DALLAS -- 7-Eleven Inc.’s recent partnership with Amazon.com has earned the convenience store chain the No. 3 on Fast Company magazine’s list of the “World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Retail.”
The Dallas-based retailer is featured on the annual list “for localizing and compartmentalizing its stores. The brand's partnership with Amazon allows users to have small packages delivered to stores rather than their homes. In 2012, that partnership expanded to five areas globally: New York, Seattle, DC, Silicon Valley and London.”
"Amazon Lockers" debuted in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and New York in 2011 and expanded into other cities in August 2012.
After a package arrives at the retail site, Amazon emails a code to customers who have shipped their item to a locker that unlocks the door holding their merchandise. The lockers--often housed in locations operating 24 hours a day--can hold only smaller items such as playing cards or books, and users have several days to retrieve the merchandise.
Users don't pay anything extra to use the service, but the locker program helps Amazon save on certain shipping costs.
7-Eleven and other store owners where Amazon is opening Locker locations benefit by bringing traffic into the stores, where they may buy a soda or other product on their way out.
Fast Company’s World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Retail list is an annual guide to the state of innovation in the U.S. economy, featuring the businesses whose innovations are having the greatest impacts across their industries and our culture as a whole, according to the magazine’s website.
Click here to see the complete list.
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