Although putting a halt to certain expansion ambitions and recently announcing the layoff of more than 18,000 employees, Amazon is still eager to expand its empire. According to CEO Andy Jassy, the firm plans to “go big” in its brick-and-mortar grocery store sector.
Amazon paid $13.7 billion for Whole Foods in 2017, but the business is far from dominating the food industry as it does in so many other areas. The company’s physical retail sector accounts for 3.4 per cent of total revenue and has risen at a rate of roughly 10% since the Whole Foods purchase.
“We’re just getting started,” Jassy told the Financial Times. “We’re optimistic that in 2023, we have a format that we want to go big on, on the physical side. We have a history of experimenting a lot and doing it rapidly. And then, when we discover something we like, we’ll double down on it, which is exactly what we aim to do.”
Several of the latest layoffs reported by Amazon were in its food sector. It has shuttered some of its Fresh stores and halted plans to establish new ones while it seeks a viable model and formula. According to Jassy, many Fresh stores debuted during the COVID-19 outbreak, and as a result, Amazon hasn’t “had a lot of normality.”
On other fronts, the physical retail industry has faltered. Amazon announced about a year ago that it was shutting all of its bookstores, 4-star shops, and pop-up sites in the United States and the United Kingdom. The goal at the time was to concentrate more on food shops and physical clothes stores. Yet, Amazon suffered a $720 million loss last quarter as a result of halting its food development ambitions.
