They obviously are prolonging the inevitable. Nobody would have noticed if they physically made the meat and seafood counters disappear, took down the signs, and filled the space with something else immediately, heck I don't care if they built a gondola of paper towels and toilet paper. Instead they leave an empty case. They obviously don't care. Your pictures are worse, they show the salad bars and soup bars shut down too. I thought those were the "most profitable segments" of the Whole Foods business?marketreportblog wrote: ↑September 25th, 2023, 5:15 pm Although I haven't been to an Amazon Fresh lately, looking at pictures online it seems like several on the east coast are permanently closing the service meat and seafood counters:
Warrington, PA
Oceanside, NY
Broomall, PA ("the seafood section closed up")
People are also complaining about the empty shelves at the east coast locations. How much longer will Amazon keep these stores open? Would there be a benefit to Amazon to running the stores at a loss? If these stores were owned by anyone other than Amazon and we were seeing empty shelves, closed service departments, and specialty features like salad bars and hot food bars empty, it would be pretty clear that the stores' closures are impending. But it's possible Amazon has a bigger endgame here beyond just running a few supermarkets. That said, the fact that there haven't been any new openings lately although there are any number of stores fully built out (along with the fact that they seem to be giving up on some of those locations) suggests that the end is near.
I think they need to just shutter every store except the two Chicago test stores. Put their spin on it because nobody else cares either. Declare victory to Wall Street. The learning was invaluable and worth the billions of dollars invested. Say they were so overwhelmingly successful that they're moving to delivery only. Besides they already impounded nearly a billion dollars to shut these down and haven't spent it yet, so they could do so in a flash and Wall Street would see no movement in quarterly earnings. Then they could work out deals to mutually part ways at no cost with landlords unhappy to have a dark warehouse in their shopping center. To the public nobody could tell the difference between the "dark store" that's fulfillment only and a completely closed box until a different sign goes up on the building. Wall Street just forgets about the whole thing since it's been so long since they took the charge to shut them down.
The fact is that Amazon Fresh was a huge hit (until they expanded it, changed everything about it, and destroyed it) and can be one again. The stores did great... As local dark store fulfillment centers only running quick deliveries. Otherwise closed to the public. They were the perfect grocery delivery service that would gladly seek out two random tomatoes and three lemons, somehow pulling good ones and packaging them right. Amazon should be looking to lease cheap smaller warehouse spaces in towns and build Amazon Fresh again but in warehouse quality space that costs a fraction of commercial space.
Amazon failed to see they had a winner when they had one because of their lofty and unreasonable expectations. If they could go back in time a bit they would likely made very different decisions.