Amazon Opening Pop-Up Shops in Malls

Amazon.com is aggressively expanding its presence in the brick-and-mortar retail market, with a plan to open dozens of new pop-up shops in U.S. malls over the next year. The pop-up shops are a separate effort from the physical bookstore that Amazon opened in Seattle last year, and are primarily designed to showcase and sell the company's hardware devices, particularly its Echo home speakers.

Total Retail's Take: Not content to dominate just online retail, Amazon is pushing to make a name for itself in physical retail as well. The company has been somewhat furtively testing pop-up stores (no press release was issued for the launch of the pop-up stores), and apparently the results were encouraging enough to go forward with a wider scale rollout. The move by Amazon to dabble in brick-and-mortar first with temporary pop-up stores may be a precursor to the retailer opening full-scale stores akin to Apple's stores. Great, just what traditional brick-and-mortar retailers wanted to hear — another channel for them in which they have to compete with Amazon.