Walmart holds a significant advantage over Amazon due to its extensive network of physical stores. Observations indicate Amazon's online recommendation system is less effective at prompting unplanned purchases compared to the experience of browsing inside a Walmart location.
Currently, Amazon has been displaying guitars for sale to a user who recently purchased an entry-level guitar, making a second purchase unlikely. In contrast, walking through a Walmart store might lead a shopper to notice a music stand, a comfortable chair, or other items unrelated to recent buys. Walmart also emphasizes the accessibility of its stores.
"Approximately 90% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Walmart or Sam’s Club," the company states on its website. Matching this reach would be a major challenge for Amazon, but the online giant is taking a step by planning its first Supercenter.
Amazon has not publicly announced this move with its usual fanfare. Instead, local media discovered the plans. "It’s the best that Amazon has to offer under Whole Foods, Fresh and their online offerings," said Katie Jahnke Dale, an attorney representing Amazon at a community meeting, according to patch.com.
"We like to explain it as: So what does that look like? It’s a grocery store. But it’s purpose-built for what we’re seeing: retail customers demand today to provide a very safer experience for customers. As well as a more pleasant customer experience," she added.
RetailWire reported Amazon plans to open a one-story, 229,000-square-foot store in Orland Park, a suburb of Chicago. A typical Walmart Supercenter is about 170,000 square feet, making the proposed Amazon store larger.
An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC in a statement, "We regularly test new experiences designed to make customers’ lives better and easier every day, including physical stores. The site in question is our planned location for a new concept that we think customers will be excited about."
Amazon has experimented with physical retail before. A user expressed being a fan of the now-closed Amazon 4-Star stores, which sold highly-rated merchandise, and saw potential in its curated bookstores launched when other booksellers struggled. The user also enjoyed the checkout-free experience at Amazon Go stores.
However, Amazon has closed numerous retail locations. Amazon Fresh closed four stores in Southern California as part of a grocery restructuring, according to SuperMarket News. It also shut all 19 UK Amazon Fresh grocery stores after four years, TimeOut London reported. Specific closures in Thousand Oaks, CA, and Manassas, VA, occurred in 2025 due to performance assessments, Grocery Dive added.
Amazon closed all its physical Amazon Books stores, totaling 68 locations in the U.S. and UK, as part of a strategic pivot, Geekwire reported. All Amazon 4-Star stores and Pop-Up formats were also shuttered, Geekwire added. Amazon Style apparel stores in Los Angeles and Columbus, OH, closed following underperformance, Spectrum News reported. The 365 by Whole Foods Market banner was discontinued in 2019, Yahoo Finance reported.
Industry observers note Amazon continues testing physical retail concepts despite these closures. "If you look at the statistics on consumer preferences, consumers actually like going to physical stores. There’s emotion that goes into a purchase, and they want to see an item, feel it, touch it," Sam Cinquegrani, CEO of digital commerce solutions firm ObjectWave, told Retail Dive.
He believes Amazon will eventually figure it out. "If I were a retailer, especially a predominantly online retailer like Amazon, I would be concerned about that advantage. Given their success, you might think they wouldn’t be. But Amazon has always proven to be much smarter than everyone else, so it’s not surprising that they’d push into physical retail," he said.
Neil Saunders, Managing Director of GlobalData, suggested the store is currently experimental. "At this stage, the store is more experimental than anything else. However, Amazon has two primary aims. The first is to try and deepen share of wallet with customers and draw in new customers...The second is to see whether grocery combined with general merchandise can work — especially as stand-alone grocery stores are an area Amazon continues to struggle with," he posted on RetailWire.
Retail expert Goug Garnett, an adjunct instructor at Portland State University since 2001, does not believe Amazon will succeed with large-format stores. "When Bezos bought Whole Foods, I expressed interest in the many savvy things they might do with the chain. Fundamentally, though, they did nothing. It may simply be that their digital obsessions blinded them to a good opportunity. I think it’s more likely that retailers have quite savvy structures in place, so there’s little dramatic advantage beyond doing the basics well. What might happen here? Nothing important. There’s no evidence Amazon has unique insight into stores," he wrote.
Bob Amster, a former senior manager with the Northeast Retail Consulting Group of Ernst & Young, thinks Amazon is wasting its time. "I don’t think that Amazon has the right amount of internal knowledge to run retail. I believe that, hoping they do not screw up Whole Foods, Amazon should stay with their online business and allow brick-and-mortar retailers to operate retail businesses," he posted on RetailWire.