Staples, RadioShack Yank Amazon Lockers from Stores
Staples Inc. (SPLS) and RadioShack Corp. (RSH) have removed Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) lockers from their stores after the partnership failed to meet expectations. — The retailers began testing a system last year in which Amazon shoppers …
Context & Ripple Effects
The locker experiment began in 2012, when Staples and RadioShack started testing in-store Amazon pickup points — an unusual arrangement putting a pure e-commerce rival's fulfillment hardware inside brick-and-mortar competitors. Per the reporting, the trial has now been quietly ended after failing to meet expectations, and the breadth of pickup — Bloomberg's story echoed by VentureBeat, The Verge, Forbes, GigaOM, Engadget and others within a day — reflects how closely retail watchers were tracking any Amazon-to-physical-retail bridge.
The timing lands amid a heavy stretch of physical-product activity from Amazon: the sixth-generation Kindle Paperwhite launch earlier this month and continued earnings scrutiny of the company's thin margins. For RadioShack in particular, whose turnaround depends on store traffic, hosting a kiosk that routes shoppers toward a larger rival's catalog was always an uneasy bargain.
First-order effects
- Staples and RadioShack lose whatever incremental foot traffic and fee income the lockers generated, while Amazon loses two national chains' worth of convenient pickup locations for customers without home delivery access.
- RadioShack, already fighting for relevance in consumer electronics, removes one of the more visible signs of cooperation with the company many blame for showrooming its stores.
Second-order effects
- Other mid-size retailers considering hosting Amazon pickup points now have a cautionary precedent: the economics of renting shelf space to your largest online competitor apparently did not clear for either chain.
- Amazon is pushed back toward alternative physical distribution — its own facilities, convenience-store partners, or neutral third parties — rather than relying on competing big-box chains for last-mile pickup.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US retail splits into camps: chains that treat their floor space as neutral infrastructure they can monetize, and chains that refuse to host a rival's logistics regardless of the fee — making physical footprint itself a competitive weapon against e-commerce.
- For Amazon, repeated friction with host retailers strengthens the case for building owned or deeply partnered physical touchpoints rather than borrowing competitors', a structural question that will shape how its hardware and services reach walk-in customers.
The trend: Brick-and-mortar retailers are discovering the limits of monetizing Amazon's expansion into their aisles, forcing the e-commerce giant to weigh owned physical infrastructure over borrowed shelf space.