STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – It’s been one year since Amazon placed its Fresh concept on “pause” – closing some underperforming locations and pumping the brakes on stores that were already deep into development – including what appears to be a fully built-out market in New Dorp. But now the e-tailer is making a new brick-and-mortar grocery push, revamping stores in both Chicago and California and testing how to better resonate with supermarket shoppers.
“If you want to serve as many grocery needs as we do, you have to have a mass physical presence,” CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Feb. 1 when asked about the latest on grocery.
“And that’s what we’ve been trying to do with Fresh over several years,” Jassy continued. “We’ve been testing V2 [version 2] of our Fresh format in a few locations near Chicago, in a few locations in Southern California. It’s very early, it’s just a few months in, but the results thus far are very promising and on almost every dimension.”
Jassy was speaking about updates to a pair of Chicago-area locations in Schaumburg and Oak Lawn, Illinois, that now feature more than 1,500 new products, plus new signage, a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop and lots of innovative merchandising features. Three Amazon Fresh stores recently got the same treatment in Los Angeles, each now offering about 3,000 new products and a number of self-checkout lanes.
In an interview with CNBC, Claire Peters, Amazon’s vice president of retail, acknowledged that Amazon still has “more work to do” to win over customers, but also said that the company is currently laser focused on making the grocery shopping experience more enjoyable and delightful. She told the publication that Amazon is currently ranked second in the nation’s online grocery market, behind only Walmart.
And Amazon has been dabbling in grocery for years: The brand first launched its Fresh grocery delivery service in 2007 before acquiring…
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