Carol Spieckerman's Brain On ... Amazon's Fall to Earth

In her latest contribution as a Retail Wire panelist, Carol doesn't cave to anti-bricks carping about Amazon's latest channel surf.

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Here's what she had to say ... About three years ago, we predicted that Amazon would open stores or form an alliance with a large-scale retailer. Who would have thought they would take on both in a relatively short period of time (owned stores and Amazon's 7-Eleven site-to-store beta)?

Both make perfect sense as site-to-store scale-builders and any owned stores will have as much (more?) in common with Walmart's holiday Walmart.com stores than with Apple retail. The new formula is to sell high-margin, grab-and-go accessories and gadgets in physical stores that can also facilitate online orders for lower margin space hogs.

I'll say it again, scale has been redefined. One channel doesn't cut it.