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Looks like Walmart is leveraging the new talent in their leadership fold, Marc Lore formerly of Jet.com and diapers.com, to launch a skunk works in Silicon Valley dubbed Store #8 after the store Company founder Sam Walton used to try out new retail strategies. Feels like less of a moonshot factory then say how Bell Labs, Xerox's PARC, Amazon's Lab126 or Google's X were set-up. But then one can ask how many of those great inventions did AT&T or Xerox actually leverage (the stuff Apple ended up launching don't count!) versus languishing on shelves. And exactly how many of X's moonshots have been commercialized? Maybe, if Store #8 is less rabbit and more turtle in the race to capture Consumers wallets. And in that scenario, Walmart can point to a whole list of competitors it has slowly but surely ground into dust. http://www.chainstoreage.com/article/walmart-launches-store-no---its-not-really-store?tp=i-H55-Q5S-341-4rp50-1u-14Qs-1c-iuA-4rjD4-27Eehq&utm_campai

With Amazon opening its 4th book store one has to wonder why is it going against the wave it helped create and that brick & mortar retailers are frantically trying to catch-up of closing their stores and shifting their business on-line. Could it be now that Amazon has wrought almost absolute destruction on brick & mortars it is looking to fill specific voids. Or, if history is any indicator, then perhaps the stores are more of a Trojan Horse. Like its initial foray as an on-line bookstore Amazon has since expanded its product portfolio to include a vast array of items from cloud computing, publishing, mobile devices, content creation and oh yes..selling a wide variety of products on its web-site (not just books) could Amazon actually be looking at these stores as a springboard to launch other businesses (think fee-based wi-fi access, built-in cell towers to create a mobile carrier network, small-biz local cloud storage solutions..etc). Or it could be just one tremendous hea