Amazon, two shops in California to grow wine & spirits with Prime Now

Amazon is no longer enough to be the king of online sales, and if some analyst seems to have easy game in predicting the end of the growth of the e-shop giant, Jeff Bezos for some years now has decided to focus strongly on a real return to the past, to brick and cement stores, albeit with high technology and few employees. A turning point that could also affect the wine sector, where Amazon has appeared in 2012, starting to ship wine in the 13 states where the law allows it, and then relaunch its commitment in the wine & food sector in 2017 with the purchase of the supermarket chain Whole Foods Market, with more than 500 stores throughout the United States. Now, the novelty is the opening, announced by the U.S. press, of the first point of sale of wines and spirits “physical”, in San Francisco. A novelty that, as the wine-searcher portal points out, is not such, because in Los Angeles a liquor store opened by Amazon Prime Now already exists since February, but no one seems to have realized it. Amazon itself did not advertise it, and the impression is that the core is not so much the desire to enter the physical alcohol market but rather the desire to respond to legislative obstacles between Amazon and the possibility of shipping wine and alcohol to the State of California through the Prime Now service, which would allow the ordered bottle to be delivered in just two hours, as has been the case since 2017, for example, in cities such as Seattle and Chicago. Everything, from the opening hours to the surface, suggests an exquisitely strategic move, to grow even more, but without competing with the “classic” retailers, just like in all other sectors, from clothing to electronics.