The first Amazon Fresh grocery store is finally opening in Woodland Hills, CA, the company announced via blog post early this morning.
This Amazon Fresh is the first of many planned physical grocery stores for Amazon. The store will feature free same-day delivery for Amazon Prime members, curbside pickup and will even let you pickup your Amazon packages at the store.
Unlike Amazon’s other subsidiary, Whole Foods, which doesn’t sell products with things like artificial flavors or preservatives, Amazon Fresh will carry all manner of CPG products.
Amazon was supposed to open the Woodland Hills store in April of this year, but the COVID-19 pandemic altered those plans. Over the past five months, Amazon used the location as a “dark store” to fulfill online orders as the company desperately tried to keep up with a surge in demand for grocery delivery.
Though this Woodland Hills Amazon Fresh won’t feature Amazon Go-like cashierless checkout, it does have the recently announced Amazon Dash Cart. These carts basically enable cashierless checkout by automatically keeping track of whatever items are put in it.
The opening of this Amazon Fresh comes during a time of record online grocery sales, thanks to the pandemic. But a recent Coresight survey found Walmart is now the leading retailer for online grocery shopping, while use of Amazon for grocery e-commerce has declined. Part of Walmart’s ascendancy could be attributed to its vast network of retail stores across the country that allow easy access to curbside pickup of e-commerce grocery orders.
The new Amazon Fresh isn’t open to the public yet. That will happen “in the coming weeks,” according to today’s blog post. In the meantime, select customers in Woodland Hills will be invited to come in and shop during this soft opening.
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