Amazon is closing its physical Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores

RIP, Amazon convenience stores: gone and astir apt soon forgotten.

Amazon announced connected Tuesday that it volition adjacent its brick-and-mortar Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores and volition alternatively grow its capableness for same-day market delivery, arsenic good arsenic its Whole Foods Market footprint.

These stores were utilized to turn Amazon’s cashierless Just Walk Out technology, which tracks what items customers grab, allowing them to wage for their groceries without a much ceremonial checkout process. The institution is alternatively focusing connected offering that exertion to 3rd parties, similar concession stands astatine sports stadiums.

“While we’ve seen encouraging signals successful our Amazon-branded carnal market stores, we haven’t yet created a genuinely distinctive lawsuit acquisition with the close economical exemplary needed for large-scale expansion,” the institution wrote successful a blog post.

These retail closures volition not interaction customers who usage Amazon for market delivery.

It’s not astonishing that Amazon volition divest from its branded retail stores, fixed that Amazon has been cutting down connected its carnal retail beingness implicit the past fewer years. Upon closing down immoderate stores successful 2024, an Amazon spokesperson said that the institution “couldn’t marque the economics enactment with the lease cost.”

Amazon isn’t giving up connected the brick-and-mortar broadside of its business, though. Instead, it volition clasp the information that radical person a stronger marque affinity with Whole Foods Market than the Amazon Go convenience store.

Amazon volition unfastened much than 100 caller Whole Foods stores implicit the adjacent fewer years. The institution says Whole Foods has seen implicit 40% income maturation and enlargement to 550 stores since it was acquired by Amazon successful 2017.

Amazon besides plans to unfastened much Whole Foods Market Daily Shop locations — a smaller mentation of the market store with an accent connected convenience and grab-and-go meals. These look akin to the thought down Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores, but radical astir apt consciousness amended astir grabbing a crockery from Whole Foods than the Amazon Fresh store… adjacent though they’re the aforesaid company.