Amazon’s homegrown grocery stores are getting shelved.
The company said Tuesday morning that it’s closing all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations, a total of 72 stores nationwide, concentrating its efforts instead on its Whole Foods Market locations and grocery delivery from Amazon.com.
The move follows a decade of experimentation and expansion in Amazon-branded grocery and convenience stores. Despite “encouraging signals,” Amazon said it wasn’t able to create “a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion.”
The final day for most Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go locations will be this Sunday, Feb. 1. California stores will stay open 45 more days due to state labor notification requirements.
In a post announcing the news, Amazon cast the move as a strategic shift, not a retreat from grocery, citing the growth of Whole Foods and same-day delivery for perishables.
The company framed its physical grocery investments as a learning experience, saying it has “gathered valuable insights about what matters to customers” throughout the process of operating the Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores.
All 57 Amazon Fresh and 15 remaining Amazon Go stores will close. A limited number of Amazon Fresh stores are expected to eventually reopen as new Whole Foods locations.
Amazon did not disclose the total number of employees impacted. The company is working to place workers in other roles, including in its fulfillment and operations network. It’s offering 90 days of full pay and benefits as part of its severance package.
End of an era
With the closures, Whole Foods will become Amazon’s only physical store brand in the U.S., a decade after it began its push into brick-and-mortar retail with its first bookstore in Seattle. The company has closed the bookstores and other retail concepts in recent years.
Amazon says it will keep operating a hybrid Amazon grocery store alongside Whole Foods in Chicago, and a “store within a store” format at a Whole Foods in Pennsylvania where customers can shop Amazon products alongside groceries.
In addition, Amazon says it’s still experimenting with concepts in physical retail, so it’s possible that new types of Amazon-branded stores could emerge in the future.
The closures impact 11 Seattle-area locations, including the original Go store at Amazon headquarters on 7th Avenue in Seattle, where the company debuted its “Just Walk Out” technology in 2018.
It’s part of a broader reset at Amazon, which is also preparing for another wave of corporate layoffs as soon as this week. CEO Andy Jassy has attributed the cuts to a need to streamline operations and reduce bureaucracy after years of rapid growth.
In an internal memo Tuesday morning, Jason Buechel, the Amazon Worldwide Grocery Stores VP and Whole Foods CEO, told employees who built and ran the Fresh and Go stores that they “pioneered something new” and noted that the Amazon Fresh brand will still live online.
“Although we’re closing these stores, the impact of your work will shape our next generation of store concepts and customer experiences,” he wrote in the memo, obtained by GeekWire.
As part of the changes, Amazon is moving its online grocery fulfillment, logistics and related operations to SVP Udit Madan‘s Worldwide Operations organization.
What’s working for Amazon in grocery
Amazon launched its Fresh grocery delivery service in Seattle in 2007, starting a long push into one of retail’s largest and most difficult categories. Grocery margins are thin and competition is fierce, but the prize is massive: Americans spend more than $1 trillion a year on groceries, and winning those purchases means winning a customer’s weekly routine.
The company reiterated today that it is now one of the top three grocers in the U.S., with more than $150 billion in gross sales and 150 million customers shopping for groceries each year.
Amazon says Whole Foods sales have increased by more than 40% since it acquired the chain in 2017, now operating in more than 550 locations. The company says it will open more than 100 additional stores over the next several years, and expand its smaller Whole Foods Daily Shop format from five to 10 locations by the end of 2026.
The company recently won approval to build a 230,000-square-foot “supercenter” in Orland Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, combining groceries with general merchandise. That store, Amazon’s largest physical retail venture yet, is expected to open in 2027.
In the meantime, Amazon is expanding its Same-Day Delivery service for fresh groceries, now available in 2,300 U.S. cities and towns. The company says perishable grocery sales through the service have grown 40-fold since January 2025, and that fresh items now make up nine of the top 10 most-ordered products where the service is available.
The “Just Walk Out” technology originally developed for Amazon Go convenience stores, which uses overhead cameras and sensors to avoid traditional checkout, will live on as a licensing business.
Amazon says the technology now operates in more than 360 third-party locations across five countries, including hospitals and sports arenas, and in more than 40 of its own fulfillment center breakrooms.
Signs of the shift
Investors who follow Amazon’s business closely may not be surprised by the news. On the company’s October earnings call, Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney asked Jassy directly whether Amazon still needed Fresh stores given the traction in online grocery delivery.
Jassy’s answer was telling, especially in hindsight. “We continue to experiment with various formats,” he said, without answering the question about the need for the Fresh stores directly.
The CEO made it clear that the format Amazon was most excited about was same-day delivery of perishable groceries. Since August, Amazon has expanded same-day delivery of groceries from 1,000 cities to 2,300, integrating items like milk and produce into the same shopping cart as electronics and household goods.
“We’re on to something very significant with what we’re doing with perishables from our same-day facilities,” Jassy said on the October call.
At the same time, the consolidation around Whole Foods has been building. A year ago this week, Amazon expanded Buechel’s role beyond Whole Foods to oversee its entire worldwide grocery business, including Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh — a move that, in retrospect, may have signaled where the company was headed.
https://ift.tt/NaKnDR1 January 27, 2026 at 03:01PM GeekWire
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