Amazon closes its sole Fresh Pickup location in Seattle

Amazon shuttered its final Fresh Pickup store, located in Seattle, in December, the company confirmed in an email. 

The store, piloted in 2017, enabled Amazon Prime members to place their orders online and then pick them up at one of two physical locations in Seattle. 

The pickup site, which was in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood, is the second of two locations the online retailer closed in 2023. The other pickup site, located in the neighborhood of Ballard, closed in January 2023. 

Both pickup sites were a prelude to Amazon’s brick-and-mortar Amazon Fresh stores, which were launched in 2020. The retail giant currently operates more than 40 Amazon Fresh locations in the U.S.

Amazon said in an email to Supermarket News that grocery delivery and pickup for Amazon Fresh will continue, and only the sole pickup location was closed. 

“Like any retailer, we periodically assess our portfolio and make optimization decisions around how we operate. In this case, we decided to close our SoDo Amazon Fresh Pickup location,” Amazon spokesperson Jessica Martin said in an email. “Local customers will continue to have access to the selection, value, and convenience from Amazon Fresh through online delivery or pickup at one of the five Amazon Fresh stores in the Greater Seattle area. We’re working closely to support our affected employees through this transition.”

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Amazon owns the SoDo location but has not announced plans for the site at this time. The site of the Ballard location was not owned by Amazon, the company confirmed. 

The company has made a variety of big changes to its in-store and online offerings over the last year. In November, Amazon closed its two brick-and-mortar apparel stores, known as Amazon Style.

Just a few days after it shuttered the Amazon Style locations, the company expanded its free delivery and pickup of Amazon Fresh orders to non-Prime members. It’s planning to add its more than 500 Whole Foods Market locations to the free delivery and pickup service “in the near future,” the company said. 

That will enable both Prime and non-Prime customers to purchase groceries from either Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods in more than 3,500 cities across the U.S., according to the company. 

Amazon also made headlines earlier this year with the renovation of two of its Amazon Fresh locations in the Chicago area and has recently completed similar remodels at locations in the Los Angeles suburbs of Woodland Hills, Irvine, and East Pasadena.