Amazon News: E-Commerce Giant Opens Second 4-Star Retail Store, Picks Denver Area After NYC

Amazon (AMZN) has spent 2018 dabbling with increased retail operations in different ways and one of them has been to experiment with brick-and-mortar stores.

After opening an Amazon 4-Star retail outlet in New York's trendy SoHo neighborhood in September, the company plans to open a second branch Thursday in the Denver area, according to the Amazon 4-Star website.

The new store will be located at the Park Meadows mall in Lone Tree, Colorado. It will be open seven days a week, with slightly reduced hours on Sundays.

Just like its SoHo counterpart, the new Amazon 4-Star sells products that are popular or trending on the Amazon website. It specializes in items that are rated four stars or higher by Amazon users. Electronics, books and more are available at the store.

Amazon 4-Star is the latest retail experiment from the e-commerce giant. The company also operates six Amazon Go convenience stores, per CNET, the first of which opened to the public in January. Amazon Go are smaller and have an emphasis on food and groceries, with the most visible difference being a complete lack of cashiers.

Customers pay directly through the Amazon mobile app as they browse instead of waiting in lines. Amazon reportedly plans on opening as many as 3,000 of them by 2021. Aside from that, Amazon operates bookstores and rolled out Prime savings to Whole Foods locations throughout this past summer.

Amazon had a rough stretch on the stock market starting last week, due to a lower-than-expected forecast for the holiday season. Shares of Amazon fell for three consecutive days amid an overall decline in the tech sector.

After Denver, there are reported plans for another store in Berkeley, California.