Amazon is abandoning its homegrown physical grocery stores, known as Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh, a humbling end to an effort that began almost ten years ago as the online giant sought to expand its retail dominance into the brick-and-mortar world.
The company will shutter all 15 of its remaining stores Go Stores and 57 remaining Fresh Stores in the coming weeks,
GeekWire reported Tuesday. Some of the locations will eventually reopen as Whole Foods stores, the grocery store chain that Amazon acquired in 2017 and which it said will become the focus of its brick-and-mortar retail efforts going forward (It will also continue to offer online grocery shopping via its Fresh delivery service).
Amazon launched its Go stores with the ambitious goal of reinventing how people shop: The stores were designed for customers to grab items off the shelf and then "just walk out," with an array of sensors, cameras, and other behind-the-scenes technology automatically charging the customer's account. The concept never quite cottoned with consumers though and the stores were more of a curiosity than a mass market phenomenon.
Amazon now licenses its "just walk out" technology to other businesses like sports stadiums, where the ability to grab a hot dog without missing any action on the field is a big plus. When it comes to traditional retail shopping however, Amazon seems to be acknowledging that disruption is not always the winning strategy.
—AO 