Amazon’s Fresh Dream Expires

It’s a good thing Jeff Bezos started Amazon as an internet-based retailer. He might never have made it as a traditional shopkeeper! Amazon on Tuesday said it would shutter its chain of Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go grocery stores, closing a chapter in its fitful efforts to expand in physical stores. Amazon still owns the Whole Foods chain it bought in 2017, which the company says it will be expanding. But for now, it seems Amazon is focusing most of its grocery ambitions online, such as its new fast-delivery service, Amazon Now. (As a side note, can you imagine being on the team at Amazon tasked with coming up with new brand names? Amazon Go, Fresh, Now, Prime, and so on and so on!)

It would be churlish to criticize Amazon for the various twists and turns of its Amazon Fresh adventures. After all, one of the company’s great strengths is its willingness to make mistakes and not get bogged down in recriminations later. But just keeping straight the current strategy for Amazon groceries is a full-time job. Conceived before the pandemic, Fresh was initially meant to create a network of stores that could both help with delivery of online grocery orders and offer lower prices than Whole Foods for shoppers. Some Fresh stores also initially used new technology—Amazon’s vaunted “Just Walk Out” tech—that could eliminate checkout lines.