Amazon vows to ‘go big’ on bricks and mortar

Amazon has vowed to “go big” on bricks-and-mortar stores, despite recently announcing that its growth plans were on hold. Pulling back its expansion plans on grocery led to a $720m impairment in the last quarter of 2022, Amazon said this month, as some of its Amazon Fresh grocery store locations were closed and new openings paused. However, chief executive Andy Jassy said the stores that had opened had yet to experience “normalcy” following the pandemic. “We are just still in the early stages,” he said. “We are hopeful that in 2023 we have a format that we want to go big on, on the physical side.” Plans to open more than 200 Fresh stores have led to just several dozen openings to date, with some US locations due to open now lying empty. Beyond grocery, Amazon has eliminated other physical store experiments, such as “4-Star”, a store selling an assortment of items rated four stars or above according to reviews on Amazon.com. The FT (£)