Amazon Fresh Irvine Now Open

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Re: Amazon Fresh Irvine Now Open

Post by HCal »

storewanderer wrote: May 23rd, 2021, 7:39 pm
Also note they are changing Amazon Go to Amazon Fresh essentially scrapping the Go concept.

But they sure caused a lot of pure play retailers to throw a bunch of resources at a pie in the sky "just walk out" checkout technology. 7-Eleven, etc.
The market does seem to have a panic attack whenever Amazon does something. Conventional grocers' stock price dipped when Amazon bought Whole Foods, pharmacies were seen as being in trouble when they bought PillPack, and now all eyes are on Amazon Fresh. My guess is this is a gimmick, they aren't going to build significant market share or fundamentally change the market. Other than the Dash carts, the Amazon Fresh stores don't really have anything special. They aren't cheap (Aldi/Food4Less), they aren't healthy or hip (Trader Joe's/Whole Foods), they don't have a broad variety of products (Ralphs/Vons). I'm guessing online order fulfillment is the main goal, and if they can pick up some in-person sales, why not?
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Re: Amazon Fresh Irvine Now Open

Post by Bagels »

retailfanmitchell019 wrote: May 23rd, 2021, 2:01 pm Kind of sounds like Fresh & Easy all over again, and we all know how that went. :lol:
We all thought Tesco was going to change everything...
It does. It's shocking that Amazon couldn't retain much of its customer base that it quickly attracted.
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Re: Amazon Fresh Irvine Now Open

Post by ClownLoach »

Bagels wrote: May 24th, 2021, 12:48 pm
retailfanmitchell019 wrote: May 23rd, 2021, 2:01 pm Kind of sounds like Fresh & Easy all over again, and we all know how that went. :lol:
We all thought Tesco was going to change everything...
It does. It's shocking that Amazon couldn't retain much of its customer base that it quickly attracted.
The delivery orders going out of that Irvine store are literally wiping the shelves clean on most days. The parking lot is "fuller" before they open for walk in business than during open hours. This store is a ridiculous bonanza for Amazon beyond all of their expectations. They have literally so much business that they had to set up temporary partition curtains in the future Cafe seating area for additional ambient temp storage. In my apartment complex you can look up and down the hallways and see bags from this Amazon Fresh location daily in front of about every 4th door. They rushed a new Mission Viejo location on Crown Valley to help take the pressure off this store. I need to compare but I am wondering if the in store pricing is now higher than the in-app delivery pricing... The reason for the existence of these stores is to 1) bring the inventory closer to the customer for faster delivery times vs. warehouses out of town. 2) Have some walk in customer business that will help offset the costs of the higher rent of a shopping center versus an industrial warehouse. They do not need very much retail walk in traffic to make this work.
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Re: Amazon Fresh Irvine Now Open

Post by ClownLoach »

On top of the above, a Manager at this Irvine store told me they have 400 employees. That's not a typo. Their biggest regret is that they didn't take a larger building because they are overwhelmed with delivery orders and not enough space for staging. I know that the 400 employees are predominantly part time, but most Target and Walmart stores have 200 or less and they're primarily part time as well. I believe that there are unique circumstances around Irvine, but I think that this little, unassuming Amazon store was the last nail in the coffin for that Walmart supercenter that closed a few miles away. It's not the walk in business, it's the deliveries. I still don't know how they do it so well - I have never had a single item fail to be delivered, or substituted, etc. If anything doesn't look right you are instantly refunded in just a few taps on your phone, no questions asked and no return hassle you just throw it out. Every order arrives on time or slightly early. They dramatically out execute the Albertsons/Vons delivery and Ralphs pickup services in every way - price, speed, service and quality.
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Re: Amazon Fresh Irvine Now Open

Post by storewanderer »

Also by Amazon taking up spaces that may otherwise house a neighborhood supermarket they are eliminating the potential for a competing supermarket to open in the location. Even if Amazon does the pick up/delivery thing much better than Vons or than Ralphs, the fact is if there was a Vons or a Ralphs in any of these buildings where Amazon is operating, they would do some number of pick up and delivery transactions each day.

What I can't get past is how using the Amazon website is so much easier than other retailers. I have ordered from a lot of other retailers; I've had pretty good luck with Wal Mart and if you can get past getting 5 separate boxes for a $35 order some from across the country Target is also pretty good as far as delivering products goes but nobody's website operates with the speed of Amazon and the product information depth of Amazon. And in my area ever since Amazon started to deliver through its Amazon van, the delivery speed is much shorter than before and condition of packages is literally perfect. And I am not a Prime member.
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Re: Amazon Fresh Irvine Now Open

Post by Bagels »

ClownLoach wrote: May 24th, 2021, 11:10 pmThe delivery orders going out of that Irvine store are literally wiping the shelves clean on most days. The parking lot is "fuller" before they open for walk in business than during open hours. This store is a ridiculous bonanza for Amazon beyond all of their expectations. They have literally so much business that they had to set up temporary partition curtains in the future Cafe seating area for additional ambient temp storage. In my apartment complex you can look up and down the hallways and see bags from this Amazon Fresh location daily in front of about every 4th door. They rushed a new Mission Viejo location on Crown Valley to help take the pressure off this store. I need to compare but I am wondering if the in store pricing is now higher than the in-app delivery pricing... The reason for the existence of these stores is to 1) bring the inventory closer to the customer for faster delivery times vs. warehouses out of town. 2) Have some walk in customer business that will help offset the costs of the higher rent of a shopping center versus an industrial warehouse. They do not need very much retail walk in traffic to make this work.
As I pointed out earlier, this is an irrational argument. Not only did they build out this store within the Market Place -- a notoriously high-traffic, high-rent shopping district -- they choose its most visible building (clearly noticeable from the 5). Just up the road near the 5/55, serving the same trade area via delivery, sits an ex-Vons/Haggen that has been vacant since 2015. If Amazon truly perceived walk-in business as "icing on the cake," they would've moved into that spot -- again, the same (actually LARGER) trade area but at half the rent with significantly greater up front incentives.

It isn't surprising that online ordering is booming -- we're (still) in a pandemic, and very few OC workers have returned to the office. Amazon is naturally going to win over most online orders -- it has (by far) the most robust website and people and people are familiar with it, having ordered from it (in some capacity) for years (it began carrying a limited assortment of groceries within SoCal in the mid-2010s). It's inevitable that as more people return to the office or field, parents begin taking their kids to after school activities, etc., that much of Amazon's online business... will return to brick-and-motor. (Online grocery shopping is here to stay... but it's inevitable that when mom/dad picks up the kids from soccer, and they want a snack, that they head into their local grocery store to grab that night's dinner + ice cream or whatever).

Ultimately, it's pretty telling that Amazon was able to build up a huge consumer shopping base... then quickly lose it., The store is beautiful, the technology is awesome... but there's nothing else to differentiate it from Ralphs, Albertson, Vons, etc.
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Re: Amazon Fresh Irvine Now Open

Post by ClownLoach »

Bagels wrote: May 31st, 2021, 5:27 pm
ClownLoach wrote: May 24th, 2021, 11:10 pmThe delivery orders going out of that Irvine store are literally wiping the shelves clean on most days. The parking lot is "fuller" before they open for walk in business than during open hours. This store is a ridiculous bonanza for Amazon beyond all of their expectations. They have literally so much business that they had to set up temporary partition curtains in the future Cafe seating area for additional ambient temp storage. In my apartment complex you can look up and down the hallways and see bags from this Amazon Fresh location daily in front of about every 4th door. They rushed a new Mission Viejo location on Crown Valley to help take the pressure off this store. I need to compare but I am wondering if the in store pricing is now higher than the in-app delivery pricing... The reason for the existence of these stores is to 1) bring the inventory closer to the customer for faster delivery times vs. warehouses out of town. 2) Have some walk in customer business that will help offset the costs of the higher rent of a shopping center versus an industrial warehouse. They do not need very much retail walk in traffic to make this work.
As I pointed out earlier, this is an irrational argument. Not only did they build out this store within the Market Place -- a notoriously high-traffic, high-rent shopping district -- they choose its most visible building (clearly noticeable from the 5). Just up the road near the 5/55, serving the same trade area via delivery, sits an ex-Vons/Haggen that has been vacant since 2015. If Amazon truly perceived walk-in business as "icing on the cake," they would've moved into that spot -- again, the same (actually LARGER) trade area but at half the rent with significantly greater up front incentives.

It isn't surprising that online ordering is booming -- we're (still) in a pandemic, and very few OC workers have returned to the office. Amazon is naturally going to win over most online orders -- it has (by far) the most robust website and people and people are familiar with it, having ordered from it (in some capacity) for years (it began carrying a limited assortment of groceries within SoCal in the mid-2010s). It's inevitable that as more people return to the office or field, parents begin taking their kids to after school activities, etc., that much of Amazon's online business... will return to brick-and-motor. (Online grocery shopping is here to stay... but it's inevitable that when mom/dad picks up the kids from soccer, and they want a snack, that they head into their local grocery store to grab that night's dinner + ice cream or whatever).

Ultimately, it's pretty telling that Amazon was able to build up a huge consumer shopping base... then quickly lose it., The store is beautiful, the technology is awesome... but there's nothing else to differentiate it from Ralphs, Albertson, Vons, etc.
I saw the Manager of the Long Beach location on LinkedIn celebrating the stores high performance. Apparently the new Long Beach store has become the top volume delivery store in the chain so far. I stopped by to see this, as it is in a former Haggen that was previously a very low volume Albertsons. The store couldn't have had more than a dozen customers when I visited. I had an Amazon return so I went to the service desk which is in front of the outbound delivery holding area. The entire space was filled with carts that are about 7 ft tall once the top shelf is loaded with shopping bags. There were about 40 of these carts which each hold about 20 paper bags. In addition the entire wall is freezers and refrigators and they were full of bags. Think of how many dollars are in those bags - this is a lot of sales volume. I asked and they said those were the deliveries just going out that night and that the entire space will be filled before they open again next morning. She said that every day since they opened the entire store sales budget is in for the day before they even unlock the doors for walk in customers. This is a location that had major construction issues and missed the majority of the pandemic - and didn't get to operate "delivery only" for a few months like their other sites. This is two blocks from the Ralphs that was closed in the dispute with the city over hazard pay, and across the street from a normally busy Stater Bros. I checked over there and it was the slowest I have seen that store.

These stores are absolutely converting walk in grocery customers from the other chains to delivery customers for Amazon. They are taking market share in a way that no delivery service has ever done before in Southern California, and I mean all the way back to the originals like Webvan. The stores themselves still aren't perfect, but they are definitely putting a new kind of hurt on the competition.

They are rushing a new Huntington Beach store on Warner - remarkable because they opened a 2nd Whole Foods there just to handle deliveries that the Bella Terra and Fashion Island locations cannot effectively process with their small size and almost nonexistent stockrooms. If you think of it as all Amazon this is their 4th store in the North Coastal OC market and a year ago they only had two. More are coming. The only thing that seems to have changed since the initial wave of stores is that they have shifted from seeking top tier, high visibility boxes to accepting lower end real estate. Between LB, HB and the new Mission Viejo stores these are a dead Haggen, OfficeMax, and Big Lots all in what I would rate "C" locations. Makes sense if delivery is an even higher percentage of business than originally expected - but what makes it so odd is that further makes the case for dark stores in leased industrial space instead of this concept. I think that they see these stores as marketing - they need people to see Amazon signs on buildings near their homes. It drives the perception that Amazon is right in your backyard so they can deliver to you faster than anyone else.
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Re: Amazon Fresh Irvine Now Open

Post by storewanderer »

The next trick is going to be getting automated warehouses in the industrial area to fulfill the dry grocery/household, transport the completed orders to the "neighborhood" store, pick fresh items from these "neighborhood" stores, merge the orders for delivery, and out they go.

No shortage of dead retail boxes in the size they are looking for.
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Re: Amazon Fresh Irvine Now Open

Post by arizonaguy »

storewanderer wrote: July 16th, 2021, 5:47 pm The next trick is going to be getting automated warehouses in the industrial area to fulfill the dry grocery/household, transport the completed orders to the "neighborhood" store, pick fresh items from these "neighborhood" stores, merge the orders for delivery, and out they go.

No shortage of dead retail boxes in the size they are looking for.
Reading between the lines I believe that this is exactly what Kroger wants to do with the Ocado warehouses in Kroger trade areas.
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Re: Amazon Fresh Irvine Now Open

Post by jamcool »

Some of the Ocado facilities are in Non-Kroger areas, like Florida
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