Amazon to open grocery chain separate from Whole Foods
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Slightly related thought: Why not design a store which allows instant fulfillment from a wide selection of goods while taking up less ground level space? I could see an Amazon/Walmart/etc store where you reserve the shelf space for presentation, but the goods are actually stored on higher floors and delivered to the customer upon checkout? Real-estate is a premium in many markets and probably keeps out super-center style stores. If you could build up, without having to extend retail niceties to all floors, you might make the costs work.
Not to mention, until robots can handle every variety of produce and package, isn't the real life manifestation basically going to be a sixteen year old dashing about in a mirror-store hidden in the back, tracing your footsteps, picking up the things you scan, and putting them in a cart?
1. Potential for less waste through 1) people not avoiding ugly produce, 2) not leaving refrigerated stuff on a non-refrigerated shelf, 3) leaving freezer doors open, 4) stealing things.
2. Less congestion in the browsing section.
3. Better stock tracking.
4. Easier stock management. You don't have to have people move stock between a warehouse and a shelf.
5. And yes, you don't have to push a cart.
There are significant drawbacks too. The biggest one I can think of is that the fulfillment mechanism doesn't actually exist.
Wrt 3 & 4, when you've practically got two whole stores, one with stocked product and one with QR codes, you're not saving space or stock management. (You're not going to go straight from shipping boxes to customer's hands)
No idea why you are conflating the desire to push a shopping cars with the ability to cook food..
Maybe it's true, and carts are a great burden on many people. I've just not seen it myself, so I'm a bit flabbergasted. Especially since children can ride in carts.
Imagine being able to open a Walmart Supercenter in the middle of, say, San Francisco(like that would ever happen but anyway). They'd never be able to afford the real estate for a traditional supercenter, but they might be able to afford a super-tower.
But since the store size is 35000 sq.ft., they'll surely do something beyond that. But what ?
And they're going to build a lot of these stores, fast. They must. Or else, Walmart.
EDIT: Why so much space?
Sometimes you need stuff from the grocery today. Other times you can order online. Sometimes you need both.
This stores will serve both roles.
I mean the checkout experience might be a little better but there are so many additional variables that come into play. Like are things going to be bagged well? I walk to the grocery store so it's important to me to get a good weight distribution between bags.
Idk this just seems like a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
Supposedly Amazon's machine-vision store is solving this though.
It seems like a strange UI for something that could just happen in the app before you even get to the store. Seems like a waste of space too since everything will be itemized and stored in the back on shelves as well.
I understand that user behavior doesn't turn on a dime but Amazon customers are already used to ordering online.
let's you decouple storage location from presentation location. i assume the grocery store knows what items are most frequently purchased together, and ensures they're as far apart as possible in presentation-space. but in this model they could then keep them nearby in storage-space, making it easier for them to load your bag up.
(also the instant you walk in, they can probably figure out the things you're most likely to get, and move them to some staging area to go in your bag as soon as you scan it.)
Introducing yet another generic grocery chain to the already saturated, age-old red ocean market doesn't seem reasonable unless they're trying to create walk-up warehouses for online grocery delivery.
Not if they succeed. The grocery market is only so large, and if Amazon pushes other other grocery chains, consumers now have less choice.
Then Amazon is coming for you.
So I'm curious, how is Amazon able to execute so effectively in so many different spaces? It would seem to me that any company endlessly extending itself into new markets is doomed to lose sight of its core competencies and eventually collapse under it's own weight.
And yet Amazon still grows, and keeps executing. How is this possible? Is the 6 page memo the magic sauce of sprawling corporate empire governance? Am I just not understanding some fundamental tenet of business?
I'm not an Amazon guy or customer. Just guessing from what I read. I am pretty sure that lots of big businesses going cheap on or ignoring workers' advice, investing in expensive or inflexible systems, and pretending to listen to their customers contributes to their loss of market share to both startups with high customer focus + flexibility and pivoting behemoths like Amazon that emulate that.
And not all of them crumbled. Walmart did great.
But today we have A/B testing, Platform reuse for other business line(Cloud, site, Warehouses, trucks, etc), more predictable supply chains(ML), scary marketing techniques, small flat teams augmented by powerful tools, generous funding from the stock market, etc.
Now Amazon has it all. Their competitors ? not so much.
I could see AMZN taking a huge dive if the economy slows down. Think about it - a lot of people will be looking for things to cut and that Prime membership may be the first to go.
The only problem is time though - it can take a couple weeks to do this.
I used to think this, but Whole Foods sure has a lot more problem with the 'popular' part than with the 'processed' part. If you actually look at the nutritional content of some of their products, it's pretty dire. (Not so much for processed food, but my wife noticed the other day that one of their cake slices, for one slice of cake, had 1100 calories and 100 grams of sugar.)
The thing I hate is they don’t carry regular Aspirin or Tylenol, Nyquil (your usual and basic over the counter medicines) instead they carry ‘homeopathic’ whatever useless ‘natural’ ‘medicines’ & ‘supplements’
Amazon has a big opportunity there as well. They've just started their vitamin Solimo brand which is actually decent, and private-labelling generic drugs is just easy money for most retailers.