Facebook parent company Meta is diving into the brick-and-mortar retail realm with its own hardware storefront coming next month. The company has set its sights on May 9 as the official Meta store opening, which will be located on its Burlingame, California campus.
The storefront will act not only as an opportunity for consumers to buy Meta products but will also allow them to test out certain virtual reality tech items. Such products include Meta's videophones, called Portal, the company's line of VR headsets, the Quest and Quest 2, and its smart glasses collaboration with Ray-Ban called Ray-Ban Stories. The latter won't be made available for purchase in-store, but those interested will be assisted in purchasing online at Meta's forthcoming retail shop.
Each Meta product will have its demo area for consumers to test to their liking with the help of an accompanying Meta store professional. Quest 2 VR headsets will have downloaded games for people to try, such as Real VR Fishing, GOLF+, Supernatural, and the highly beloved Beat Saber. Those who opt-in to a beta run of the Quest 2 can even take home a 30-second mixed reality clip of their time within the headset.
Meta store entrants will also find a demo section for the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses so interested buyers can try out various styles to their liking and likewise test out its different features, like video-taking and sharing. Consumers will also be able to test out the Portal video phone concept by video calling with a store associate at a specified Portal demo area.
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The move comes not four years following Amazon's first push into physical retail store conceptualization, which now sees a total of 30 across the US, and just as Google itself gears up to continue its own efforts in the field. Google opened its first retail shop in May of last year following many various pop-up efforts, with the main drive being to promote Nest, Fitbit, and Pixel products.
Although this would be a complete first for Meta, the company has seen itself within such stores as Best Buy, witnessed in a partnership made to showcase and demo the company's VR headsets, as well as the obvious Ray-Ban Stories being available in Ray-Ban stores. But the main driver on the surface of it all is Meta's still bullish push in advocating the adoption of VR, AR, and XR capabilities for widespread metaverse considerations.
Meta's storefront, however, won't be a massive Apple store-like attraction. The company relayed that it will be a 1,550-square-foot store located around Meta's Reality Labs HQ and will hold its open hours from 11 AM to 6 PM Monday to Friday. Its location will aid the company in its efforts to broaden physical brick-and-mortar retail chains across the US, as Martin Gilliard, Meta's storefront lead, explains in a statement. Of main importance to Gilliard is the "opportunity to experiment and keep the customer experience core to our development."
While a physical store may seem to go against Meta's whole new digitized persona, a New York Times article dated November 5, 2021, proves that the company's efforts are mainly in anticipation of what it sees as the future. As of yet, there are no real plans for a product debut that Meta can showcase at the store in the next several months, which begs the question, why now? The Meta store will merely act as a gateway for those potentially interested in said efforts, building out a more stable understanding for consumers on how the metaverse will function and how Meta itself will vie to be at the forefront of this effort through intelligent hardware.
