Amazon shutting down Fresh grocery stores, including 2 on Long Island

Amazon Fresh stores are coming to an end after struggling with profitability for years.

Amazon is closing all of its Amazon Fresh brick-and-mortar grocery stores, including the two on Long Island, and Amazon Go convenience stores, as the company focuses on expanding online grocery delivery and its Whole Foods Market chain, the company announced in a blog post Tuesday.

The only two Fresh stores in New York State are on Long Island.

A 47,300-square-foot store opened in Oceanside, at 3620 Long Beach Rd., in July 2022, followed by a 42,908-square-foot store that opened in East Setauket, at 4054 Nesconset Hwy. in Suffolk Plaza, in October 2024.

A Fresh store in Plainview closed in September, less than a year after its opening in October 2024. The store occupied a 33,342-square-foot space at 50 Manetto Hill Rd. in Manetto Hill Plaza.

About two dozen Fresh stores have closed in recent years as the concept struggled to gain traction with customers.

“While we've seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven't yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion,” Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. said in the blog post.

There are 57 Fresh stores in eight states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey and Virginia.

The last day of operation for the stores will be Feb. 1, except for those in California, which will remain open longer to comply with state requirements, Amazon said.

Some of the closing stores will be transitioned into Whole Foods stores, the e-commerce giant said.

Amazon declined to say how many employees will be affected by the store closings, but it said it was working to find those workers jobs elsewhere in the company.

There are 14 Amazon Go convenience stores in California, Illinois, Washington State and New York but none on Long Island. The convenience stores allow customers to pay digitally without going to cashiers.

Amazon has more than 550 Whole Foods stores in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, seven of them on Long Island.

Amazon plans to open more than 100 more Whole Foods stores over the next few years, it said in the blog post.

Also, Amazon added perishables to its same-day delivery service in 2025 and plans to expand that to more communities this year. The retailer also is testing Amazon Now, which delivers thousands of household items and groceries to customers in 30 minutes or less, in Philadelphia and Seattle.

Problems persisted

Amazon doesn’t disclose financial data specifically about its Fresh and Go stores.

It’s possible the stores weren’t doing poorly, but weren’t doing well enough to justify the significant financial investment in their technology, said Joe Feldman, a senior managing director focusing on retail at the Telsey Advisory Group, a Manhattan-based brokerage firm.

Also, the stores aren’t unique enough to differentiate them from competitors, he said.

“They’re unique in the technology that they brought but if someone needs to go buy bananas, strawberries and some bread and milk, technology is not going to draw them to do that,” Feldman said.

Instead, grocery stores’ proximity to shoppers, the freshness and quality of the food, the assortment of brands and the levels of service are more important factors for where consumers choose to shop, he said. 

Amazon bought high-end natural and organic foods grocer Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017 as it sought to expand its grocery business.

Amazon opened its first Fresh store in Woodland Hills, California, in 2020.

With Fresh, Amazon was attempting to compete more with mass-merchant discounter Walmart, which has long dominated the supermarket industry as the top grocery retailer in the nation, retail experts said.

Among all grocery sellers in the United States, including convenience stores and warehouse clubs, Walmart ranked first, with 21% of the market share in the year that ended Sept. 30, according to Numerator, a Chicago-based market research firm. Whole Foods, based only on in-store sales, ranked 12th, with 1.62%. 

Amazon, including its Fresh and Go stores' sales and Whole Foods' online sales, ranked 14th, with 1.56%, according to Numerator.

Amazon tried to improve Fresh's performance for several years.

Amazon CEO and president Andy Jassy told analysts in February 2023 that the company had decided over that last year that it was pausing the openings of new stores until it had "an equation with differentiation and economic value that we like."

The openings of the East Setauket and Plainview stores were part of the pause.

Amazon revamped the Fresh concept by expanding the grocery selection and lowering prices.

Amazon also changed the technology customers use to shop. Fresh stores' shoppers use Dash Carts, which are "smart" shopping carts with screens that show running cost totals. Customers scan bar codes of products using cameras on the carts, and then exit the stores through Dash Cart lanes that charge them using the payment method linked to their accounts.

The stores also have traditional and self-checkout lanes.

Fresh store openings resumed in summer 2024 but closings followed. 

Stores that closed in 2025 included four locations in Southern California; a store in Thousand Oaks, California; one in Manassas, Virginia; and a Seattle-area store in Federal Way.

Also, Amazon announced in September that it would be closing 14 Fresh stores in the U.K. and converting the remaining five in the country to Whole Foods stores.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.