Target will phase out all Kindle products this spring
Last night we reported on Target's plans to discontinue sale of the Kindle due to “conflict of interest,” and now the company has confirmed the story with us. In a statement, Target says that it will be “phasing out Kindles and Amazon …
Context & Ripple Effects
Target has confirmed what it told reporters overnight: every Kindle product leaves its shelves this spring, and the stated reason is a 'conflict of interest' with Amazon. The timing lands five days after Amazon settled the Texas comptroller's $269 million back-tax claim — a reminder of how aggressively the retailer-state tax fight had been running — and two days after Amazon reported Q1 net income down 35% on sales up 34%, underscoring how little margin the company earns on hardware itself.
The commercial logic behind Target's phrase is visible in the same week's numbers: comScore puts the Kindle Fire at 54.4% of US Android tablets, meaning the best-selling device on Target's tablet aisle is also the front door to a rival's storefront. The story travelled widely the same day, with pickups at TechCrunch, GigaOM, CNET, GeekWire and Good E-Reader, so this is now a public test case for every big-box chain stocking Amazon hardware.
First-order effects
- Amazon loses one of its largest physical retail channels for Kindles heading into the summer selling season, pushing more device purchases onto Amazon.com itself.
- Target forfeits Kindle-driven foot traffic and accessory sales, betting the showrooming risk — shoppers scanning goods in-store to buy cheaper from Amazon — outweighs the hardware margin.
Second-order effects
- Competing device makers, chiefly Barnes & Noble with the Nook, gain an opening to negotiate premium shelf space in the aisle Amazon vacated.
- Other national retailers stocking Kindles face the same conflict-of-interest calculation Target just made publicly, giving their merchandising teams a precedent to point to.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, big-box retail splits into camps: stores that treat Amazon as a supplier versus those that treat it as a competitor, accelerating Amazon's shift to direct-to-consumer hardware distribution.
- A retail sector losing Amazon device revenue has growing incentive to back alternative ecosystems — or to press regulators on the collection rules, like the Texas settlement, that shape Amazon's state-by-state price advantage.
The trend: Physical retailers are beginning to weigh Amazon's role as both supplier and existential competitor, and device distribution is drifting toward manufacturer-direct channels as a result.