Unlike its namesake river, Amazon the retailer is ready and willing to change course, quickly, temporarily, and frequently. Relatively soon after announcing new physical retail concepts like Amazon 4-Star, which housed only products that earned high ratings from customers in the surrounding local area, and bookstores that harkened back to its initial product line, Amazon has decided to pull both those concepts. In the meantime, it purchased Whole Foods, and it has offered no signals that it will be closing any of those stores. It also announced, nearly simultaneously, expansions of its cashier-less Amazon Go stores and a new foray into fashion, called Amazon Style. Thus, Amazon looks like an inveterate, serial experimenter: Try one thing for a while, see if it works, and then terminate the project if it doesn’t. But if the project idea is effective, Amazon is out ahead of the crowd, with little competition, as has been the case thus far with its Just Walk Out technology. Such an entrepreneurial strategy is challenging of course. It isn’t always easy to admit mistakes, especially for a big company. Investing heavily in a new concept, only to terminate it a few years later, also is expensive. But in this sense, Amazon’s size benefits it, because even if its physical stores lose money for a few years, its overall revenues remain secure by its digital dominance. So what comes next?

Source: Karen Weise, “Amazon Plans to Shut Down More than 50 Brick-and-Mortar Stores,” The New York Times, March 2, 2022