Amazon is not the only major online retailer exploring the brick-and-mortar space.
Home furnishings retailer Wayfair has announced plans to open a 15,000-square-foot physical location in Wilmette, Illinois. The store will carry a wide range of home goods, including furniture. Home decoration, household goods and DIY products.
And like many large home goods stores, it is going to even have its own restaurant called The Porch. The everlasting location, opening May 23, follows test branches at other locations.
Wayfair’s expansion comes at a difficult time for the corporate. Revenue in 2023 fell 1.8% and the corporate posted a net loss for the 12 months. The company also laid off 13% of its workforce in January, totaling about 1,650 employees. This was followed by 1,750 job cuts in 2023.
Wayfair has struggled with larger online retailers, CEO Niraj Shah wrote in a memo to employees in January.
“We went overboard hiring during an economic boom and strayed from our core principles. Although we have come quite far back to them, we have not quite reached our destination yet,” Shah wrote. as quoted by The Wall Street Journal.
Shah was also criticized last 12 months for advising his employees to work harder and balance their personal lives with their skilled lives. The concept that employees shouldn’t work long hours is “ridiculously wrong,” he wrote.
The hope is that the brick-and-mortar store will encourage consumers to purchase more as discretionary spending on big-ticket online items just like the furniture that’s Wayfair’s bread and butter has fallen sharply because the end of the pandemic.
However, physical locations are a chance and do not at all times repay. Amazon announced last month that it might close all of its Amazon 4-Star stores and pop-up kiosks, which began rolling out in 2015. The Whole Food Market branches are after all not affected by the withdrawal.
