Online retail giant Amazon has announced that it is going to open grocery stores all across the United States, starting with neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Chicago, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
The company has signed over a dozen leases in L.A., and the first couple of stores are going to be located in Woodland Hills and Studio City. There will be another in Irvine in Orange County.
Amazon is planning on opening stores in cities all across the country as it continues to push physical locations in a continued quest for expansion.
The stores could open as soon as the end of the year, and it’s not known whether they’ll be employing Amazon’s cashless Go technology. The stores will sell prepared foods and have kitchen space, as well as more mainstream run-of-the-mill groceries such as soda and Oreos. They won’t be in direct competition with Amazon’s Whole Foods brand, which is more health oriented.
Amazon has been steadily expanding its brick-and-mortar offerings — it now has 16 Amazon Go stores, four Amazon 4-star stores (which carry 4-star items) and 18 Amazon Books stores.
The company’s revenue from these physical locations isn’t significant yet, but it is growing. Sales from actual stores went up 1 percent to $4.3 billion from a year before. Only sales that happen in the store, and not those that are done online and picked up, count toward that number.
The company was recently granted permission by local regulators to start work on a grocery store in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, and records show that the store will have a large kitchen. The store Amazon is taking over used to be a Toys R Us, and it’s near an Office Depot, Citibank and Sharky’s Woodfired Mexican Grill.
Amazon is reportedly also looking at commercial locations in metro New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
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