The news: Amazon on Wednesday debuted a new Whole Foods Market concept store in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, that features a 10,000-square-foot automated micro-fulfillment center stocking over 12,000 items from both Whole Foods and Amazon.

• Whole Foods shoppers can either order from Amazon’s website for in-store pickup or scan QR codes while shopping in the store to access additional products.
• The idea is to test whether Amazon can capture a greater share of grocery spending by letting Whole Foods customers order from its vast online catalog, including staples like Bounty paper towels that the upscale grocer doesn’t stock.

How it works: Shoppers will find QR codes throughout the store.

• Scanning one with a smartphone opens the Amazon app to a custom storefront featuring thousands of products—from Pepperidge Farm Goldfish to Tide Pods—that shoppers can add to their online cart.
• After checking out online, shoppers receive a text when their order is ready for pickup at the in-store Amazon Pickup & Returns Counter.

The strategy: The concept looks to combine Whole Foods’ natural and organic groceries with Amazon’s national-brand staples in one trip.

• For online shoppers, the process is fairly seamless; they can build a single cart spanning both assortments.
• But for in-store shoppers, the process introduces friction: Amazon items must be ordered online and picked up separately after navigating the store. That’s similar to Amazon’s downtown Chicago hybrid concept, which pairs an Amazon Grocery on the ground floor with a Whole Foods upstairs. Both setups require two checkouts, creating an unnecessarily cumbersome experience.
• And even if the Plymouth Meeting concept works, scaling it could be tough since Whole Foods has just 500 stores, many in dense urban areas where space for micro-fulfillment centers is limited.

Our take: Amazon’s online grocery business is already massive. Excluding Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh, it generated over $100 billion in grocery-related gross merchandise sales over the past 12 months, enough to make it the third-largest grocer in the US. But its offline mass-market grocery ambitions have largely fallen flat.

Rather than making a major push to expand its physical footprint, it makes more strategic sense for Amazon to focus on growing its online grocery sales. And despite unveiling a new brick-and-mortar concept, that appears to be the approach Amazon has settled on.

Amazon plans to extend same-day delivery for fresh groceries to 2,300 locations by the end of the year, which will allow shoppers to add perishables like milk and eggs to their regular orders and receive everything within hours. It’s a move that could help Amazon win more grocery dollars not by building stores, but by making the doorstep the new checkout line.