As you may have heard, e-commerce giant Amazon has had to drastically scale back its warehouse square footage in recent months due to labor and energy cost increases. Why, then, is the company simultaneously gobbling up land all across the country in key markets?
One of the company's most recent purchases was 193 acres of land located just outside of Round Rock, Tex., near Austin. Texas' lenient land-use laws mean that Amazon can use this massive parcel for whatever it wishes – so what is on the agenda?
According to reports, Amazon's land accumulation endeavors started about three years ago. The Seattle-based retail predator quietly started searching for land in Southern California, Texas, Illinois, Florida, and the Bay Area. Since that time, the company has just about tripled the amount of industrial space it owns in North America.
Between 2020 and 2022, Amazon acquired some 4,000 acres of bare land, says real estate researcher CoStar Group Inc. Some of this land will probably be used for new fulfillment centers, but the rest of what the company has planned remains unclear.
"Buying land is a major shift for Amazon, which historically relied on a handful of developers to find property, build fairly simple warehouses and rent them back to the company," reports Supply Chain Brain.
"Now Amazon is increasingly taking parts of the development process in-house, often bidding against long-time partners for the best space."
Do you want to live in an America with Amazon fulfillment centers in every corner?
During the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) plandemic, Amazon massively overbuilt its warehouse square footage as shopping volume saw massive declines. Despite this, the company now says that there will be no changes made to its long-term real estate strategy, which includes buying up lots of land.
More than likely, a lot of the land Amazon is buying will, in fact, be turned into fulfillment centers that are close to people's homes. If it does not grab any land it can get, competitors like Walmart will capture the market instead.
"There's going to be something on the other side of all of this investment for the consumer," says John Blackledge, an analyst at Cowen and Company LLC. "People will buy more on Amazon when they see they can get it in five hours instead of two days."
In the past two years, Amazon has spent approximately $2.2 billion acquiring new land and properties. This is considered to be a conservative estimate, suggesting that Amazon has actually spent much more money on land.
For many years before that, Amazon took a much different approach to its business. With Jeff Bezos at the helm, the company historically made very few investments in real estate – almost too few, by corporate standards.
That has since changed, and now Amazon is buying up land like crazy. What does the company have in store for the world moving into the future? Does it plan to control every aspect of the retail experience, becoming the only shop in town with a fulfillment center on every corner?
Amazon's so-called "Fresh" grocery stores are another element in the company's business model. These Orwellian facilities feature thousands of surveillance cameras on the ceiling that watch customers as they put things in their carts and automatically charge them when they walk out the door.
It seems as though Amazon wants to own America. And it is accomplishing this by buying as much land as possible, much like how billionaire eugenicist Bill Gates is buying up hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland all across the country.
More related news about Amazon's predatorial business model can be found at JeffBezosWatch.com.
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