Amazon is still striving to develop its empire, despite putting the brakes on some expansion plans and recently announcing it will dismiss more than 18,000 workers. According to CEO Andy Jassy, the company wants to “go big” with its brick-and-mortar grocery store division.
Amazon paid $13.7 billion to acquire Whole Foods in 2017, but the corporation hasn’t yet completely taken over the supermarket industry like it has so many other industries. Only around 10% of the company’s entire revenue comes from its physical retail section, which represents 3.4 percent of the whole business.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Jassy said: “We’re really still in the early phases. “We’re hoping that by 2023, we’ll have a format for which we want to have a huge physical impact. We have a history of doing several experiments swiftly. Then, when we come across anything we like, we’ll double down on it, which is what we plan to do.
In its food segment, Amazon just revealed several of the layoffs. As it looks for a model and strategy that works, it has shuttered a number of its Fresh stores and postponed plans to establish new ones. As a result, Amazon hasn’t “had a lot of normalcy,” according to Jassy, who also pointed out that many Fresh outlets launched during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Other areas of the physical retail industry have been difficult. Amazon announced about a year ago that it will be shutting all of its bookshops, four-star stores, and pop-up sites in the US and UK. At the time, it was intended to put more of an emphasis on traditional clothes retailers as well as the supermarket industry
