Amazon is getting out of the business of running its own grocery stores. In a company announcement on January 27, the retailer said it would close all of its Amazon Fresh supermarkets and Amazon Go convenience stores — about 72 locations across the country — and pour its energy instead into grocery delivery and its Whole Foods Market chain. “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.
The closures cover 58 Amazon Fresh stores and 14 Amazon Go shops in states including Washington, California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Virginia. Most shut their doors on Sunday, February 1. Stores in California stayed open an extra 45 days to satisfy state labor-notice rules.
It is a quiet end to a noisy experiment. Amazon opened its first Fresh supermarket outside Los Angeles in 2020 and launched the cashier-free Go format in Seattle back in 2018. The Go stores were the showcase for the company’s “Just Walk Out” technology, which uses cameras and sensors to track what shoppers grab so they can leave without stopping at a register. The stores never reached the scale Amazon wanted, and the company will now sell that checkout technology to outside customers instead, such as stadium concession stands.
For the workers, Amazon said it would try to move staff into nearby jobs in its warehouses and delivery network. Employees who do not take a new role are being offered a severance package that includes 90 days of full pay and benefits. The company did not say how many people are affected.
The decision is less a retreat from groceries than a bet on a different way of selling them. Amazon is already the second-largest grocer in the United States, with more than $150 billion in gross grocery sales and over 150 million customers buying food from it each year. Most of that runs through delivery, not store aisles. The company says its same-day delivery of fresh food now reaches more than 2,300 U.S. cities and towns, and that sales of perishable items through the service have grown fortyfold since the start of 2025.
The other half of the plan is Whole Foods, the upscale chain Amazon bought for $13.7 billion in 2017. Amazon says Whole Foods sales are up more than 40% since that deal, with more than 550 stores now open. The company plans to add over 100 more locations in the coming years and to convert some of the shuttered Fresh and Go sites into Whole Foods stores.
Amazon is also leaning on a smaller store idea called Whole Foods Market Daily Shop — a compact, grab-and-go format between 7,000 and 14,000 square feet, roughly a quarter to half the size of a regular Whole Foods. Five are already open in New York, New Jersey and Virginia, and Amazon plans to double that to ten by the end of the year. At the other extreme, the company won approval to build a 230,000-square-foot “supercenter” in Orland Park, Illinois, near Chicago, combining groceries with general merchandise. Slated to open in 2027, it would be Amazon’s biggest physical store yet.
The shift says a lot about where grocery shopping is heading. After years of trying to crack the supermarket business with its own brand, Amazon decided the math did not work — running physical stores is expensive, margins are thin, and shoppers already had plenty of choices. Delivery and a trusted store name turned out to be the stronger hand.
For rival grocers, an Amazon that competes through Whole Foods and delivery rather than hundreds of Amazon-branded stores is a different kind of threat — one built on speed and a premium brand rather than price. For the towns losing a Fresh or Go store, it means an empty storefront and a hunt for new jobs. And for shoppers, it is one more sign that the future of buying groceries is shifting from the checkout line to the front door.
JBizNews Desk
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