Dive Brief:
- Amazon plans to construct a nearly 225,000-square-foot retail store in Orland Park, a village in Cook County, Illinois, located near Chicago, according to local planning documents.
- The proposed store will offer groceries and general merchandise, and marks Amazon’s first retail store that is on par with Walmart’s supercenter format, which averages around 179,000 square feet.
- An Amazon spokesperson said the planned store is “a new concept that we think customers will be excited about.” The company noted that the store will offer a broad selection and low prices across fresh groceries, household essentials and general merchandise.
Dive Insight:
With its new big-box store concept, Amazon is taking another crack at brick-and-mortar retail, with groceries as one of the draws for consumers.
The “first-of-its-kind” retail store will be located at 9600 1569th St. and sit right next to a Costco, according to Orland Park. Plans for the 35-acre parcel include parking dedicated for pickup orders and multiple commercial outlets for smaller businesses. The site plans, which were approved by Orland Park’s Planning Commission last week, still need approval from the village’s board that meets later this month, Patch reported.
The Amazon spokesperson noted that the e-tail giant regularly tests new shopping experiences. Last year, a Whole Foods Market in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, started piloting a new concept that lets shoppers scan in-aisle QR codes to order an expanded selection of groceries from an in-store microfulfillment center. Whole Foods Market has also been expanding its small-format Daily Shop concept, which it launched in September 2024, and has operated its Amazon Go convenience store chain for the past several years.
Amazon has struggled to gain traction with its physical retail locations. The company’s attempts at running apparel stores, bookstores and 4-star — a format that only sold items with a 4-star rating or better — have fizzled. The Amazon Fresh chain has seen stop-and-go growth since the first store debuted in 2020.
The new big-box store concept further blends groceries with general merchandise — a strategy that Amazon has been pushing lately and one that Walmart has been doing for decades. Last year, Amazon rolled out same-day delivery of perishable groceries, which lets customers order groceries alongside millions of products from Amazon.com, to roughly 2,300 cities and towns.
Amazon noted that over 150 million people in the U.S. turn to the company for grocery shopping and said that its grocery business rang up more than $100 billion in gross sales in 2024. Rival Walmart, which has told investors for several consecutive quarters that its grocery sales continue to improve in the U.S., brought in $276 billion in net sales of food and beverage items during its 2025 fiscal year.
