Amazon tests out big box retail

photo: Village of Orland Park, Illinois                  

The Orland Park Village Board approved the retail giant’s plan for a 230,000-square-foot building selling groceries, prepared foods, household essentials and general merchandise on Monday, Supermarket News reports.

For scale: That’s about 52,000 square feet larger than the average Walmart Supercenter and more than 100,000 square feet bigger than the average Target. You could fit nearly six Amazon Fresh grocery stores inside of it.

Orland Park officials said the city is not providing any financial incentives to Seattle-based Amazon in exchange for the project.

Amazon is reportedly planning to open other big-box stores across the U.S., according to a report this week in The Wall Street Journal. 

The Orland Park site, about 25 miles south of Chicago, is at 9600 159^th St. and is the site of a former Petey’s II restaurant, which closed in 2024.

The single-story store will be located near other large retailers, including Costco, Target and Walmart.

Amazon’s move into big box retail provides growing evidence of the retailer’s desire to compete with Walmart, the country’s largest grocery retailer, in the grocery segment. It’s anticipated that the Orland Park store will dedicate about half of its footprint to traditional retail, with the other half used to fulfill online and in-store orders—a blend of digital and physical retail in the same space.

“This could be just another experiment, but as experiments go, it reveals a degree of Walmart jealousy that we didn’t expect,” analysts Mike Levin and Josh Lowitz of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners wrote, according to a GeekWire report.

Amazon’s big box outing will feature a mix of grocery items from Amazon-owned Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and online offerings, an Amazon lawyer told Orland Park leaders during a hearing earlier this month.

The construction project is expected to create 200 jobs, followed by an estimated 500 permanent jobs once the Amazon store opens, according to the city of Orland Park.

The project will fund infrastructure improvements in the city to improve traffic flow and reduce congestion, the city said.