Amazon May Have Another Acquisition in Line

Amazon is a worrying development to large portions of retail out there, and probably for good reason.

Its grip stretches into a host of areas, and threatens to replace the brick-and-mortar store as we know it today. We’ve known it has had its eye on groceries for some time, and a new potential acquisition target may put it in line for further grocery development.

Word from the Daily Mail has Amazon targeting Ocado, regarded as the largest dedicated online supermarket on Earth.

If this goes through, reports note, Amazon would use Ocado as a wedge to break into the online grocery delivery service in the United Kingdom, which is where Ocado is said to be headquartered.

It’s a rational move; reports suggest that Ocado has been hit with some unpleasant stock price impacts over the notion that it might have to compete with Amazon.

That’s not a good position to be in, and some companies have gone out of business outright competing with Amazon.

So Ocado gets to pull out of a market it might well lose anyway, with a healthy slug of Amazon cash in its coffers, and Amazon gets to take over the market it likely would have taken over to begin with, without a protracted fight and with plenty of Ocado’s assets, customer lists and the like on hand.

Throw in the concept of drone delivery and suddenly the idea becomes downright exciting.

The notion that we could one day order groceries and have same delivered, when we live within maybe a 20 to 30 mile radius of the store, is almost as exciting as restaurant delivery from a similar distance.

Some might consider this the start to an entire society of shut-ins, but it’s certainly got some appeal; no more traffic, no more muggers, no more car accidents for any of a number of reasons…it’s the kind of thing that represents a fundamental change to our way of life.

It may not go that far, of course, but knowing what we know so far suggests that we could be looking at a very big change to come.