Can Amazon Put Brick-and-Mortar Retail Back Together Again?
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- I have been a big proponent of flagship Amazon.com (AMZN) - Get Report retail stores for some time.
Jeff Bezos, speaking to Charlie Rose on
CBS
, discussed the issue. In the process, he proved why he is, by leaps and bounds, the best CEO in the world, right alongside Howard Schultz at
Starbucks
(SBUX) - Get Report
.
Watch this. It is simply fantastic stuff (with respect to CBS, you might have to sit through a 30-second commercial, but it's well worth it):
If your first reaction was
Wait a minute, the Kindle Fire is a 'me, too' product
, you really don't understand Amazon. Sadly, I might not be able to save you, but I'll try.
If 100 companies are doing something and you're the 101st, you're not really bringing any value to society
.
Couple this with
the strategy of aggressive spending to seize massive opportunity
and, again,
with the exception of Starbucks
, there is not another company, across industries, doing anything even as close to entrepreneurial, innovative and exciting as Amazon.
Plenty of companies with limited resources, relative to Amazon and Starbucks, are taking similar chances, but it's a different ball game. Very few giants and blue-chips take this approach. They park money overseas, hem and haw about political gridlock and produce uninspiring copycats of what everybody else is already doing. That's not money well spent.
So, we know that Amazon took the $3 billion bond because it's a great environment to do it in. It's relatively cheap debt and the company has so many different directions it can go in to get a solid ROI from the move.
It will work on Amazon Web Services. It's dropping serious cash on a new headquarters building. Of course, Jeff Bezos is probably frightened by
Netflix
(NFLX) - Get Report
CEO Reed Hastings' strong words (
) so he needs extra cash to spend on digital content.
There's little doubt in most people's minds that, as it exponentially expands its fulfillment capacity in and around major urban centers, Amazon will shoot for same-day delivery.
That brings us to the possibility of physical retail.
Amazon already tests something like same-day delivery in select cities across the U.S. --
Amazon Locker
. For some items you have the option at checkout to pick up your items at a location somewhere in your city.
These two concepts -- same-day delivery and Amazon Locker -- could naturally lead to at least a handful of brick and mortar outlets.
From a branding standpoint, it makes sense to have a store in Seattle, Manhattan, downtown San Francisco and somewhere in Southern California. However, as Bezos said -- and this is why I love him -- it makes no sense to do brick and mortar merely for the sake of doing it.
He was being nice when he said the other guys do a good job at it. Certainly some do. When he brought up iPad, you could almost see the respect Bezos has for
Apple
(AAPL) - Get Report
in his eyes. That's a friendly competition if I ever have seen one.
But, ultimately, what Bezos was saying, as I read between the lines, is that the present brick and mortar retail model stinks.
It strikes me kinda funny that Amazon busted the model in two. Now, Bezos says,
Man, we can't really think of anything to do that's different at the moment
. Translation: He's a humble genius. He disrupted an entire space.
And you know darn well that, even if it's bubbling somewhere below the surface in his shiny dome, Bezos has ideas on how to put physical retail back together again.
I am no Bezos, but I have ideas as well. Explore some with me on
and in
future articles on TheStreet
.
Rocco Pendola is
TheStreet's
Director of Social Media. Pendola's daily contributions to
TheStreet
frequently appear on
CNBC
and at various top online properties, such as
Forbes
.