Amazon has closed the last of its two Fresh Pickup facilities, marking the end of its experiment with a drive-in and drop-off grocery service.
Fresh Pickup was launched in 2017 with two centers in Seattle/ At the Fresh Pickup sites, customers would place a grocery order online, then drive to the pickup center and have the groceries brought to their car. The store used license plate readers to identify the customer and the order once they arrived.
The retailer never opened new Fresh Pickup locations in Seattle, nor did it expand the concept outside of Seattle.
“Like any retailer, we periodically assess our portfolio and make optimization decisions around how we operate,” Amazon spokesperson Jessica Martin said in regard to the closing.
Amazon still operates more than 40 Fresh grocery stores around the country, including five in Seattle. It runs Go convenience stores in Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. Amazon also owns Whole Foods, which it purchased in 2017 for $13.7 billion.
In the second quarter of 2023, Amazon’s physical stores sales grew 7% compared to the same quarter a year earlier, the company said.
This is the latest in a series of moves by Amazon to reduce its brick-and-mortar presence. The retailer has already shuttered all of its bookstores, 4-star shops and pop-ups, and Amazon Style stores and has cancelled leases on a number of sites throughout the U.S.