There were lots of Fresh staffers - too many, really - constantly restocking shelves while otherwise keeping to themselves, plus the aforementioned greeters at the front doors to help get people in and out of the store. The Alexa terminals suggest that Amazon wants to staff Fresh stores as leanly as possible, even if it’s liberally using employees during the launch phase to address potential customer pain points.
But on our second visit, all of the terminals were experiencing “connectivity issues,” perhaps the closest Amazon Fresh stores will get to a business-disrupting employee strike. On our first visit, the Alexa terminals were both working and helpful, accurately pointing us towards items we wanted to locate. Instead of having employees answer inventory-related questions, Amazon scatters Alexa terminals throughout the store, offering AI guidance on item locations, wine pairings, and measurement unit conversions. That feeling extends to how Amazon Fresh uses - and doesn’t use - people in its operations. If it wasn’t for a cadre of friendly greeters, walking through Amazon Fresh would feel more like visiting a warehouse or Costco than shopping in a typical supermarket of its size. A staffed customer service area is in the back, not the front, which instead allocates a lot of interior space to managing shopping carts.Įven the baked goods, which in other stores flow attractively off the edges of store shelves, seem to have been assigned to a specific corner of Amazon Fresh and told to stay firmly within the lines. There are places to purchase whole cooked chickens for $4.97 and pizzas for $8.99, but nowhere to sit and eat them. From the signage to the aisles and specialty counters, Amazon’s latest store feels as if it was designed largely by engineers, and conceived to be as easy as possible to retrofit inside another retailer’s abandoned space - in this case, the 40,000 feet formerly occupied by a Babies R Us store.Īpart from the produce, nothing about the environment feels organic: Floors are spartan, displays are boxy, and everything looks to have been optimized for customers by computers, rather than humans.
Unlike Whole Foods, the high-end supermarket chain Amazon acquired in 2017, Amazon Fresh stores look like small warehouses, and have all the charm of Walmart’s grocery sections, minus two-thirds the people and half the choices.
Register Now A boxy, spartan layout, seemingly by design
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