Just a few days ago, the Wall Street Journal got a hold of some insider reports that say that Amazon is working on seriously branching out into retail. Specifically, the reports claimed that Amazon Go was just one of three different possible retail formats that they were looking at using to expand, and that the e-commerce giant would be opening around 2,000 brick and mortar stores in the near future. Amazon reached out to a number of media outlets to quickly squash that rumor. Not only is Amazon not planning on opening up thousands of brick and mortar establishments in the coming years, but they are barely playing around with the format at all, and certainly don’t have three different working models to test from.
Not long ago, Amazon opened up a bookstore in Seattle, and just recently, they opened up a new Amazon Go convenience store, which is only accessible to employees for now and will be open to the public some time next year. While an Amazon presence in the physical retail space would be revolutionary, and the idea of Amazon Go allowing customers to grab what they want and walk out is nothing short of such, it seems that Amazon will be playing things much closer to the chest than that for now. For the time being, Amazon does not have terribly ambitious expansion plans in the physical world, and a couple more stores here and there in the Seattle area, if that, will probably be the extent of their ambitions outside of the internet for at least the next few years.
Rumors of Amazon’s plans in the physical space seemingly originated, at least partially, from some documents that Business Insider got a hold of at one point. While those documents may have laid out potential plans or ideas, Amazon has made it clear that they were nothing definitive, and anybody saying anything to the contrary to the media does not have the company’s backing at this point. With delivery drones in the works, of course, Amazon could still change shopping as we know it without opening up stores of their own, though Google may beat them to it with Project Wing.