Amazon Fresh grocery store hits London as it makes UK debut
The first UK Amazon Fresh store is set to be unveiled on Thursday in Ealing, West London.
According to a report by the Mail on Sunday, Brits were due to get their first taste of Amazon Go, with the newspaper stating that workers had been preparing an Ealing Broadway site in recent weeks.
On Saturday, the Amazon Go facade was covered in an effort to keep the project under wraps for as long as possible, the Mail on Sunday claimed.
But it actually looks like Londoners are getting an Amazon Fresh grocery store.
An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.
Stateside debut
Last year, the e-commerce giant opened its first ever Amazon Fresh store, in Woodland Hills, California.
This included the Amazon Dash Cart, which enables customers to skip the checkout line, and new Alexa features to help people manage their shopping lists and better navigate aisles.
According to Rick Watson, CEO and Founder, RMW Commerce Consulting, the fact that Amazon launched in LA and not its home town of Seattle signalled that the store concept was ready to scale.
"This is not a pilot. You don't like to screw up your biggest market unless you are (finally) ready to expand," he said in a LinkedIn post.
Also, the 'walk out' technology not being based on computer vision in the aisles but rather on the Amazon Dash Cart itself, showed that Amazon is not about gimmicks.
"It is about iteration. Keep this in mind when you scoff at their drones. It's an approach that could fail. But the approach has a reason, a goal," Watson commented.
"It was obvious vision wasn't going to work by itself in a huge store soon. Maybe later," he added.
Watson also noted that Amazon Fresh is at a different price point than Whole Foods. "This is Amazon's foray into the mass market. I somewhat doubt they will open new Whole Foods stores. The Head of Grocery even said they saw them side by side."
“The real magic of Amazon grocery is the connections to Prime, technology convenience, pickup, and delivery. Will Walmart and Kroger be able to iterate as quickly? Amazon is betting no," Watson concluded.
