Amazon plans to open “300 to 400” brick-and-mortar bookstores, according to CEO of mall operator General Growth Properties
Amazon Plans Hundreds of Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores, Mall CEO Says — The Seattle company plans as many as 400 bookstores, according to the chief executive of General Growth Properties
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's move from online-only to physical retail began with its first Amazon Books store in Seattle's University Village in November 2015, stocked with 5,000-6,000 titles. The new wrinkle here is scale and source: the number comes not from Amazon but from the CEO of General Growth Properties, one of the largest US mall operators — meaning a landlord is publicly shopping Amazon as an anchor tenant for hundreds of locations.
The claim was immediately contested: Re/code reported a day later that while Amazon does plan more physical retail beyond bookstores, it has no immediate plans for 300-400 stores. Bezos then confirmed direction without numbers at the May shareholder meeting, saying Amazon is planning more physical stores and new Prime services.
First-order effects
- Mall landlords like General Growth Properties get a marquee replacement tenant for space vacated by struggling book chains, and they are marketing that opportunity publicly before Amazon has committed to a count.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's own follow-through ran through smaller formats rather than hundreds of full bookstores: by September 2016 it was scaling mall pop-up stores toward 100 locations, run out of its devices organization — using cheap footprints to showcase Echo, Kindle, and Fire hardware instead of leasing big boxes.
Third-order effects
- The pattern held and widened: five years later Amazon was still expanding offline, with reports of large physical stores in Ohio and California extending into clothing and other categories — suggesting the bookstore talk was the opening move of a durable omnichannel strategy rather than a one-off experiment.
The trend: Amazon is steadily converting its online brand and customer data into physical retail footprints, starting with bookstores and pop-ups and expanding into broader category stores inside malls.