Amazon Fresh appears to have started opening new stores in earnest again after the grocery concept was put on hold last year.
The Seattle-based retail giant opened four new grocery stores in one day last week, following grand openings in Eatontown, New Jersey, in June and in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights in July.
The four stores that opened Thursday are in Bensalem, Pennsylvania; Roseville, California; Lodi, New Jersey; and Tinley Park, Illinois, an Amazon spokesperson said in an email. Supermarket news.
All new stores are between 3,500 and 3,900 square meters in size and offer a selection of local and regional products as well as branded and own-brand food products.
The starting wage in the stores is between $15.75 and $16.50.
With the new openings, Amazon Fresh now has 49 stores, including 19 in California and 11 in Illinois, according to its website. Additional stores are located in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, Maryland, New Jersey and New York.
All new stores will use Amazon’s state-of-the-art Dash Carts, which allow customers to bag and weigh their products and then proceed to checkout through the store’s Dash Cart lane.
Amazon launched its Fresh grocery concept in Bellevue, Washington, in August 2020 and opened about 34 stores in its first two years of business, often celebrating more than one grand opening per day.
The new openings were met with great curiosity as most of the stores were equipped with the retailer’s “Just Walk Out” technology, a system of embedded cameras that allows customers to shop for groceries without stopping at the checkout line.
But those openings slowed and stalled, and real estate companies sued the retailer last year after a number of planned Fresh stores remained closed.
In April, Amazon announced that it would put this technology on hold and focus on its AI-powered smart shopping carts.
The move was part of a broader relaunch of Amazon Fresh designed to give stores a warmer, more human atmosphere.
