All Amazon Fresh stores in UK to close
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/23/all-amazon-fresh-stores-in-uk-to-close-whole-foods
Posted by a3poify
All Amazon Fresh stores in UK to close
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/23/all-amazon-fresh-stores-in-uk-to-close-whole-foods
Posted by a3poify
25 Comments
An interesting experiment, but it always felt like more of a hassle to get my phone out at the start of the shopping trip to get in than to get it out at the end to pay at the till, for some reason.
Good. We need more independently owned shops and less marketplace consolidation by silicon valley tech giants.
I visited one of these at excel and I thought I did it right but found out I just shop lifted my lunch as it never charged me. It was a cool experiment but we seem to struggle with self service terminals, so this was a bit too futuristic
I’ve never heard of or seen these. Guessing it was a London thing.
Were those the ones that were supposed to use AI to check what you bought and bill you but it turned out to be underpaid overseas workers checking the cameras manually?
Our supermarket sector is already dominated by 4 massive companies, the last thing we need as consumers is for one of the *world’s* largest companies to have a stake in the sector…
>with a range of highly sensitive cameras and sensors used to monitor which products they picked up while in store.
Surprising that The Guardian doesn’t read The Guardian – [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/10/amazon-ai-cashier-less-shops-humans-technology](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/10/amazon-ai-cashier-less-shops-humans-technology)
TLDR: the highly sensitive cameras were just providing a video feed to thousands of staff in India and other similar countries who were being paid buttons to record on the system what people were buying – a modern Mechanical Turk.
I used to use them. Then I switched to Amazon Morrisons. I’m thinking of just doing directly from Morrisons.
They were always just an experiment to be fair and more about branding than anything else. I imagine they got a lot of data and research from this they will use or sell elsewhere
u/AskGrok
Which of the stores closing will be converted to a Whole Foods?
That’s a crying shame as I get my daily meal deal there.
£3.60 for a better quality offering than Sainsbury’s and Tesco. I’m surprised they are closing as the products on shelves recently changed, which meant they have still been brokering deals for shelf space.
This makes me curious of who uses those scan and shop readers when they go into a supermarket.
My local Sainsbury’s has them. I never see them in use.
I saw a ad a while back and thought it never happened, ive never seen one of these anywhere.
How did they prevent people just stealing stuff?
“Amazon did not confirm how many staff would be affected by the closures” – that’s easy, I guess the answer is: none. It’s all automated. Maybe a few hundred jobs lost in India.
But seriously, these stores were EXPENSIVE. Might be just my subjective feeling, but it felt much more expensive than Tesco, Aldi, Sainsbury’s.
I thought it turned out these stores just had Indians watching the cameras and manually charging you at the end? The technology didn’t even work
The only thing that Amazon really does well in my view at is getting you an item you know you need quickly.
If you need to do any sort of browsing, support, finding what subscriptions you have etc the software is just plain horrible.
A cool “hack” I found with these stores is ask someone to pick an item off the shelf and give it to you. They would be charged instead of you!
Wasn’t this one of those AI-based shops that turned out to just be run by a bunch of indians?
As much as I hate Amazon and big tech dominance I actually found these stores quite good. Meal deals at £3.60 and no joke rules like yoghurt granolas being “mains”
Definitely a bad thing. Picking up your items and just scanning a QR code at the end of shopping was so much easier than scanning them all or waiting in line. Prices were decently competitive too. One less supermarket isn’t a good thing for competition and prices
TIL Amazon had food shops.
Not that it matters, I’ve got them on the banned list, (including M$ and Meta), since Trump came back.
Sad. They have great prices and food inflation lags in their offering.
It was always fun to pack items straight into your tote and walk out.
The entrance qr would always show on the app if you just turned your GPS on for 2min.
Yeah, this is probably because your target audience can barely make toast without help.
I hate Amazon as a company. They have helped ruin the high street through monopolisation as well as a lot of other negative aspects all for the name of profit. I’m glad they’re shutting down these pointless shops.
One of the comments in the BBC News article “Maybe it just goes to show people do want to interact with other people in stores” – meaning “I want to chat for 15 minutes with the shop keeper about my life while everyone else behind me waits”.
I liked them for that reason – grabbing a lunch, in-and-out, get on with my life. Also they give a free paper bag, and the one I went to you just needed to tap your card or phone to exit and that was it. Obviously I didn’t (or want to) think too hard about all the data they were collecting on me, what shelf I spent more time looking at etc.