Is Amazon Go stores sticking around? It is confusing when they say "all physical stores" are closing, but even the Amazon Go ones?
Might be wrong, this is just my observation in SEA/what I recall.
On the other hand, maybe that's the real lesson of Grocery Gateway and "dot coms" who tried to do a hard burn on this back in the day— it's a really hard thing to get right, and getting it right requires an extremely long horizon of slow and steady growth.
The goal of Amazon fresh was to say "hey UPS! Looks like we can do deliveries all by ourselves without you! Give us a better deal or we'll become your competitor". Because all those deliveries were on Amazon trucks.
Then one day Amazon's delivery needs scaled beyond what UPS was willing to take on. And so Amazon Logistics became a major thing.
Resistance is futile.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/technology/whole-foods-am...
(Sorry for paywalled article)
From what I've read, today it's so expensive in terms of hardware that it's probably a money pit. But hardware gets cheaper, software gets more efficient, and eventually this stuff will just be in every store.