Amazon plans to close 68 brick-and-mortar retail locations across the US and the UK, including all of its Amazon Books, 4-star, and Pop Up stores
- Amazon plans to close all locations of its Pop Up, Books and 4-star stores, the company confirmed to CNBC.
CNBCAnnie Palmer
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon had already abandoned its U.S. pop-up kiosk network in 2019, ending a format used to let shoppers try its products and services. Closing Books and 4-star alongside the remaining Pop Up stores turns that earlier pop-up retreat into a broader withdrawal from several small-format retail experiments.
The move also foreshadows Amazon's later reassessment of convenience retail, including eight Amazon Go closures and the eventual plan to focus its U.S. physical strategy exclusively on Whole Foods. The arc is not a single store rationalization but a narrowing of which physical formats Amazon is willing to operate.
First-order effects
Amazon will exit the Books, 4-star, and Pop Up formats in the U.S. and UK, removing 68 locations from its physical retail footprint.
Customers and retail employees tied to those formats lose those local storefronts, while Amazon no longer has those stores as product-discovery and merchandising channels.
Second-order effects
Amazon's remaining physical-retail operations face greater pressure to justify their role, a discipline later reflected in the company's roughly halved Amazon Go portfolio.
Whole Foods becomes relatively more central to Amazon's physical presence as smaller branded formats are removed, concentrating the company's store strategy in its established grocery banner.
Third-order effects
If the subsequent Fresh and Go closures hold as the operating pattern, Amazon's physical retail model is consolidating around Whole Foods rather than a portfolio of proprietary experimental formats.
The retrenchment suggests that Amazon's store network is becoming less a testing ground for multiple branded concepts and more a selective complement to its core retail operation.
The trend: Amazon is narrowing physical retail from a broad set of proprietary store experiments toward a more concentrated Whole Foods-led footprint.
Breaking into the traditional non-food #retail market proved too challenging for #Amazon at present. I visited their first UK 4-star store when it opened here, looked more like a showcase than a real store, a front-end to the website https://twitter.com/...
The Amazon bookstore was a beta test for the Metaverse: an Uncanny Valley simulation of a physical space you used to love but can no longer visit because the company itself had already destroyed it. https://www.reuters.com/...
BREAKING - All Amazon Books, Four Star, and pop up stores are closed permanently this AM. Employees were given no warning and it's unclear if they'll be offered a job within the company. This after Amazon Fresh retail workers try to unionize. Shameful. https://www.cnbc.com/...
Unpopular take but I loved browsing these stores. Goes to show that big co won't sustain a lagging business unless there's huge strategic value or exec conviction. https://twitter.com/...
Congrats to all of the indie bookstores I know and love who were so good at bookselling and interacting with their communities that they outlasted this shitty behemoth. https://twitter.com/...
I actually liked their bookstores, fewer titles + surfacing interesting ones I wouldn't necessarily have noticed at another store. (kids section put me onto quite a few new books my kids have loved) https://twitter.com/...
Amazon won't rest until all physical retail is dead! “What about stores without any living humans selfishly taking $18 an hour to assist customers? When do we get those?!” People asked Alexa Her silence spoke volumes. https://www.cnbc.com/...
Amazon's brick-and-mortar bookstores were never very welcoming. They felt like bookstores designed by people who never visited a bookstore before. https://twitter.com/...