Amazon is closing most of its physical stores to double down on Amazon Fresh and WholeFood brick and mortar locations.
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Closing 68 stores (Amazon Books, Amazon 4Stars, Amazon PopUps) all over the U.S. may seem a lot. At the scale of Amazon, it's not. Unsurprisingly these stores were large-scale prototypes designed to answer the question: where to verticalize next? And the answer seems to be that unless it's about fresh products, no physical stores are really Amazon-grade profitable.
If you're a book store (and I'm poking a close friend on this that is just about to open one), it's a glass-half-empty, half-full situation. Amazon clearly deems this market too shallow to be with physical stores (big surprise), but this asks what in-store experience Amazon couldn't deliver to attract recurring customers with a profitable average basket?
This "negative" space is the remaining opportunity and the answer is not automation or data.