Amazon Continues To Push Retail
In spite of the “pending†collapse of retail, Amazon continues to push forward with a decidedly retail strategy. For an online-first company, this strategy may baffle many but it reads like a book.
In just the past couple of years, they have opened up numerous physical bookstores, purchased Whole Foods, and now inked a partnership with Kohl’s to facilitate returns and purchasing.
The Atlantic has a wonderful piece outlining the parallels between Amazon and, wait for it, Sears.
From its founding in the late 19th century to its world-famous catalog, the history of Sears, Roebuck & Company is well known. Less storied is its magnificently successful transition from a mailing company to a brick-and-mortar giant. Like Amazon among its online-shopping rivals, Sears was not the country’s first mail-order retailer, but it became the largest of its kind. Like Amazon, it started with a single product category — watches, rather than books. But, like Amazon, the company grew to include a range of products, including guns, gramophones, cars, and even groceries.
From the start, Sears’s genius was to market itself to consumers as an everything store, with an unrivaled range of products, often sold for minuscule profits. The company’s feel for consumer demand was so uncanny, and its operations so efficient, that it became, for many of its diehard customers, not just the best retail option, but the only one worth considering.
Source: “ The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doingâ€, The Atlantic
The notion that retail is dead is being proven wrong from various corners of the world. Amazon’s deployment of retail seems to affirm 2 important aspects of the power of retail:
- Convenience has no match — no matter how many distribution centers, people will always have short-term and last minute needs to meet. Physical presence allows anyone to service his or her real-time needs in an instance.
- Subliminal messaging — advertising still has an irreplaceable role in our lives and we can still be swayed readily by our casual encounters. Turns out wherever they open a store, traffic increases
As different as things may seem from day to day, year to year, and generation to generation, it is clear that history often does repeat itself, regardless of the medium. Nostalgia will never get old, nor will history run out of lessons to teach us.
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Gregarious Narain is a serial entrepreneur and product strategist. A reformed designer and developer, he writes on his experiences as a founder, strategist, and father on the regular. Work with him at Before Alpha, connect on LinkedIn, follow on Facebook, or say hi on Twitter.