Amazon should have bought the Radio Shack leftovers and used them as a drop off for returns/pick up for free shipping etc. Amazon competes with Target and Walmart, not with Albertson's. And Sprouts is freaking amazing. I love this place and go there as much as I can when I go back home.
More than that, people misunderstand how Amazon works. Bezos wants them to sell everything. Literally everything. he wants to have at least one of everything in the world just to have everything in the world. That's not a business model, that's a delusion... but it illustrates what drives them, which is "we want to be the first place you look for everything." You can't have a showroom full of "literally everything." You can have a showroom of the top two items in your top 100 categories, tops. The bigger that showroom, the higher your margins have to be to pay for the floor space. Apple has stores because they can't legally have churches... but if they could, they would. You come to the Apple Store to pray to the Half-Bitten God. Microsoft has stores because they figured "well, shit, it's working for Apple" and because once they started making their own hardware (xBox, Surface, Zune), why not. Everyone else has stores because they sell shit there. Amazon's ultimate expression of success is when they are the only store in the world. This is their goal. This is their modus operandi. They succeed through monopoly; until then, they cut their margins to the bone so that their economies of scale drive everyone else out of business. Storefronts around me are going for about 18/sf/yr. A Whole Foods runs around 40,000 square feet. That's three quarters of a million, triple net (so more like $1.1m), just for the lease. Whole Foods spends $10b a year in rent. For the record, that's about the sales amazon gets from cloud services. that's without staff. That's without inventory. That's without all the other shit that makes a brick'n'mortar site. Check it out. HOLY SHIT. Amazon made money for two straight years. The fact that this is amazeballs is fucking disgusting - how does a company founded twenty goddamn years ago, whose stock is a thousand flipping dollars a share, get away with making it to consistent profitability just now? Because the market is insane. And has been. And they'll happily congratulate Amazon on their white elephant because it's "bold."