Amazon at the mall? —

Amazon to expand Prime benefits, open more brick-and-mortar stores

Although where, and how many more stores, remains unclear.

Amazon to expand Prime benefits, open more brick-and-mortar stores
Amazon

While still a primarily online store, Amazon isn't turning its back on physical retail establishments. After opening its first brick-and-mortar store in Seattle last year, the company's CEO Jeff Bezos confirmed at Amazon's shareholder meeting that more stores are coming.

"We’re definitely going to open additional stores; how many we don’t know yet,” Bezos said at the meeting according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. “In these early days, it’s all about learning rather than trying to earn a lot of revenue."

Currently Amazon's Seattle location is mostly a bookstore, and the company is already building another location in San Diego. Amazon has also built smaller kiosks in cities like San Francisco and Sacramento that sell Amazon products like Kindles and Fire tablets. Back in February, General Growth Properties, Inc. CEO Sandeep Mathrani said in an earnings call that he guessed 400 more Amazon Books locations would open in the future. He then backtracked on that statement.

According to the report, Bezos also has plans to add more features to Amazon's $99-per-year Prime membership. We don't know exactly what those new features could be, but Bezos wants Prime to include enough benefits that people feel they are "being irresponsible" if they aren't subscribers. The most recent addition to Prime memberships is access to Amazon's forthcoming private-label food brands, which it announced earlier this week. Still, Bezos' statement is a bold one, so we'll likely see numerous additional Prime membership perks rolling out soon.

Channel Ars Technica