Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
(finance.yahoo.com)312 points by trenning 5 days ago
312 points by trenning 5 days ago
I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores. There were instances of their prices being lower than Walmart or other budget stores. The avocados were $0.25 each and carrots were half price of ones in Safeway, even ground beef was weirdly cheap. One time as a comparison I put the same items in my cart for Amazon fresh and Walmart and it was $21 at Amazon fresh and $36 at Walmart. WAY cheaper than Instacart too.
> operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores
Wouldn't surprise me. I know a guy who invented a device for truckers that became ubiquitous in truck stops across the US. This would've been like 2014.
He refused to sell on Amazon, so Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price, until he agreed to list (at which point they dropped their competing product)
It has been their practice since forever. Look up the diapers.com case.
I'm not aware of any Amazon product lines or organizations that specializes in devices for truckers. Can you provide a listing?
> I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition
iirc that's exactly what Amazon did to destroy diapers.com over a decade ago
Amazon did not destroy diapers.com.
Diapers.com aka Quidsi was already operating at a loss when it was acquired by Amazon. It's whole business model was using VC-funding to offer products below sustainable costs with the goal of eventually jacking up prices once they drove out smaller/local competitors. Amazon used its own business model against it by dropping prices even lower, knowing that the VC investors couldn't afford it.
Walmart passed on buying Quidsi when Walmart was thinking about launching its own e-commerce platform because the business model was unsustainable. Walmart decided they would rather spend several hundred millions building out their own platform then to buy an existing website with millions of customers.
This is basically the playbook of every "disruptive technology" startup or FAANG initiative of a similar stripe - set prices incredibly low to bleed out competition and gain market share, then raise them once you are in the dominant market position.
At a certain point it's not about technology anymore, but access to cheap finance. See also: Uber.
Nobody on this forum believes in startups or technology anymore.
And then they can’t figure out why the economics don’t work.
Phase 1: bankrupt the competition
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: profit!
That's literally their MO. They've been doing that forever.
Walmart isn't a budget grocery store, though. Its prices are higher than actual grocery stores (like Safeway.) Also, everyone is WAY cheaper than Instacart.
>Walmart isn't a budget grocery store,
The answer to this is complex, it has any number of products that are cheaper than products of similar quality from any other store. Places like Safeway/Aldi typically beat on price on very generic items that may or may not have similar quality.
The biggest thing to watch for at Walmart is price discrimination dependent on location. Back in the days I used to shop with them (read made less money) picking a store in a poorer neighborhood could save $10 to $30 dollars on the same car of items.
Not in the areas of California I frequent. Walmart is usually the cheapest around here; heck, even Target beats Safeway on some items. On the other hand, Walmart is also usually the worst at stock rotation.
Walmart is certainly the cheapest in some rather remote cities, like Fargo, ND.
Wegmans opened a store at the Brooklyn Navy Yard just to show people in NYC what a real supermarket looks like. I mean, you might be impressed with Whole Foods if all you know are those bodegas that have around NYC but if you've been to a real supermarket Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and such are not impressive at all.
This comment completely misunderstands why NYC (and the core of most major cities) is not impressed by a supermarket.
Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
You get the highest quality products from people who specialize in those products.
Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days.
Thats why Wegmans opened a store in Brooklyn Navy Yards in an area that’s close to no mass transit, because supermarkets are valuable in car centric areas and not as useful in walkable dense neighborhood.
> the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days.
Yeah, so for me that changed after having kids. Once I had to spend 30 minutes a day running around to various stores because we were always running out of everything it wasn't fun anymore.
Furthermore, specialist stores charge higher prices for the same goods because they don't have the pricing power of a large supermarket. It makes a material difference once you have a family.
Urban supermarkets are great because they give you the option of getting everything in one place when you're pressed for time, and they're usually not as large as suburban ones. Mine has a direct entrance from the subway station, so I don't even have to go aboveground.
One of the things I hated most about living in NYC was grocery shopping.
Having to walk meant you could only practically buy in small quantities, and visiting different places for different things was super annoying and inefficient.
Moving out and being able to take my car to the georcery store once a week and get everything I needed was one of the best quality of life upgrades from leaving.
While that is true for the quality-based things like deli/baker, there is one advantage to massive grocery stores that the stores inside the city can't compete with: selection. Every time I leave the city, I make a point to go to a suburban grocery store and walk down their massive spacious aisles to find new/different products that simply aren't stocked inside the city because shelf space is so limited. Entire aisles dedicated to chips!
> Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk,
Once you get used to have everything at a walking distance, you wonder how you could put up with having to drive to a supermarket.
Two are the main advantages.
The first is that you don't need to plan much in advance. Want to make hamburger tonight ? Cross the street, get meat from the butcher, get a couple of tomatoes and salad from the grocery store and the bread, and you are ready to go. I used to shop once a week and I had to have an idea of what I wanted to cook every day for the whole week.
The second is that this way you regularly eat really fresh food. My shopping list is always stuff like "two tomatoes", "three apples", "fish for tonight", "a loaf of bread". My fridge is mostly empty.
> all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
Is that really a thing though? I feel like arguing for quality is a strong argument, but between walking between small shops at the end of my work day and just doing one supermarket feels more efficient.
Finding stuff within a supermarket is also not hard once you've been once or twice.
That really, really depends what neighborhood you live in. Bakeries and especially butchers don't exist everywhere, and sometimes they (bakeries) suck. It's not Paris or Rome. And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn). Some neighborhoods are both densely populated and a desert for quality, leaving only bodegas and overpriced artisanal boutiques.
I'm with the original poster here about Wegmans. In London you have Waitrose, which is 10,000 times better than Trader Joe's/Whole Foods and has fresh bread, alcohol, a butcher, etc etc and way more all in one place.
NYC is gar-bage when it comes to groceries.
If you spend a few minutes in the suburbs, even a rural exoburb outside of NYC, you'll drive to the supermarket and take a deep calming breath. You're not supposed to say driving could ever be better than a walkable city, but if time is precious to you and you value not hauling bags back and forth across multiple stores, you'll be way way happier.
> Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
Except that you don't. Typically, you have maybe one small store selling random junk reasonably close to you. At high prices, because there's no local competition.
There's a reason the current NYC mayor campaigned on opening government-run stores.
It’s normal in London to live a few min walk to bakery, grocery, deli, so on but we still have supermarkets - from smaller ones to large hypermarkets. Everyone uses them and they sell good quality products.
The same is true in every European city I’ve been to. There’s a large hypermarket a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe and you can hardly say Parisians don’t have a good choice of local bakeries, cheesemongers and butchers.
It’s true you won’t usually get something like a Target or Costco in the central area, but in the slightly further out suburbs (e.g. Z2 in London) where most people actually live, Europe is full of supermarkets.
Sure, Europe is different than the US in many ways. I think most people know that.
What is more surprising to me is that Europe has become relatively homogenous. There are more differences between some US states than there are between some European countries, if we set aside language. A mid size French city vs an equivalent German/British/Swiss/Italian city… they differ of course but Tampa vs Seattle is a bigger contrast to me.
That's the dream, but isn't currently an option for most people in the USA. And it's usually only availabil in very expensive to live areas.
I don't know the Wegman's in NY at all, but the one I used to use in the Boston area was ... okay?
It was a good grocery store with decent produce, a good frozen section, some nice specialty items, and some decent prepared meals. I would put it at roughly the early-2010s era of Whole Foods with slightly better prices. Now that I'm no longer working near there, I don't miss it much.
So I've never understood the hype. But I've also been told that the Boston stores were pretty mediocre compared to the ones in NY and especially Ithaca.
If you live in MA the standard options are Star Market and Stop and Shop, right? New England supermarket chains are already perfect.
I think the comment you are replying to is playing up a specific characteristic of, like, deep-in-the-city NYC (it looks like Wegmans has a place in downtown Manhattan?). I also read it as slightly tongue-in-cheek. People in NYC know what grocery stores look like, I think. They just don’t fit in dense areas.
FWIW, I’m not confused about the two; I’m quite familiar with the NYC metro region.
I haven’t heard any Wegman’s fans comment on their NYC stores. I’ve heard multiple people wax poetic about Wegmans who frequented the Princeton-area store and the Ithaca store.
From my experience, I don’t get it, but I haven’t spent substantial time in either of those stores.
I like that store but it's not exactly convenient. I'm a New Yorker - my apartment is small and I've never had a driver's license in my life. I need to buy small amounts of food frequently rather than load up, so going to a place that has kind of middling versions of everything isn't super useful compared to places that have smaller selections of good things. I spend a lot of time at Trader Joe's for example, though I buy bread from a bakery, tea from a tea shop, meat and cheese from a specialty shop, etc.
What's so special about Wegmans? I have one a mile away but I almost never go there. It's a little pricey and they don't have anything particularly special. Although I pretty much never go to Whole Foods either. Amazon Fresh isn't (wasn't) near me so I only went to one once, also nothing special.
They were great 15 years ago. Now they're running on a fading rep. Notably, the prepared foods were affordable and outclassed typical supermarket fare.
Wegmans is good, but I find Whole Foods to have much better quality of products. Whole Foods used to be even better, we will see how Amazon manages it.
I'm in Wegmans' home town, and the enshittification process has hit them hard in recent years.
Interestingly, we only went to our local Amazon Fresh store a handful of times but it was always a perfectly fine experience. It seemed reasonably clean, well-stocked, and well-organized. Other than those new self-checkout shopping carts (which also actually worked well, even weighing produce), it was fairly indistinguishable from other grocery stores in our area.
Amazon Go, on the other hand, always seemed like a dead man walking. It's a fun novelty to check out and grab some junk food, but it must be far more expensive to build and run than a 7-Eleven, and it's not even meaningfully more convenient.
I should also add that we've been pretty happy Amazon Fresh delivery customers for a couple of years now (we resisted regular grocery delivery for a long time...until we had a child).
You should also know that the AI that enabled the Amazon Go experience was the Actually Indians type of AI. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...
> those new self-checkout shopping carts
I'm going to miss those. Two nice things about them compared to a normal self-checkout: 1) you see things ring up as you shop instead of at the end, which is nice in case of errors or unexpected prices, 2) you can shop directly into a reusable bag or backpack instead of repacking everything at the end.
They had Amazon Go by Grand Central Terminal and it was great to grab a snack and drink on the way to the train, with no worry about being delayed by the checkout line. I figured they had people in India verifying things but saw no reason to care as a customer.
Spot on assessment of an Amazon Fresh store. Their big gimmick is a cart where you can scan your groceries as you put them in it, then you just walk through a designated check out lane and it charges your card automatically for whats inside. I've tried it a few times and I can't say its preferrable for any type of shopping trip. Only picking up a few things? You're faster with a basket and self checkout. A big weekly food order for a family of four? All of your groceries won't fit in their special cart because it needs room for the scale and the scanners.
The prices are indeed pretty insane and the produce is always great, but the stores are ghost towns most of the time. The only people inside are those using it as a spot to drop off Amazon.com returns and those fulfilling pick-up orders
They could never get that cart right. I tried using that cart again last week and it was still glitchy and it seems like you waste more time screwing around with the cart. I found it quicker to just use the normal check out since nobody shops there anyway. At my local store, you could go there on a Saturday afternoon and find only one cashier with no line. The Trader Joe’s nearby would be absolutely jammed.
> You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders
To be fair I've noticed this in multiple supermarket chains the last few years. Although they aren't usually employees, they are instacart runners or whatever.
I go fairly often to a Sprouts grocery store and there are times I need to avoid multiple people clearly doing an Instacart run with 2+ carts full of items.
Shelves are often emptier than they used to be also at these times.
The delivery shoppers are especially bad at whole foods. There really must be a critical mass where having a grocery warehouse makes more sense than these people meandering around.
There is actually. I used to work in grocery e-commerce. The model is pickers in a store --> a "dark store" that looks more like a home Depot with only pickers, not open to public --> warehouse like environment with various levels of automation.
This was a bit before the model of having Uber driver type delivery though. I am guessing that having the deliverers be close to the deliverees make it more economical to keep them in stores until a larger scale is reached. The dark store+ model was also predicated on a more factory floor like environment with only FTEs present. Think pallets moving about among the pickers- not too hard to work around IMHO but maybe the lawyers and insurers feel differently.
I still feel the overreaching factor is that in dense urban centers there is no cheap commercial/industrial space that is also in close proximity to customers.
I can see how minimizing drive times is cheaper in aggregate but there is just so much commercial space here in Atlanta..
I suppose you pay for the retail stores either way so the threshold to justify a "dark store" is pretty high unless it can double up as the regional grocery warehouse or something.
>$0.85 for a box of Barilla pasta
That's cool. Which one? The cheapest one in Russia costs about $1.20 [0]
> a photo of their QR code and reuse it over and over again
Don't you think it's a wrong thing to do?
[0] https://5ka.ru/product/makarony-barilla-dzhirandole-n-34-450...
lol are you me? There was also a loophole with the coupons where it only used the total before discounts to validate the limit was met, so you could buy something that was $10 or 2 for $15, but the 2 would count as $20 towards your $40 limit.
I moved away from Seattle a while back so I'm not sure if they ever closed that one. I really miss getting all those cheap groceries!
I live right down the street from an Amazon Go store, and I like it because it's convenient when it's open, but the hours on this store stunk: it closed at 4pm sometimes. I found it very funny that this store advertised itself as a fully automated experience, when in fact there needs to be a worker/manager there all the time for it to be open. If it were actually automated, it could've been open 24/7
Meanwhile in East Asia they have no problem with tons of 24/7/365 stores, even fully vending machine stores. Heck even Europe has vending machine stores that are constantly open without even a door that could be closed, selling grocery basics.
America had 24/7 grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants, and even some Walmarts before COVID. Now, at least in my area, thats a thing of the past. Still not as bad as Switzerland where everything closes early on Saturday and is closed on sundays.
China has had 24/7 McDonald’s since forever, well, and lord of other things as well. But not grocery stores at least.
I don't know if anyone from Switzerland explained why this is to you, or if you are interested.
Swiss business hours limits are for worker protection. You are lucky to hang out on HN and work whenever you want. You neighbor who keeps your groceries on the shelf for you is happy to be home with his or her children in the evening instead of in the store.
Having a high trust society also includes treating all people with respect, so that they will be willing to trust you. Even the hourly workers who keep the world turning for the rest of us.
I lived in Switzerland a couple of years so I know how it goes. I thoroughly enjoyed by Sundays, even if I couldn't do my laundry, and had a nice routine setup where I would go do some coding work in Lausanne's museum cafe that was open from 11 to 4, with some croissants and drinks bought from the local Coop Pronto. Then after a run along the lake, maybe buy an economist at the train station and have a meal at McDonalds next to the train station (train stations of course had an exemption and the businesses around it could be open).
The lack of options creates new options, I guess.
That being said, after leaving Switzerland I was in China for 9 years where I could barely tell it was Sunday at all.
The stores where I'm at in the US stopped being 24/7 long before COVID due to (AFAIK) changes in crime rates. I wish they would do some sort of members program where you could register to gain access after hours. I think they've got more than enough video surveillance to handle any abuse that might arise.
My experience is mostly in the Bay Area, but people are extremely excited here to destroy anything that can be tied to a big corporation. Smashing the dumb E-scooters, beating up Waymos or just bricking a banks windows were just like regular events here. The culture definitely idealized and encouraged it.
Not just big tech. Destroying anything public has been common for a long, long time. Stealing from vending machines, destroying public bathrooms, throwing out random trash on the sidewalk/road, etc.
These bastards drove out some nice stores near me (supposedly the lease ended and did not renew) and rebuilt the buildings in order to open an Amazon Fresh location. That Amazon Fresh store never opened. Now we have a giant empty storefront nobody uses.
Same here. A local grocery store and several other local businesses got bought out and demolished so Amazon could build a new Fresh store.
I guess Amazon pulled out of the project halfway through, since for the last ~2 years there's been a half-finished building just sitting there completely abandoned in our town center.
Reminds me of the time they made towns all around the US do a dog and pony show to attract "HQ2" and then just located it where Bezos wanted to be all along. I remember AOC getting it right all along, she did the most milktoast of pushback in her district and it caused Amazon to huff and puff and just walk away(causing many property speculators to lose out). She got raked over the coals but a few years later and the place HQ2 ended up didn't fare so well. AOC was vindicated.
My hope is that more towns learn from your experience and don't tolerate this nonsense anymore.
HQ2 ended up in Crystal City, Virginia, which is a commercial district of Arlington County, and it’s fine. The pandemic-driven remote work trend led Amazon to scale back the number of buildings.
The state and localities did a good job structuring incentives so everything was tied to milestones, some of which Amazon ended up not hitting. My recollection is that NY was offering to give a lot more away, which helped fuel the backlash, but don’t quote me on that.
It also helped in VA that Crystal City has been a commercial wasteland for many years thanks to DoD decentralization. A lot of offices moved down to Fort Belvoir and surrounding areas, leaving Crystal City with a lot of vacant office space. Nothing was being “lost” by Amazon coming in.
Local real estate agents put “HQ2” in their listings for a few years but it didn’t matter much because homes near Crystal City were already super expensive.
I often make spelling and grammatical errors due to my declining typing ability. At least at this time that can help prove that I am not a bot for the time being (I think?)
John Oliver analyzed state's tax rebates, 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bl19RoR7lc , he concluded that giving 1000 people Ferraris to drive around a pile of $30 million cash on fire would be more fiscally responsible...
I found it pretty funny when Mayor Mamdani of NYC pointed out that the people opposing him spent more money trying to stop him being elected than they would end up paying in increased taxes. It really is a game to those people. They can't bear to give up one cent or one ounce of control.
Another funny story was that some substack writer (whom I forget sorry) noticed that Bill Ackman subscribed to their substack and used a 30% off coupon ha ha.
Wait, how does a store that never opened drive out an existing store? That’s not how commercial leases work…
Given that a supermarket abandoned that location, and Amazon never opened on their either, perhaps that location or the lease price simply doesn’t work for a grocery store?
And then the new lessee just doesn’t finish the new building so it’s no longer possible to build on the land without tearing down or finishing the project at great cost to any new lessee. Which would be waste but you’d have to take Amazon or whatever shell company they used to court.
sounds like you have an opportunity to open a grocery store?
I always found the "Amazon 4-Star" name funny. Presumably when it was first pitched internally it was called "Amazon 5-Star", then they realised that meant they basically couldn't sell anything, since nothing popular gets a full 5 stars. So they changed it to "4-Star", which just sounds awkward, and lacks the suggestion of top-quality that "5-Star" would. Instead, it's like the "Amazon Not-too-bad" store. I was amazed that they actually went ahead with it.
When did naming things have to reflect reality? ie it's "Burger King" and not "Bearable Burger"
Wait that explains so much! Do you know more about the change?
I've been weirded out by the fact that their jr burger buns are now super shiny as if they are spraying something on them. I know this is processed food, but no burger bun should be able to reflect sunlight the way their burgers now do...
I can't tell if it was franchise specific, but we have a Burger King near us in Clear Lake/Houston that is absolutely amazing. Fries are always crispy and well seasoned, the patties actually have grill marks and taste like they've been charred. The location hasn't been updated since before I moved away in 2015, and has been consistently good since 2010 or so when I first moved near it.
That said, every other Burger King around me, and near my house in Louisiana, and near all of the places I lived including NJ, NY, CT, VT have been awful. I never ate there BEFORE this 2013 change though, so I cannot comment on the quality in the before times. But my local, is amazing. Tastes like I remember it from the 90s.
The burgers are fine at the one accross the road from my job but the Burger King here has to most bland frys I dont think they salt them at all they are crispy but lack taste.
My fiancee used to work at a place called "Decent Pizza". Their motto "Not the best but not the worst."
Sounds like something straight out of A Prairie Home Companion.
Shoulda just bit the bullet and gone with "4.8-star." I'm sure they talked about it and yeah it's goofy and awkward but it would get the meaning across and maybe show a bit of a sense of humor and that's exactly why they never ever could.
Yeah it’s kinda like a dollar store but instead of focusing on the upside (cost) it reminded you of the downside (quality).
"'Amazon Not-too-bad' store" sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe a too-clever work around for the 5-Star problem would be to call it "100-Star," which would be 4 in binary notation. Or they could call it "5th-Star" since 4 stars is the fifth number of stars b/c the range of starts is zero indexed.
Ordinal : Cardinal
1 : 0
2 : 1
3 : 2
4 : 3
5 : 4
6 : 5Presumably when it was first pitched internally it was called "Amazon 5-Star", then they realised that meant they basically couldn't sell anything, since nothing popular gets a full 5 stars. So they changed it to "4-Star"
This would not be the first off-by-one error at Amazon.
Also funny because there are many product categories on amazon where if its not above 4.5 its probably shit
These stores were solving for an Amazon problem (brick and mortar stores without the expense of workers), and not any significant customer problem.
They often put them in places, hoping that people would be attracted by marginally lower prices and brand extension, all while removing one of the primary appeals (for most people) of in person grocery shopping: impromptu community socialization, even if it is simply greeting the checkout worker.
I'm not surprised they failed.
The Amazon Go stores in San Francisco were weird. They always had no people shopping in them, which would make sense given the increased efficiency, but it amplified the "am I stealing?" vibe. And the cost of goods wasn't made any cheaper than comparable stores in SF despite the touted increased efficiency.
The pitch from Bezos -- and it's a dumb pitch -- was basically just to make checking out faster by avoiding interacting with humans (but this can be achieved by increasing the number of cashiers and baggers). The pitch was never lower prices. The combo of all the tech and the army of Indians watching video was not cheap.
And because they were relying on computer vision and Indian vision, they had to get rid of all their fresh meals because they were too hard to calculate prices for. So, it ended up being a half-assed 7-Eleven concept. The whole concept was made by someone who hates humanity.
I personally prefer stores with actual cashiers. What I don't like are lines, but that is very solvable. The organic grocer near me is super fast to check out.
The lack of people in them was the thing about going to one that always felt weird to me.
LOL, any found efficiency doesnt go to the consumer. The evidence is the widening wealth gap over the last 40 years. Its trickle up economics.
It does, though you need sufficient competition.
In particular, it's useful to have new, upstart companies that are 'hungry' for market share, and aren't excessively tied down to old ways of doing things.
The Fresh stores are kind of a weird shopping experience with a mix of normal, overpriced and bizarrely cheap at different times.
I've gotten into the habit of stopping in to wander the aisles and check prices because of it (e.g. I stocked up on a bunch of canned soup when most (but not all) Progresso soups were $0.44 a month or two back, and I picked up some microwavable rice+quinoa pouches for my wife at $0.35 each a couple weeks ago, but the inconsistency and overall not great prices mean it can't be my go-to grocery destination.
I'm sure the one by me will be closing since there's a significantly larger Whole Foods just a few miles away.
Every time I check I am still amazed that the Amazon Hair Salon in London is still open. https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?node=26247109031
The headline in their corporate press release says "Amazon doubles down on online grocery delivery and Whole Foods Market expansion to reach more customers"
That's one way to spin things I guess.
Hmm Amazon fresh was useless anyway. It was this weird niche of grocery delivery but for small urgent orders. I just don't have that need like ever, if I need a bottle of shampoo or a head of lettuce urgently I'll just go to the corner shop.
Edit: oh oops I see this is about physical fresh stores, we never had those in the first place. Here in Europe Amazon fresh is a weird service for quick small grocery orders. For the bigger ones they partner with a local supermarket ("dia" here in Spain). But I never do grocery delivery because I never make any plans, I just make my life up as I go along :)
But Amazon fresh here is expensive and still slow (2hrs) so really not good for anything.
Amazon go I'm not even sure what that is.
I just moved here, but WOW Safeway's prices are absolutely criminal. We'll shop anywhere else. It'd be hard to be worse than Safeway.
I haven't been to a Fresh here, but we had one in IL and it was just a normal grocery store but more confusing. There's a constant sense of "am I stealing?" And the whole "just walk out" thing doesn't work if you don't have a Prime membership, so it all felt a bit overwrought and pointless. Some of the prices were good, others were bad, others were stupid (produce by item count instead of weight). I'd rather just go to a normal grocery store.
> Amazon go I'm not even sure what that is.
And now you don't have to!
Ba-dump-ching! I'll be here all week, folks! :)
Amazon go I'm not even sure what that is, must be something like Pokémon go to the polls.
The Amazon Fresh in North Seattle had Just Walk Out. Initially you had to "scan in" and "scan out" and then they eventually removed the "scan out" (or scan in? can't remember). From a shopper's perspective, it was pretty good, and I was hopeful they'd figure out the tech. One time they overcharged me for a paper bag and there was no way to dispute it. It was only $0.08, but really rubbed me the wrong way. I know I got a fair bit of stuff for free as they seemed to err on the side of not charging vs. charging if they weren't able to figure it out, though.
I actually did find it saved me time. I would go in, grab a couple things, and leave, and it was actually a good experience to do that. I never did full grocery store runs there, though.
The aisles were always packed with workers picking/packing orders, which was frustrating to deal with.
One thing that was bad about it was that produce was all fixed price. At a normal store you pay per pound for an onion, but there every onion was $1 (or whatever the price was). Giant onion, tiny onion, all the same price. The produce got picked over in weird ways because of that.
Then one day they said, "okay, Just Walk Out is gone, it's just a normal grocery store now." Then it just became just a mediocre grocery store. There were definitely periods where aisles could be nearly empty, but lately it's been okay. Prices were great, though -- by far the cheapest in the area.
Their hot bar was extremely mediocre. I like the Whole Foods one, but theirs was just... not good. Half the time they didn't even have it stocked with food.
They had a little stand up front where kids could get a free piece of fruit, which mine liked.
It also had convenient returns for Amazon purchases, which was about half of what I went there for.
It was a convenient place for me, and I like it better than Safeway, but I can't say I'm too heartbroken that it's going away. QFC/Sprouts/Town&Country/Safeway are a few minutes in any direction, but they're more expensive. I doubt they'll turn this one into a Whole Foods either.
You were overcharged .08 cents for a paper bag? Like you were charged $0.16? Or did you not use a bag and were charged anyway?
Doesn’t surprise me. I frequently shop at Amazon Fresh in store and it’s a mediocre experience. It’s a poorly run store with no visible manager making sure things are in order. You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders and they aren’t helpful. I always find expired groceries/produce on the shelf so I have to spend a lot of extra time inspecting each item. The only reason I put up with their nonsense is that some of their prices are insane and they have easy returns, for example $0.85 for a box of Barilla pasta. They actually don’t accept returns in store and just refund you automatically in the app (Returnless returns). It’s pretty silly and rife for abuse.
I also found a loophole with the Amazon.com return grocery credit. The systems are separate for the $10 off $40 coupon and you just scan a QR code in the store to get it. It turns out you can just take a photo of their QR code and reuse it over and over again.