Peyton Bigora | Jan. 27, 2026 | Link to store here: LINK
Amazon will shutter all Amazon Fresh and Go stores. The company will focus its brick-and-mortar strategy on Whole Foods Market, with plans to open more than 100 new stores under the banner over the next few years.
- Amazon announced Tuesday, Jan 27th, it will close all of its brick-and-mortar Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores.
- An unspecified number of these storefronts will be converted into Whole Foods Market locations, as Amazon plans to open more than 100 new Whole Foods stores over the next few years.
- The company will shift focus to its same-day perishable groceries delivery offering, expanding the reach of the service to more communities in 2026.
Dive Insight:
Amazon’s decision to abandon its physical grocery store business comes about five years after the company entered the conventional supermarket space with the opening of the first Amazon Fresh store.
But while Amazon has opened dozens of stores under the banner since its debut in Woodland Hills, California, in 2020, the chain has struggled to attract shoppers and compete with established grocers.
In early 2023, the company temporarily stopped growing the chain as it looked for ways to better differentiate the stores and improve their financial performance, with executives acknowledging that Amazon had gotten ahead of itself in its zeal to grab market share from more seasoned grocers.
“There are some clear fundamentals that every grocer needs to get right. And we need to improve on that,” Claire Peters, then-vice president of retail for Amazon, said during a tour of the Woodland Hills store later in 2023.
Amazon expanded stores’ assortment, refreshed decor and doubled down on low prices while also highlighting high-tech features such as Dash Carts. But the e-commerce giant made clear in Tuesday’s announcement that it was not able to accomplish its goal of turning Amazon Fresh into a viable traditional supermarket chain.
“[W]e haven’t yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion,” Amazon said in announcing that it was pulling the plug on the chain.
Amazon disclosed what it called a “difficult decision” to close down the Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go chains in the context of a broader announcement that played up the company’s vast reach in the online grocery space. The company highlighted its grocery delivery service, which is available in more than 5,000 communities, and noted that it has more than $150 billion in gross grocery sales.
Amazon also said that Whole Foods’ experiment with its small-format Daily Shop concept has been successful so far, adding that it intends to add five more Daily Shop locations by the end of 2026. The company noted that customers can continue to shop Amazon Fresh online for delivery.
“While Fresh and Go will no longer form part of Amazon’s grocery ambitions, this should not be taken as a signal that Amazon has given up on the category. Nor does it mean that Amazon has failed in grocery,” GlobalData Managing Director Neil Saunders wrote in emailed comments.
“In our view, in one way or another, Amazon’s physical grocery mantra is: we’ll be back,” he added.
Bill Wilson, Senior Editor | Jan. 27, 2026 | Link to store here: LINK
Amazon said Tuesday that it will close all Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores to focus on same-day fresh grocery delivery.
The Seattle-based retail giant will convert some Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go brick-and-mortar locations into Whole Foods Markets and plans to open more than 100 new stores over the next few years.
There are 58 Amazon Fresh stores and 16 Amazon Go locations, according to ScrapeHero. The first Amazon Fresh opening outside of Los Angeles in September 2020 while Amazon Go debuted in Seattle in 2018.
“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 company said in a statement. “After careful evaluation of the business and how we can best serve customers, we’ve made the difficult decision to close our Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores.”
Amazon said it will continue testing new physical store experiences, including Amazon Grocery, which launched alongside a Whole Foods Market in Chicago, and a store-within-a-store concept at the Whole Foods Market in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania.
The company also plans to continue developing a mass physical store format and introduce new store concepts, including a supercenter-style retail model where customers can shop Amazon offerings in groceries, household essentials and general merchandise. Amazon plans to open its first 230,000-square-foot supercenter near Chicago late next year.
Amazon launched its same-day fresh grocery delivery service in August, announcing that customers in more than 1,000 cities and towns can order fresh groceries with same-day delivery. The company plans to expand the service to more than 2,300 locations across the U.S. by the end of 2025.
Amazon tested same-day delivery for perishables in areas including Phoenix; Orlando, Florida; and Kansas City, Missouri. The company found that first-time Amazon grocery shoppers who used same-day delivery returned to shop twice as often as those who did not purchase fresh food.