Amazon Lays Plans For Up To 2,000 Grocery Stores

The tech giant may be heading into the brick-and-mortar grocery business.

According to internal documents viewed by Business Insider, the company is outlining plans for 20 pilot locations of an AmazonFresh-branded grocery store. The initial sites include Seattle, Las Vegas, New York, Miami and the Bay Area, GeekWire reported on Thursday (Oct. 27).

Many of those locations will also feature a drive-up, where customers can pick up orders placed online, while others will be traditional grocery store setups, where shoppers can browse for products.

The internal documents also revealed that Amazon expects to open as many as 2,000 of these grocery stores in the U.S. over the next 10 years.

Earlier this year, GeekWire uncovered the project sites for two Amazon drive-up locations in Seattle based on planning documents filed with the city.

Several media reports have noted that the stores are expected to be around 30,000 square feet, and the first stores in Seattle could open by the end of the year.

Last year, Amazon opened its first brick-and-mortar shop in Seattle’s University Village.

It didn’t take long for rumors to spread that the company had ambitions to actually open hundreds of bookstores across the country, possibly igniting its own major retail chain.

But Amazon has remained pretty mum on sharing exact numbers.

“We’re definitely going to open additional stores. How many? We don’t know yet,” CEO Jeff Bezos said at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting, via The Wall Street Journal. “In these early days, it’s all about learning, rather than trying to earn a lot of revenue.”

It’s been an open secret for months that Amazon is less interested in selling books in its bookstores than it is in learning about how consumers behave in B&M stores in the first place.

“Everyone was shocked and amazed at Amazon’s bookstore, but the bookstore is a Trojan horse to get devices into consumers’ hands,” retail analyst Doug Stephens told Retail Dive. “Everything Amazon does is aimed at that — getting their consumer into their ecosystem.”