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Comment by kentosi | Hacker News Reader

Slightly misleading title. They're closing 8 of their stores across NYC, SF, etc, and this is after they just opened a few more across the US.

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And according to Google Maps there are 9 Amazon Go stores in NYC right now, so this would still leave 7.

Which is just business as usual, figuring out which stores in which locations turn out to be most profitable.

You're right, but it's weird for such a tech-focused company to close stores in such a fashion, because we're used to the giant margins of tech. Apple has never closed that many stores that quickly.

Apple stores are famous for being some of the most profitable stores mankind has ever created. And there aren't that many of them.

These Amazon stores are just local convenience stores. They're selling candy bars. And Amazon is a much more "experimental" company than Apple -- they launch and shut down stuff all the time to iterate and learn. This isn't about penny-pinching or margins, it's about finding product-market fit.

The actual title is "Amazon Go closing 8 of its c-stores," the HN post title is misleading

They built one of these near us (years ago) and never opened it. They recently announced that it was going to remain unopened indefinitely.

That’s a completely misleading title then.

HN removes numbers from titles, as an anti-clickbait tactic, but it leads to errors like this.

From the article:

>"The retailer also opened a number of locations last year in Southern California. As of last month, Amazon operated 31 Go stores in total."

>"With these closures, the company will have 23 Go stores, the spokesperson said."

That's a loss of 8 stores.

It's a loss of 8 Go stores, but Amazon has been ramping up the Amazon Fresh grocery stores over the last 2 years. There are 33 Amazon Fresh stores from my count.

Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh are two distinct and different retail entities. The subject of the post is specifically Amazon Go. That being said, on the most recent earnings call Amazon also announced that they were "pausing" the rollout of Fresh stores.

“We’ve decided over the last year or so that we’re not going to expand the physical Fresh doors until we have that equation with differentiation and economic value that we like, but we're optimistic that we're going to find that in 2023,” [1]

[1] https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail-financial/amazon-halt...

> after it opened a location in Puyallup, Washington that follows its larger suburban-focused format.

Sounds like they’re focusing on the suburban market instead. Related to rising crime in the cities maybe?

And the 2 “closed” in seattle have been boarded up for some time, they are in an area that became even higher crime during Covid and never really recovered.

More accurately: they are in an area that dropped to zero foot traffic during covid and never really recovered. I think the literal number of people that go past the store on 6th is lower than the number of crimes committed in most areas.

One of those stores was only accessible by badged Amazon employees, too. It was basically just a grab and go cafeteria for them.

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