It seems that e-commerce giant Amazon has decided to enter 2019 with a New Year resolution of expanding physical stores across the United States. It plans to achieve this resolution by increasing the counts of Whole Foods Grocery stores across suburban cities and other areas, according to Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
The Whole Foods expansion is latest in Amazon’s quest for expansion of physical stores, since it is already in the middle of expanding Amazon Go convenience and new 4-Star retail stores. WSJ claims that the company is mulling to go for 45,000 square feet, which is slightly larger than the standard Whole Foods store.
Jeff Bezos’ company has been aggressively trying to expand the Whole Foods across U.S. ever since its acquisition last year. The online shopping behemoth paid nearly $13.7 billion to acquire the grocery supermarket company. If WSJ’s report is any hint then Amazon is also planning to integrate its delivery and pick-up services to all 470 Whole Foods stores across the U.S.
It is certainly clear that Amazon, which is synonymous for online shopping across the word, is giving a lot of importance to physical stores. It is still very early to say that the Seattle based company is planning to become an omni-channel player in the future, but expansion of physical stores surely seem to be among its long-term strategy. In physical retail space, its biggest rival is obviously Walmart, which now apparently is also the main competitor in India’s burgeoning e-commerce market.
Meanwhile, as soon as reports of Jeff Bezos’ company is planning to expand Whole Food Stores reached the market on Monday morning, Amazon’s shares started heading northwards. The shares jumped 1.4 percent to US$1,499.16 at 10:19 a.m. in New York.