With Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods in August, many commentators, myself included, pointed to a host of strategic implications, many originating in Whole Foods’ physical footprint. One of the ideas tossed around is that Whole Foods’ presence provides Amazon with 300 new ready-built locations in which to install Amazon Lockers.

In the company’s words, “Amazon Lockers are secure, self-service kiosks where customers can pick up Amazon.com packages at a time and place that is convenient for them.” Partnering with other businesses and organizations, Amazon began building this self-service fulfillment network in 2011, and has since grown to more than 2,000 locker locations in the US.

However, information on the breadth and depth of the locker network, and its strategic implications for Amazon and its partners is relatively scarce. Recent Chain Store Guide market research allows us to shed some light on the program.
 

By location type, convenience stores account for the greatest portion of locker locations (see the graphic above), followed by a more surprising group of retailers in light of the public reaction to the Whole Foods thing. Grocery stores account for nearly 25% of total locker locations. It’s not all grocery stores, but a couple of companies cozied up to the Big Guy before Whole Foods was even a twinkle in Amazon’s eye. (You can read more about the C-store and supermarket angle to our research here.)

Shopping centers and malls, college campuses and apartment complexes are next in line, each comprising 4-5% of the Amazon Locker footprint. An interesting player within this subset is the University of California, which has partnered with Amazon to host approximately 30 lockers systemwide. The department-store category noted in the graphic begins and ends with struggling department store Bon-Ton. Bon-Ton invited the fox to take up residence in the proverbial chicken coop by placing 44 Amazon Lockers in its stores, a state of affairs that you can read about here.

Looking at geography, the top five states are California, Washington, Texas, Florida and New York. I’ve mapped the number of US Amazon Lockers by zip code in the graphic above, but Chain Store Guide’s Retail Locations Database now contains geocoded location data, street addresses and company listings for all 2,044 Amazon Lockers. We even have the names of each locker. (Check out my personal top ten list of locker names here.)

Chain Store Guide also offers our clients and customers access to more than 750,000 individual retail and restaurant store locations that they use to meet their site selection, competitive analysis, mapping, merchandising, marketing and logistics needs. If you need data, we’ve got it covered.