Amazon Is Planning on Opening Another Grocery Store Chain in 2020. Here’s What We Know.
When Amazon bought Whole Foods amidst opening their own Amazon Go stores, industry observers wondered what, exactly, the company’s long-term plan might be. Things still aren’t clear, but it does seem that the company is doing what many thought they would: turning their lessons from those stores into a third new brand.
As Fortune reports, the company recently placed job postings looking for people to work at “Amazon’s first grocery store” in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. The reporter wasn’t able to get much detail from the company, other than that the store is slated to open next year, and that it will have a standard check-out procedure, more like Whole Foods than the technology at Amazon Go that allows users to simply walk out with their purchases.
Previously the Wall Street Journal had dug into the mysterious new store, and learned that it would stock more mainstream goods than Whole Foods, with planned locations in strip malls and shopping centers. At the time, it was announced other leases were being signed and plans were in place for more than a dozen locations, including San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, and Philadelphia. This report adds more locations in the Los Angeles area.
The grocery industry has been keeping a close eye on Amazon since the online retailer’s $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods in 2017, and their move to marry their delivery capabilities to their grocery business, which puts them in competition with stores like Walmart, Safeway, and Kroger — notably exactly the style of grocery store this new brand seems to be.
With the three levels of stores — Whole Foods in the natural market, the new brand in the traditional grocery, and Amazon Go in the convenience business, Amazon seems to be waging an all-out war on the grocery industry, much as they once did to the brick-and-mortar bookstore landscape.