Amazon is closing three Homeless Fresh stores in London

Amazon has closed three of its Homeless Fresh stores in London, incl the first to open its doors in 2021.

Amazon Fresh stores in Wandsworth, East Sheen and Ealing Broadway – the first 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 stores have used the company’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 opening seems totemic, Amazon Fresh stores have spread rapidly across London and still enjoy quite a strong presence.

Even with the last three closings, the official website lists 17 stores across the capital, including central locations in Southwark, Euston, Chancery Lane and Kensington.

These aren’t even the first stores to close, with Amazon closed its Dalston branch earlier this year.

At the time, Amazon described this as a reprioritization of its plans rather than a general withdrawal from the retail store market. Indeed, he pointed to subsequent openings in Croydon and Monument to back this up.

Once again, the official comment echoes this sentiment: “Like any brick-and-mortar retailer, we regularly evaluate our store portfolio and make optimization decisions along the way,” an Amazon spokesperson told the BBC.

“While we’ve decided to close three Amazon Fresh stores, that doesn’t mean we won’t grow – this year, we’ll be opening new Amazon Fresh stores to better serve customers in the London area.”

Amazon’s dominance of e-commerce has been built on data and analytics, so in a way it’s no surprise that the company isn’t afraid to close stores that aren’t performing as well as they’d like.

But at the same time, closing three stores in one day doesn’t feel like a vote of confidence in this endeavor. There was a time when the company was they are reportedly planning about 100 stores in the UK and that ambition seems at least to be slowing, if not completely stagnant.

A Sunday Times report since last year, we heard from an insider who blamed the slow expansion on two things: the poor performance of Amazon’s existing Fresh stores and the high cost of fitting out new locations with the smart technology that makes the checkout-free experience possible.