Major surprise in the American retail sector: Amazon is throwing the towel for its physical books and electronics stores, closing all 68 physical stores of its “Amazon Books”, “Amazon 4-Star” en Pop-Up chains. Focus moves to food and fashion.
End of three concepts
Amazon has been trying out physical stores for a while now, opening the first of its 24 own book stores in Seattle six years ago. Another step saw the opening of the remarkable 4-Star concept, which only sold products with a review rating of four stars (out of five) or more. Moreover, Amazon had a number of pop-up stores in shopping centres with an ever-changing product range.
Now Amazon is shutting down those three concepts, Reuters reports. Still, this does not mean the en of Amazon’s offline ambitions: it still has a food branch (with Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go) that keeps on growing quickly, and that may help some of the redundant employees to find a new job. Moreover, there is Amazon Style, the e-commerce giant’s venture into offline fashion: that will also receive a larger part of the focus.
