Of all Amazon’s retail ambitions — an online juggernaut that began with books and has expanded to everything under the sun — its grocery effort remains somewhat undercooked, despite a decade in the space.
There’s no real mystery to why Amazon would be so assertive in grocery: Total 2015 U.S. supermarket sales were $649 billion, according to the Food Marketing Institute. And trends favor Amazon’s incursion into the space, with grocery trips increasingly fragmented as households more often split shopping duties (rather than leaving the chore to women), as e-commerce sales contribute a growing (if still uneven) share and as younger shoppers go to different retailers for various reasons, according to other research from FMI.
