Meta looking into launching its own retail stores in the US

Facebook’s parent company Meta is looking into opening its own retail stores in the United States, according to a report.

The stores will largely be used to show off the business’ physical goods, such as its virtual reality headsets and video chat tablets which are already sold in other chains across the country, and allow customers to try them out in a bid to get them hooked into Meta’s forthcoming ‘metaverse’.

“Today we are seen as a social media company, but in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people, and the metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said when announcing Facebook’s name change.

The first Meta flagship store is likely slated for Burlingame, California. The store was likely going to be called the ‘Facebook Store’, though it remains to be seen if this will still be the case after the business’ rebrand last week.

Meta is late to the party on launching its own physical stores, with fellow tech giants Amazon and Google both having launched their own stores in the last few years.

However, with its roughly 2.9 billion monthly active Facebook users globally as of the third quarter of 2021 (according to Statista), the business has a large pool of potential consumers to market itself toward.