Amazon has announced it plans to close all 68 of its physical stores across the US and UK.
It currently has a number of bricks-and-mortar ventures: bookstores, ‘4-star’ retail stores, and various ‘pop-op’ shops, but has largely failed to penetrate the physcial retail space since launching its first bookstore in 2015.
Amazon’s “physical stores” revenue made up just 3 per cent of Amazon’s A$188 billion in sales during the December quarter, and the majority of this was from Whole Foods – a major supermarket player in the US.
The writing has clearly been on the wall for a while now; In November, the company’s VP of physical retail, Cameron James, left, after 14 years at Amazon.
