亚马逊为什么要开线下实体杂货店？

亚马逊为什么要开线下实体杂货店？

亚马逊进军实体店，标志着它的一个戏剧性转变——告别仅供线上战略。正是该战略的成功，使这家公司成为全世界市值最高的企业之一。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

grocery食品杂货店['grəʊs(ə)rɪ]

tilted倾斜的，翘起的[tɪlt]

browse浏览；吃草[braʊz]

bricks-and-mortar传统的实体企业

departure出发；违背[dɪ'pɑːtʃə]

underscore强调[ʌndə'skɔː]

elusive难懂的；易忘的[ɪ'l(j)uːsɪv]

Amazon’s drive-in grocery store marks new offline push（667 words）

By Leslie Hook in Seattle

On a grey industrial block in north-west Seattle,the lights are already turned on in a building that has no name. This is set to be Amazon’s new grocery store,one of two that will open soon in its home town,marking the retailer’s first step into physical stores for grocery and convenience items.

It will be anything but your typical convenience store,however. The store functions around a drive-in concept,and features a large tilted awning that gives it the air of a 1950s drive-in diner. Customers who come here will not browse the aisles — they will order their goods online in advance,then stay in their car while their groceries are brought out to them.

Amazon’s move into bricks-and-mortar outlets marks a dramatic departure from its online-only strategy,whose success has made the company one of the most valuable businesses in the world. It also underscores a key new goal,one that has so far proved elusive: mastering the grocery market.

The company has been expanding its grocery delivery programme,Amazon Fresh. It has more than doubled its footprint this year and expanded to 17 markets,including London,yet Amazon controls just 1 per cent of the $800bn US grocery market,according to estimates from Cowen and Company.

“Grocery is the company’s biggest potential for revenue upside,”says John Blackledge,a Cowen analyst. He estimates that Amazon’s food and beverages sales could grow from $9bn this year,to $23bn in five years,making it one of the top 10 grocers in the US.

This could spell tough competition for Amazon competitors such as Walmart,which controls a fifth of the US food and beverage market,as well as smaller players such as Kroger and Albertson’s. Walmart is struggling to find growth in its grocery sales,which fell 2 per cent in October compared with the previous year,according to a consumer survey by Cowen. Amazon’s grocery sales grew 12 per cent in the same period.

Amazon’s experiments with physical stores come at a time when its soaring overall sales give it room to test out new strategies. In the past 12 months,Amazon’s sales rose to $117bn（excluding Amazon Web Services),up 25 per cent from the same period a year earlier — vastly outpacing the growth of the US online retail market.

Despite this,more than 80 per cent of US retail sales remain offline,and those familiar with the company’s thinking say Amazon is looking for new ways to get a piece of such sales.

Although groceries are a notoriously low-margin business,shoppers tend to purchase items more frequently than any other category. This makes it highly desirable from Amazon’s point of view,as the company works to get users ever more hooked on its Prime membership service,which could in future include groceries,and to cross-sell other items to grocery shoppers.

Mark Mahaney,analyst at RBC,points out that Amazon’s retail margins are already in the low single digits,and thus not dramatically different from typical operating margins in the grocery business.

A one-year subscription to Amazon Fresh,the company’s grocery delivery service,currently costs $15 a month. Amazon declined to answer questions about its new stores for this piece.

Analysts caution that the drive-in grocery stores are still an experiment at this point.“Do I expect them to set up a chain of physical retail stores? Absolutely not,”says Mr Mahaney.

However,the company has recently starting increasing its brick-and-mortar presence in other areas too. Amazon opened its first physical bookstore a year ago,in Seattle. It has since opened two more,in Portland and in San Diego,with a fourth set to open in Chicago next year.

Analysts expect that it is only a matter of time before Amazon starts testing out bricks-and-mortar strategies in other areas,starting with apparel. Amazon has already upended the traditional retail market with the success of its online model,and now it is looking to take the fight closer to its rivals’home turf.