Amazon Closing Grocery Stores, Converting Others To Whole Foods
Amazon is walking away from its branded grocery and convenience stores as the e-commerce behemoth focuses on speedy delivery over brick-and-mortar locations.
Some of the Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations will be converted to Whole Foods, the grocery brand Amazon acquired in 2017 for $14B that’s not part of the strategic pivot. Amazon made the announcement in a corporate blog post Tuesday, saying it would focus on accelerating its grocery delivery services including an ultra-fast option of 30 minutes or less.
“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 post says.
An Amazon spokesperson declined to provide a timeline for the closures or details about how many locations would be converted. There are 57 Amazon Fresh locations and 15 Amazon Go stores, according to Geek Wire.
Amazon is still pushing deep into physical grocery stores, and it said Tuesday it now plans to open more than 100 new Whole Foods stores over the next few years. Those openings include Whole Foods Market Daily Shop, the brand's small-store format that’s currently in five locations.
Amazon Fresh, the company’s full-scale grocery brand separate from Whole Foods, launched in 2020 and had grown to 44 locations by 2023 when the corporate giant announced it would pause plans to expand the brand. The pause lasted roughly a year.
Amazon Go made waves when it launched in 2017 as a cashier-less concept, with cameras equipped with smart vision instead tracking what shoppers pulled off shelves to automatically charge their accounts. In April 2024, a report from The Information revealed that 1,000 workers in India were actually reviewing customer orders.
Amazon closed roughly half of its Amazon Go locations between 2023 and 2025 and said it was turning its focus to licensing the “Just Walk Out” technology to other retailers. In its post on Tuesday, Amazon said it had deals to use the checkout-free solution at over 360 third-party locations in five countries.
Amazon also launched a same-day grocery delivery service called Amazon Fresh in August that has quickly grown from 1,000 cities to more than 5,000 locations today.
Management has homed in on ultra-fast delivery as its next frontier to maintain market share. Amazon rolled out a 30-minute delivery pilot program in Seattle and Philadelphia in December that leverages smaller warehouses stocked with items from its everyday essentials category.
That category was growing nearly twice as fast as the rest of the business, CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.
Even without Whole Foods, the e-commerce giant sold more than $100B worth of groceries in the 12 months ending in October, making it one of the country’s largest grocers, Jassy said.
