Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has announced that it will be closing all of its cashier-less Go convenience stores in San Francisco on April 1st. The closures will affect four Go stores in San Francisco, two in Seattle, and two in New York City. The company stated that they periodically assess their portfolio of stores and make optimization decisions accordingly. In this case, they decided to close a small number of Amazon Go stores in Seattle, New York City, and San Francisco.
Despite the closures, Amazon is still committed to the Amazon Go format and will continue to operate over 20 Amazon Go stores across the US. The company will also continue to learn which locations and features resonate most with customers as they keep evolving their Amazon Go stores.
The San Francisco Go stores that are set to close are located at 300 California St., 3 Embarcadero Center, 98 Post St., and 575 Market St. Amazon has stated that they will work with affected workers to find new roles at Amazon and that they are still looking to open more Go stores elsewhere.
Amazon first opened its cashier-less Go stores in 2018, where shoppers could grab items and pay automatically through smartphones to skip lines. The company expanded to three stores in less than a year. However, last year, the company announced that it would close more than 50 of its physical retail stores, including two dozen bookstores and about 30 4-star stores, which sell general merchandise.
Earlier this year, Amazon released more details about a series of layoffs that ultimately affected 18,000 employees across the company. These layoffs impacted 104 workers in its San Francisco offices and 157 employees across its Sunnyvale locations.
