Most Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations are shutting down or being converted into Whole Foods, a move that landed just weeks after another massive round of layoffs at Amazon.
Customers were given only days to clear out the stores, snapping up 50 to 70 percent discounts as shelves emptied.
According to reports, nearly all of the physical Amazon stores will close just days after last week's announcement, with a few to become Whole Foods locations. This came shortly after another huge round of job cuts that left around 16,000 workers unemployed.
This followed the 14,000 layoffs in October 2025.
Amazon continues to claim that this downsizing has nothing to do with financial issues, but rather a shift in priorities.
"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," said the retailer.
It has not mentioned whether this failure will impact Whole Foods stores.
On TikTok, customers visited their local Amazon Go locations one last time. Shelves stood largely empty after sales of 50 to 70 percent off encouraged shoppers to grab the rare discounts while they could.
"Since the only time Jeffrey will give us a deal is when he's closing his stores, we're gonna go into this Amazon Go store and see what the deal is," said @olivia.ohno.
Even the self-serve coffee was sold out of that one, so she had to opt for tea.
The Seattle location visited by @lexnryan was even emptier, with almost nothing left to buy.
"Bye bye Amazon GO store," he wrote. "You have been my weekly stop on Friday mornings."
Amazon Go launched in 2016 with promises that tech would replace cashiers, allowing shoppers to go in, grab some items, and get out with less hassle. Critics argued that this would hurt workers, and if the closures did contribute to those 30,000 layoffs, they were right.
Those Amazon critics spent the past week doing a victory lap.
"Good. Close Bezos’ bank accounts next," said @hotboymatt92.bsky.social.
"This, plummeting Tesla sales, Open AI coming up short," @rmwkenpo.bsky.social wrote. "They only care about their power and we are taking it."
"Keep the pressure on that f**ker bezos until he has to shut down everything in his awful dystopian circus," said @voidfemme.bsky.social.
Others claimed they predicted the closures a while ago because of how empty and strange the stores always felt.
"I went to the one near me a handful of times to return items and it always felt … off in there?" reported @toepicktrips.bsky.social. "Like not quite a full range of products but not quite a discount warehouse either. And its prepped food options felt like leftovers from Whole Foods."
Bluesky user @whetmoser.com said they "went to the amazon fresh market a couple times because there's one near a fast EV charger and it was unsettlingly empty and checking out by scanning stuff with the grocery cart only added to the uncanny valley shopping."
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