This month, Amazon announced that it will be opening a new 230,000 sf big box store in the suburbs of Chicago. Half of the store will be consumer-facing, where customers can browse aisles for groceries, household items, and general merchandise, and the other half will serve as a kind of micro-fulfillment center.
Supposedly, the municipality applied a restriction to the lands requiring it to be a consumer-facing store; it can't just be for fulfillment. But it seems that some kinds are allowed.
My understanding is that the "fulfillment" component of the project will allow customers to order (on kiosks throughout the store) certain items "from the back" and have them delivered to the front of the store for checkout. Importantly, it also decouples inventory management and optimizes the back-of-house for online grocery.
This is a big store; bigger than even a Walmart Supercenter. It also sits on a 35-acre site, which means the lot coverage is only around 15%. However, there's also a large stormwater management pond and room for additional pad buildings based on this site plan:
A store this massive is a fascinating signal because it's a clear admission from Amazon that it needs to get its brick-and-mortar strategy right if it wants to compete in grocery. Even after its Whole Foods acquisition, it's only about 3% of the US grocery market, whereas Walmart is sitting at over 20%.
Ten years ago, it did not feel like this would be where we would end up. Retail as a real estate asset class was out of favor. Brick-and-mortar retail seemed destined to be disrupted by e-commerce and drone delivery. But retail evolved and grocery proved to be a unique facet of retail. At least so far.
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