Amazon to Close Amazon Fresh and Go Stores, Shift to Whole Foods

Amazon said Tuesday it will shut down its Amazon Fresh grocery and cashierless Amazon Go convenience stores, effectively ending its current experiment with Amazon‑branded brick‑and‑mortar food retail while keeping Amazon Fresh as an online brand. Some of the physical locations will be converted into Whole Foods Market stores, underscoring Amazon’s decision to lean on the higher‑end chain it bought in 2017 for $13.7 billion rather than continue building a parallel grocery footprint. In a statement, the company said that although it has seen 'encouraging signals' in its own‑brand grocery stores, it has not yet achieved a 'truly distinctive customer experience' with an economic model that supports large‑scale expansion. Amazon said its overall grocery business—which includes Whole Foods, online grocery and other formats—now generates more than $150 billion in annual gross sales, but the Go cashierless technology will increasingly be deployed in hundreds of third‑party stores in five countries instead of its own U.S. convenience outlets. The move marks a significant pullback by one of the country’s largest retailers from running its own physical grocery and convenience formats, with implications for local jobs, competition with traditional grocers, and the future of checkout‑free tech in U.S. retail.