Orland Park’s Village Board gave the green light to a roughly 230,000-square-foot Amazon retail store on Jan. 19, 2026, making the Chicago suburb home to what officials call a first-of-its-kind brick-and-mortar concept for the e-commerce giant. The approval has drawn sharp criticism from local shoppers who worry the massive store will choke traffic on already busy roads and disrupt the character of the area. The project sits at the intersection of Amazon’s growing appetite for physical retail and a community caught off guard by the sheer scale of what is coming.
What Orland Park Just Approved
The one-story retail facility will rise at the corner of 159th Street and LaGrange Road, a high-traffic commercial corridor in Orland Park, Illinois. The Village Board approval at its Jan. 19 meeting confirmed the store at approximately 230,000 square feet will be open to the public and is explicitly not a warehouse or distribution center. That distinction matters because it signals Amazon’s intent to compete directly with big-box retailers on their own turf rather than simply expanding its logistics network, and it positions the site as a daily shopping destination rather than an out-of-sight industrial facility.
The site address is 9600 159th St., and the store will carry general merchandise and groceries, blending categories that typically require separate trips to different stores. For context, 230,000 square feet is larger than a typical Walmart Supercenter footprint, which generally runs between 150,000 and 180,000 square feet, meaning the building will dominate its corner of the intersection both visually and in terms of activity. Placing that kind of retail mass at one of the south suburbs’ busiest crossroads is the core reason residents are pushing back, as they imagine an almost mall-like draw squeezed into a single big-box shell.
Why Shoppers Are Pushing Back Hard
The backlash has been swift and vocal. Social media threads and local comment sections filled with complaints almost immediately after news of the approval spread, with residents sharing photos of existing backups on 159th Street to illustrate their fears. “This will be a mess” became a recurring refrain among shoppers who already deal with congestion along 159th, particularly during weekends and holiday seasons when nearby shopping centers are at their busiest. The concern is straightforward: a store of this size, selling groceries alongside general merchandise, will generate a constant stream of vehicle traffic that existing road infrastructure was never designed to absorb, potentially turning routine errands into gridlock marathons.
Residents are not simply opposed to Amazon itself. Many acknowledge the economic benefits a major retailer can bring and say they already rely on the company’s delivery services. Their frustration centers on the gap between the project’s scale and the lack of publicly available traffic mitigation plans. No primary-source traffic impact study has surfaced in municipal records tied to the approval, and that absence fuels suspicion that the village prioritized the deal over the daily experience of people who live and commute nearby. Without concrete data showing how thousands of additional daily car trips will be managed, through turn lanes, signal timing changes, or access redesign, the promise of jobs and tax revenue rings hollow for those who expect to sit in the resulting backups.
Amazon’s Broader Physical Retail Ambitions
The Orland Park store is not an isolated experiment. Amazon has been steadily expanding its physical retail presence, and its brick-and-mortar operations remain a key part of the overall business even as its technology-focused units drive growth. The grocery category is the clearest battleground. Amazon already operates Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh locations, but a 230,000-square-foot store combining groceries with general merchandise represents a different competitive posture, one aimed squarely at Walmart’s suburban strongholds and designed to capture a household’s full weekly spend under a single roof…