Since 2005, Amazon has changed how virtually every American shops. That February, the company launched Prime, the first-of-its-kind, lightning-fast subscription delivery service that now has an estimated 147 million members in the United States. Along the way, Amazon invented its own shopping holiday, assembled an army of couriers schlepping your packages in the trunks of their cars, and turned toilet paper into the kind of thing that people have sent to their homes by the case. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has made enough money to launch himself into space. Now we appear to know what Amazon’s next great innovation might be: building department stores.
On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon is planning to test several U.S.-based locations of a new brick-and-mortar retail concept that will focus on stuff like clothes, housewares, and electronics—the kinds of things you might have bought in a department store at the mall before the online shopping apparatus that Amazon helped create drove a nail into that business’s coffin. The stores would be the latest in a series of in-personal retail experiments for the company, which operates bookstores and Amazon Go convenience stores, among others, in addition to its ownership of Whole Foods. The stores will reportedly be about 30,000 square feet, which puts them closer in scale to the average Best Buy than to the multi-floor shopping meccas that dominated American consumer life for a century; they will stock well-known brands, as well as Amazon’s own lines of electronics and other products. (When asked to confirm the WSJ report, an Amazon spokesperson said only, “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation.”)
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