Meta takes a shot at retail

[Brian Lutz]

https://about.fb.com/news/2022/04/meta-retail-store/

On May 9th Meta will be opening a retail store in Burlingame (presumably near their new Reality Labs campus and SFO airport) that will highlight products such as Meta (Oculus) Quest 2 and Portal. The track record of tech companies that aren't Apple with retail stores has been spotty, and it remains to be seen if this store expands beyond the single planned location, but some of these products (particularly Quest) really need people to actually use them to understand what they can do.

[lake52]

https://about.fb.com/news/2022/04/meta-retail-store/

On May 9th Meta will be opening a retail store in Burlingame (presumably near their new Reality Labs campus and SFO airport) that will highlight products such as Meta (Oculus) Quest 2 and Portal. The track record of tech companies that aren't Apple with retail stores has been spotty, and it remains to be seen if this store expands beyond the single planned location, but some of these products (particularly Quest) really need people to actually use them to understand what they can do.

You are correct that this will be at their new Burlingame campus which is where the Oculus program is based. The campus is pretty isolated, off any main roads but visible from 101. It is relatively open to the public (compared to MPK at least) via Bay Trail access and a coffee shop among other public amenities. I believe this was part of their agreement with the various regulatory agencies to build this project.

The store will attract some tourists or enthusiasts but it isn’t somewhere to grab foot (or vehicle) traffic. I would imagine it’s not quite different from the public Apple store in Cupertino attached to their campus. It will be interesting to see if they expand beyond campuses.

[Brian Lutz]

Up until recently I actually worked in the Reality Labs division of Meta (although I was based in the Seattle office I made occasional trips to the MPK campus before COVID since all the developers I worked with were there) and know they were moving all of those teams to the new Burlingame campus. It's located on the bayfront near SFO, and I'm sure it's a really cool place to go planespotting since it's right off the final approach. One of the main problems with selling VR headsets is that you really need to get people to try them, and although they had set up demo programs at Best Buy and other similar stores those all fell by the wayside with COVID, and I don't think they've found a way to really reestablish them. Granted anything with Facebook/Meta's name on it is going to be a hard sell for a fair number of people and I can't see these ever being all over the place the way Apple stores are, but I could see these being a good way to get their products out as long as they don't go overboard.

What I've noticed about technology companies trying to get into retail is that they tend not to treat it as a retail operation, but more as an engineering exercise. It's why Amazon keeps throwing money at things like Just Walk Out technology, and presumably why Meta is doing this. That said, Microsoft basically did what they always do when they see a successful Apple or Google product and make a mediocre clone of it that ultimately fails, but that was happening long before they ever tried to break into retail.

[HCal]

I'm guessing that the purpose of this project is to gather more data to sell to advertisers, rather than to create a viable retailer.