""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," Amazon explained in a post on its website. The move came a day ahead of Amazon's announcement on Wednesday of 16,000 corporate layoffs, including some related to the Go and Fresh closures. That was on top of 14,000 layoffs last year as part of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's campaign to rein in what he sees as creativity-stifling bureaucracy."
"Amazon's Go convenience stores, launched in 2018 and a major priority for founder Jeff Bezos, allow consumers to avoid checkout lines thanks to an array of cameras and sensors that tracked each item a shopper picked from a shelf and automatically charged the customer for it when it left the store. But the dazzling tech was not enough to camouflage how blah the merchandise was."
"These failures had predecessors: In 2015, Amazon launched a small chain of bookstores that it closed a few years later. Other Amazon retail flops: Amazon 4-Star (a kitchen goods, toys and electronics store); electronics kiosks in shopping malls; and a short-lived Amazon clothing store chain called "Style" that it closed in 2023 after only two years."
Amazon is closing its Fresh grocery stores and Go automated grab-and-go shops because the formats did not deliver a distinctive customer experience or the right economics for scaling. The closures preceded a corporate announcement of 16,000 layoffs and follow 14,000 cuts the previous year; some layoffs are connected to the store shutdowns. Amazon will keep and expand its Whole Foods chain. Fresh launched in 2020 and never found a niche. Go used cameras and sensors to eliminate checkouts, but the technology could not overcome uninspiring merchandise. Earlier retail experiments also closed.
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