Amazon has closed three of its checkout-free Fresh stores across London, including the first one to open its doors back in 2021.
The Amazon Fresh stores in Wandsworth, East Sheen and Ealing Broadway — the first one to arrive in the UK — closed their doors for the last time on Sunday.
Like other Amazon Fresh locations in the UK and US, the shops used the firm’s ‘Just Walk Out’ sensor technology, which allows customers to pick up items and leave, with purchases billed to their Amazon accounts.
While the closure of the first UK store just over two years after it opened feels totemic, Amazon Fresh stores have spread quickly across London and still enjoy a reasonably strong presence.
Even with the three latest closures, the official site lists 17 shops across the capital, including central locations in Southwark, Euston, Chancery Lane and Kensington.
These aren’t even the first stores to shut, with Amazon closing its Dalston branch earlier this year.
At the time, Amazon painted this as reprioritising its plans, rather than a general withdrawal from the brick-and-mortar retail store market. Indeed, it pointed to subsequent openings in Croydon and Monument to support this.
Once again, the official comment echoes this sentiment: “Like any physical retailer, we periodically assess our portfolio of stores and make optimisation decisions along the way,” an Amazon spokesperson told the BBC.
“While we decided to close three Amazon Fresh stores, it doesn’t mean we won’t grow - this year, we will open new Amazon Fresh stores to better serve customers in the greater London area."
Amazon’s dominance of e-commerce was built on data and analytics, so in one sense it’s no surprise that the company isn’t afraid of closing stores that aren’t performing as well as it would like.
But at the same time, closing three stores in a single day doesn’t feel like a vote of confidence in the endeavour. There was a time when the company was reportedly planning 100 or so stores across the UK, and that ambition seems to at least be slowing, even if it hasn’t completely stalled.
A Sunday Times report from last year heard from one insider who blamed the slowed expansion on two things: the underperformance of Amazon’s existing Fresh stores, and the high cost of fitting out new locations with the clever technology that makes the checkout-free experience possible.
