While Meta is home to Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, the firm also has a hardware division in Quest and Portal.

In a bid to put its hardware in more hands, Meta has announced the opening of a physical store as well as an online store on its website.

The Meta Store will open on 9th May in Burlingame, California and it will feature interactive demos, as well as the physical product shoppers can touch and play with before buying.

Within the store, customers can make calls – in-store of course – to test out Portal or learn how to make use of Ray-Ban Stories.

The location of the store was chosen because it’s close to the headquarters of Reality Labs where Meta is building its Metaverse.

“Having the store here in Burlingame gives us more opportunity to experiment and keep the customer experience core to our development. What we learn here will help define our future retail strategy,” explains head of the Meta Store, Martin Gilliard.

“The Meta Store is going to help people make that connection to how our products can be the gateway to the metaverse in the future. We’re not selling the metaverse in our store, but hopefully people will come in and walk out knowing a little bit more about how our products will help connect them to it,” the store head adds.

We have to point out the irony here in that Meta needs a physical store in order to sell people on the hardware and seemingly the idea of a metaverse. Yes we know that isn’t the express purpose of the store but it made us chuckle.

As for the online store, it’s live right now but Meta only ships to a handful of countries and, you guessed it, South Africa nor any other African countries are on that list.

We guess that this means the metaverse is going to take a while to reach Africa. That’s fine though because we really need to focus on getting the unconnected online before we start selling VR headsets and a billionaire’s advertising solution.