Amazon Explored Opening Home Goods, Electronics Discount Stores (bloomberg.com) 30
Amazon.com has explored opening discount retail stores selling a mix of home goods and electronics, a potentially significant expansion of the company's growing portfolio of brick-and-mortar locations. From a report: The outlets would carry unsold inventory sitting in Amazon's warehouses at steep discounts, according to two people familiar with the plans. The company has considered opening permanent stores, as well as pop-up locations in malls or parking lots, said the people. The plans were preliminary and under discussion last year, but the pandemic and new Fresh grocery chain forced many employees to focus on day-to-day operations. "It's a way to be able to clean out warehouses, and get through inventory without having to destroy it," said one of the people, who was briefed on the plans but not authorized to discuss them. "It is keeping with the value proposition of Amazon, keeping price at the forefront and allowing customers to get access to products at low cost."
And then scalpers (Score:3)
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Would clean out the stores and then put it the items back up for sale on Amazon’s website, just like they do to other meatspace stores.
Somehow I seriously doubt scalpers will find success trying to re-sell Amazon Basics branded shit, on Amazon, for a profit, in an attempt to beat Amazon.
Just sayin'... (Score:2)
The recently closed Fry's store in Illinois is literally around the corner from a massive Amazon warehouse.
Amazon stores exist (Score:2)
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Most of the stuff Amazon sells you might as well buy online. It's boxed up so you can't really inspect it in the store unless they happen to have a display model, and usually online research is more useful e.g. does it invade your privacy or does the battery die after a few years?
Plus in some countries buying online gives you extra rights to return it if it sucks.
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Most of the stuff Amazon sells you might as well buy online. It's boxed up so you can't really inspect it in the store unless they happen to have a display model, and usually online research is more useful e.g. does it invade your privacy or does the battery die after a few years?
Plus in some countries buying online gives you extra rights to return it if it sucks.
Good points. The store I saw had a mix of display models and boxed items.
brick-and-mortar locations (Score:2)
Maybe set up pop-up / brick-and-mortar locations to sell their returned goods instead of destroying them [slashdot.org] or sending them to landfills [slashdot.org]?
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Where they can destroy them and or send them to a landfill.
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How about a storefront where people can pay a pittance to destroy returned goods before they get sent to the landfill? I'd pay to put a sledgehammer through a big screen TV or torch a MAGA hat.
There seem to be plenty (Score:2)
Of deserted K-Marts and Sears stores.
Or they could just take over abandoned Malls, and have separate stores selling different things....
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I am not sure that will work.
The large brick and mortar Malls and Big Retail Stores. Are things that people in general try to avoid now. A smaller store often gives the impression of a better experience. Sure Malls have spots for those small stores. But they require big parking lots, and a lot of inside travel that people don't care for much anymore.
Many Malls today are being flipped inside out to a bunch of box stores facing outward. As people are often looking for something in particular vs a general
Re: So during the pandemic (Score:2)
3d printing was never going to go anywhere due to limited materials and the cost of 1-off printing useful commodity things like pens being more expensive than just buying them.
Drone delivery has definitely got a niche where it is more effective and cheaper than the alternatives. Part of it is just going to be regulations, and determining how high (to reduce noise) and frequent the deliveries can be, and working out how the airspace can be shared without accidents.
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Drone delivery is failing because they tried to get cities to accept them without first thoroughly proving the technology in hundreds of rural areas first. Second, at the present time drone delivery is not as cost-effective as underpaid humans. Drones will eventually be cheaper and less trouble than an army of employees, but it needs to have more testing, reliability (stop trying to cater to people who don't have a designated drone delivery pad or zone), and public acceptance (the drone has to lower the pa
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The tech just wasn't there yet. The ground drones are being deployed now.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/ne... [aboutamazon.com]
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Regulations for drones delivery isn't quite set yet.
3d Printing you can only make so much.
Re: So during the pandemic (Score:4, Informative)
Rural drone delivery (Score:2)
If they are looking for new markets, why don't they get into package delivery logistics and compete with UPS/FedEx. Why does it cost nearly $100 these days to overnight something? The postal service delivers in 3 to 4 days, the same distance .. for 50 cents. Surely Amazon could figure out how to do it for less, maybe using one of those automated drones that lower a package to a landing zone in your yard? That's what Walmart is looking into: https://www.core77.com/posts/1... [core77.com]
The blunder everyone is making wit
Re: Rural drone delivery (Score:3)
Why does a dedicated bespoke service with gauranteed delivery times cost so much more than a bulk delivery service optimised to treat packages as identically as possible so as to drive as much cost savings from economies of scale as possible?
I don't know, seems like a big mystery.
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Something like Zipline's winged delivery drones seems like a no-brainer for rural areas. They've got the experience already delivering medical supplies in several countries to rural clinics, being the world's first profitable drone delivery service. The day they start operations in Peru I'm retiring and going to work for them.
https://flyzipline.com/ [flyzipline.com]
The Zipline story began in Rwanda and Ghana and has taken us around the world. We've delivered hundreds of thousands of shipments of life-saving blood and medi
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Zipline works because there are very few locations for the clinics, the clinic orders aren't typically too often (it handles blood, so maybe once a week), and there's no reasonable alt
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I see that Zipline has an office in Arkansas now. I suspect they're in talks with Walmart about rural deliveries, since Wally World is spending a big chunk of money on trying to compete with Amazon. It will be interesting to see.
Of course maybe they just consider Arkansas another Third World country like Rwanda or Ghana . . .
They used to just copy designs (Score:1)
Home Goods is already a national chain of stores under TJX.
Why not? (Score:3)
There are tons of empty stores all around the worlds, millions of them. :-)
Mostly because of Amazon.
Actually completes the circle for them.... (Score:3)
A whole lot of this extra inventory Amazon has to deal with is due to their "retail store killing" policy of being excessively customer-friendly. That "customer is always right" thing that any retailer can tell you is poisonous to business and just plain untrue? Yeah, Amazon pretty much follows it.
EG. A guy I knew got an Amazon gift card from a relative as a birthday gift. Except he didn't take good care of it and by the time he decided he should redeem it, it was damaged enough so he couldn't read all the numbers on it to enter it in. He called Amazon cust. service and they said, "No problem! We'll credit your account over the phone for it. Happen to know how much it was for?" He really wasn't sure, but guessed $150. They gave him the $150. Later, he found out from his relative it was only a $50 card.
They're pretty much the same way with anything you return. Buy a repair part and blow it up while installing it because some other part was the actual defective piece that destroyed the replacement? Send it back in 30 days.... Heck, let a Kohl's store do the work to box it up for you and actually ship it back, since they're usually hosting Amazon return desks. They'll give you a full refund as soon as they see the tracking number indicates it's coming back to them! Buy a pair of fancy shoes to wear to a function and decide you really don't need them again? Return them.... Amazon will go right along with it, and not look for evidence you wore them first.
So, having them go "brick and mortar" to unload all of this, now that they leveraged those policies to put the other retailers under, just completes the circle.
Warehouse Lockers (Score:2)
Pickup Centers? (Score:1)
At this point, it seems best to keep the ordering online, and let the massive logistics apparatus that has already been built work most efficiently. Consider it one of the better Sears/Pennys catalog replacements for the 21st century.
All Amazon really needs at this point past blue/grey vans is pickup centers with storage lockers in denser population areas. This could be a good use of some of the recently closed K-mart locations. Those may just be more van centers tho, still fulfilling a need.
This doesn't