Remember when news leaked that Amazon was planning to open a lot more brick-and-mortar stores? Amazon’s PR team got pretty angry about those reports and insisted they weren’t true. But today Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos himself has confirmed that they’re “definitely” planning to build more stores.
Today Amazon is holding its annual shareholders meeting in Seattle where Bezos is fielding questions and talking about the future of the company. Geekwire is reporting that Jeff Bezos said that they’re “definitely going to open additional stores.” However, the number and precise location of the stores remain undisclosed.
Rumors back in February led many to believe that Amazon had some rather bold plans to open as many as 300-400 stores. Reports from the New York Times and Recode claimed that the plans were probably more modest than that, but that they’d definitely be headed by Steve Kessel, an Amazon executive who helped with the launch of the first Kindle.
The Kessel initiative is rumored to be called simply Amazon Books, though that seems a bit confusing and practically redundant in some weird way. We’ll just have to wait and see.
I reached out to Amazon by both email and phone but have yet to hear back. This post will be updated as soon as the notoriously secretive Amazon gives us a comment we can publish.
[Correction: This post originally misspelled Steve Kessel’s name. I regret the error.]