Amazon Quietly Began Building a Grocery Chain During Pandemic

As many businesses struggled to survive the pandemic, Amazon.com was quietly building a national grocery chain. From a report: The first Amazon Fresh store opened to the public in Los Angeles in September. Store No. 11 opened Thursday, and Amazon is working on at least 28 more, from Philadelphia to the Sacramento suburbs. The company is also testing the "Just Walk Out" cashierless shopping technology created for its Go convenience stores at an Amazon Fresh location in Illinois. More than a decade after it started selling groceries, Amazon has a tiny sliver of the $900 billion U.S. grocery market and has watched traditional chains finally start figuring out how to sell food online. Amazon Fresh, industry watchers say, is a way for the company to become even stickier with devoted Prime members, as well as appeal to a broad cross-section of America -- from lower-income shoppers who frequent discounters like Walmart Inc. to wealthier customers looking to pick up online orders.

Whole Foods RIP

[CWCheese]

In LA there are several Whole Foods locations being shuttered and converted to Amazon Fresh and opening this spring, so it appears the Whole Foods experiment is winding down as AMZN will probably deep six WF in the next few years.

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[known_coward_69]

doubt it since Prime Now is huge in a lot of areas

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[ShanghaiBill]

doubt it since Prime Now is huge in a lot of areas

It works for me. I haven't been to a grocery in six months.

I also order on-line from Costco. Online ordering doesn't require a membership.

Driving to the grocery store, shopping, checking-out, and driving back home, wastes an hour of my life. For a $5 delivery charge and a $5 tip, I can avoid that. My time is worth more than $10/hr.

By shopping online, I save time, stress, and gas. I also help to create a job for someone.

Hopefully, the pandemic is the beginning of the end for B&M grocery shopping.

Re:Whole Foods RIP

[jhecht]

The damage Amazon did to Whole Foods was painfully obvious here in the Boston area by the time the pandemic hit last year. Some good stuff was gone, the checkout lines were long, and it was no longer a good place to get good food at a premium price. I haven't gone back since, and the only thing that might get me back is if it still has fresh-ground peanut butter. I don't think Amazon knows how to run a good grocery story; their corporate imagination is limited to something between a trendily designed quick-stop and a small suburban supermarket with shelves for Prime deliveries.

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[fermion]

While Foods has 500 locations. The 365 concept was expanding as late as last year. Amazon certainly bought these stores as footholds in more affluent locations. Amazon is also trying to get customers off the Prime/Whole Foods hybrid app.

It makes sense that Amazon would convert these stores. The appeal, for the most part, is warehouse space. Customer Service was the Whole Foods advantage for most of its life, but it has been a decade since they have been hiring people based on their ability to serve custom

No, Maybe

[unixcorn]

For dry or canned food and other non-perishable items, Amazon might be able to compete right now. I was going to add "compete with WalMart" but anymore Walmart uses loss leaders and then ups the price on items they believe you will need. If Amazon can reliably deliver perishables and non-perishables at reasonable prices (think Aldi), along with allowing me to create recipes/meals/lists that I can save, they might be able to supplant the entrenched regional chains.

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[spudnic]

They already do this. I'm in Nashville. I just had an Amazon Fresh delivery of all kinds of items, including frozen and fresh meat.

They really do a great job and it's much cheaper than InstantCart or any of the other grocery delivery services around here.

In the UK they already do

[martynhare]

Through partnerships with supermarkets, a £40 shop gets you free 2 hour delivery. They also offer decent control over substitutions when stocks are low unlike when using the supermarkets themselves directly. If you're a single bachelor, the cost (in both time and money) from travelling to/from a supermarket is much greater than the increased costs from purchasing goods using Amazon.

The future is looking bright when it comes to competition, all with no need to travel to commercial zones to buy thing

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[alvinrod]

Maybe it's an alternative for some, but I'm always going to want to pick my own produce and meat from the store. If you don't care about what you get any more than whoever gets hired to pick it out for you then it won't change anything, but I doubt that person will care quite as much as you do.

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[Oligonicella]

Yep. Exactly what I was going to say. I know what I want my bananas to look and feel like. They don't and can't.

Uniform, storage type foods, fine. Subjectively fresh or perishable, nope.

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[Oligonicella]

While not explicit, what I got was him referring to an on-line list stored and perhaps used against browsing for food stuffs.

I have no idea if Wally world or anybody else does it but it sounds like a good idea. Grab one of their online recipes, or input your own and item by item, it pulls up the goods that will work.

Strange headline

[DarkOx]

Its been blindingly obvious to anyone watching that AMZN wants to get into the grocery racket.

They have had multiple irons in the fire. Some were probably experiments they thought they might grow into permanent nation wide offerings some that were probably never intended to be more than POC work to develop technology and test tactical level business strategies; so they can bring out a Amazon branded product well polished out the gate.

The one thing they haven't been is 'quiet'. The idea anyone in the grocery business is surprised Amazon intends to try to become the purveyor of the typical house holds weekly shopping basket by ultimately opening local stores or pickup locations and / or morphing and re-branding Whole Foods into that has been asleep at the wheel for longer than just 2020.

grocery unions will want to get in as well

[Joe_Dragon]

grocery unions will want to get in as well

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[avandesande]

I hate to say it but this could be an easy win for them. Last spring I experimented with home delivery with our Kr___ chain supermarket and the experience was so bad I gave up.

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[DarkOx]

Kroger needs to cut the bullshit with the substitutions. They either need to have some kind of smartphone type push thing where they ask 'can we swap X for Y' or they need to do a lot better job of making sure X and Y are equivalent.

They do stuff like swap dried yeast for turbo yeast. That might work if I was just making bread and can simply cut the proving time and observe when the size has doubled. It does not work for yeast-ed cakes and such where you haven't got the gluten structure and if it rises to

Re:Strange headline

[sconeu]

Happened with Vons/Safeway.

I orded a kosher salami chub. They brought me hot dogs instead.

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[Bodie1]

Safeway made a bad substitution on me once Johnny, just once.

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[avandesande]

The solution is to have real time inventory information. I now it's hard with perishables but everything else there is no excuse.

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[Oligonicella]

Amazon is just as bad. If they don't have what you search for, you won't get "Not found" (something they absolutely won't do) but an absolute shit dump of totally unrelated items.

For instance, I just did an Amazon grocery search on "bok choi", which i misspelled on purpose, like a typo. What I got was a list of (in this order and without a "did you mean?"): water chestnuts, dark chocolate cookies, yaquan, wheat noodles, butternut squash, miso soup and the list continues.

Changed it to "bok choy" an

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[timeOday]

Among people I know what has really gained momentum is curbside pickup. You drive to the grocery store, click a web link on your phone to tell them you've arrived, and somebody comes out and puts them into your trunk, at no added cost. It really is a timesaver. Full home delivery wouldn't be worth the cost because I drive right past several grocery stores on the way home from work anyways.

I'm confused ...

[fahrbot-bot]

Amazon Quietly Began Building a Grocery Chain During Pandemic

They couldn't just use Blockchain?

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[tlhIngan]

I'm confused as well. Amazon bought Whole Foods to get a grocery chain a number of years back.

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[CWCheese]

the WF acquisition has gone bust for the most part, since WF staff continually resisted AMZN changes. I went to WF a while back to pick up some dietary supplements that my wife normally gets online but had run out; so I went inside to look for it unsuccessfully, and then I asked a clerk why they didn't stock this fairly popular supplement and got the response - "we're not Amazon, this is Whole Foods" - clearly WF staff are hostile to AMZN even to this day, thus their stores are starting to be converted to A

And the UK is next...

[Whibla]

They (Amazon) opened their first 'no till' shop in London about a week ago [theguardian.com]. Given that it was mentioned (*cough* advertised) on the national news that evening I'm not sure I'd call that 'quietly' though.

Given their history I'd be extremely surprised if more don't swiftly follow. Not a bad time to be looking for high street real estate either...

Can we just start calling them..

[Quackattack]

Buy n Large already.

Amazon Go vs Amazon Fresh?

[ayesnymous]

You can have an Amazon Go convenience store located inside an Amazon Fresh grocery store?