Six years after Amazon opened its first brick-and-mortar grocery store in Woodland Hills, the e-commerce giant announced it’s closing all of its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go locations.
The closures will impact 22 stores in California, including ones in North Hollywood, Los Angeles and Encino. Customers will still be able to order groceries online for same-day delivery in many areas, the company said.
Several of the Fresh and Go locations will be converted into Whole Foods grocery stores. Amazon acquired the health-food company Whole Foods in 2017 for $13.7 billion and plans to open more than 100 new stores over the next few years.
“While we’ve seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven’t yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion,” the company said in an announcement Tuesday. “After a careful evaluation of the business and how we can best serve customers, we’ve made the difficult decision to close our Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores.”
Amazon, the Jeff Bezos-owned online retailer that sells items ranging from electronics to bedsheets, started carrying groceries and household essentials more than two decades ago. According to the company, more than 150 million customers use Amazon to shop for groceries each year.
The company said it will continue to invest in brick-and-mortar concepts that will resonate with customers. In Amazon Go locations, the company developed its Just Walk Out technology that allows customers to pay for their items without a traditional checkout lane.
The technology is now used in more than 360 third-party locations, Amazon said, and drastically reduces wait times.
Amazon is also expanding a new grocery store format dubbed Whole Foods Daily Shop, which will offer a smaller, curated selection of grab-and-go meals as well as coffee and household items. There are currently five Daily Shop locations, including one in Hoboken, N.J. There are more than 550 traditional Whole Foods markets across the U.S.
A total of 57 Amazon Fresh and 15 Amazon Go stores will shut down in February.
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