, there’s also new kinds of stores such as Amazon 4-stars.

It looks and feels a bit like a BestBuy, as CNBC’s video

Of course this all coincides with a big push for grocery delivery, specifically Whole Foods’ 2 hour delivery coming to more cities. Retail automation is coming and Amazon needs to establish a better physical presence and brick-and-mortar footprint if it wants to lead the first wave.

Who said Amazon was just for E-commerce?

Amazon may have hit the $1 Trillion market cap level, but it might need to experiment a bit more before it fully understands customer experiences in physical retail stores. At least that’s according to some journalists who visited the first store in NYC.

• The format for Amazon 4-star stores appears to be 4,000 square feet.
• The SoHu highly-curated store is, well, a book store, hardware store — no, a toy store — or maybe electronics, travel and pet shop all in one? Yup.
• The in-store products have collectively earned more than 1.8 million five-star customer reviews with an average of 4.4 stars.

It’s a great concept in theory but in the West product reviews are about as reliable as counterfeit products are common in the Chinese versions of E-commerce leaders.

But let’s look on the bright side. How could Amazon’s range of products actually go wrong here? Amazon will do fairly well in the haven of the “everything-store”, since — well, it is Amazon we are talking about.

There’s no good reason every major city in North America should not have such a store, is there? Amazon means convenience for urban shoppers and that’s not likely to change in the future.

Amazon needs to experiment aggressively with physical store concepts. You know there are already:

• Amazon Books bookstores
• AmazonGo convenience stores (a few different formats here)
• Amazon Pop-up Kiosks (in Malls)
• AmazonFresh Pickup grocery locations
• Amazon Whole Foods stores
• Amazon college pickup and return centers

What’s not to like about Amazon getting more competitive in physical retail? Someone needs to set the retail apocalypse myth straight. Whole Foods does have around 460 locations, after all, and grocery delivery is the future of food. You don’t need to be a futurist to know that much.

So, just when you thought Amazon was an E-commerce behemoth, it’s not. In China Alibaba partners with Starbucks and offers O2O (offline to online and online to offline) customer experiences America doesn’t even have. American retail has always been on the clunky side, on the sensual physical shopping side of things.

Amazon has been slow to pull the trigger on physical retail. It’s expensive to open stores and it could be an epic flop. It could acquire someone like Nordstrom’s or DoorDash (before Uber does), because they both make sense for how Amazon can scale into physical retail and O2O experiences.

Alexa subbing for customer service in physical stores would be the entire point of something like a voice assistant. Amazon has to hurry since Google Assistant is going to be everywhere with the rise of Waymo and Alphabet’s talent for business partnerships.

Amazon 4-star stocks items that have an average customer review rating of four stars and above. This isn’t a new idea but it’s a new store for Amazon and it was packed in its first action recently. What Amazon calls “no comment on rumors and speculation”, might just be the future of Amazon in America. Amazon needs to get brick-and-mortar retail, healthcare (read pharma and BioTech), banking and the future of the smart home simultaneously to make good on its potential. For the 2020s, that means scaling into physical venues and urban consumer ubiquity.

Amazon is the real IoT/Cloud company that can disrupt the consumer experience on every level of our times — at least for the Western internet. Walmart, Netflix, Google, Kroger, Macy’s, Flipikart, HomeDepot, Target, iTunes and others — need to wake up and smell the roses.

Amazon is coming, and it’s coming for you.