The real answer is: Retail is hard and stores are a lot harder than they look.

Physical stores require a different muscle: real estate judgment, local merchandising, labor scheduling, shrink control, in-store execution, daily operational discipline and more. Being great at building products—or even being great at e-commerce—doesn’t automatically translate to running stores that make money. Stores are complicated, messy and risky.

Why Amazon Keeps Coming Back For More

So you’d think Amazon would take the hint and move on.

But no. It’s going in the opposite direction with a new concept that is bigger, broader and more ambitious. The next proposed Amazon store is in a Chicago suburb and has 230,000 square feet, roughly 30% bigger than the average Walmart Supercenter. It will sell groceries, prepared food, and general merchandise; about half the space will be taken up by a fulfillment center.

Whatever you call it, it’s a move into Walmart-Costco’s territory. For a company that has consistently closed all the retail concepts it has tried, it’s pretty surprising.

It’s not just audacity, it’s a different relationship with risk.

In most companies, recycled ideas die at the first presentation. At Amazon, past failure doesn’t end the conversation, it guides the next iteration. They have a goal and they are staying on the problem no matter the history.

A CEO once told me, “if my people aren’t wrong 20% of the time, I tell them they’re not taking enough risk.”

Amazon believes that its willingness to fail is a competitive advantage and its dominance in e-commerce proves the point. The store closures look like a defeat and they are. But they’re also how Amazon learns.

If Amazon keeps failing at stores, they will have lost a ton of money. But if it ever succeeds, it will prove that resilience matters more in the long run than anything else.

Both Amazon and Walmart run experiments that cost a lot and don’t work. Their difference is that iterate-and-do-it-again state of mind.

It’s not a coincidence that Walmart and Amazon, with all their failed experiments, are the #1 and #2 retailers in the country. Their willingness to absorb failure and keep at it is a huge advantage.

It’s a very different model from a traditional playbook business which says “do what you know.” Their thinking is that a win-loss record is not destiny.

Will Amazon ever crack the retail store the way its e-commerce has scaled? No one can say but if any company can turn repeated mistakes into a workable model, this is it.