Amazon Fresh Grocery Stores Get Closer to Seattle and Bellevue Debuts

Amazon’s quest to conquer the grocery world continues in 2021. The company announced that it is hiring for positions at two upcoming Amazon Fresh grocery stores opening in the area, one planned for the Central District and one for Bellevue. An Amazon spokesperson says the Seattle store will be located at 23rd Avenue and Jackson Street, while the Bellevue outpost will be in the Factoria Mall.

Amazon Fresh’s grocery store — which officially made its debut in August 2020 in Woodland Hills, California — is the brick-and-mortar counterpart to Amazon’s online grocery shopping option that goes by the same name, featuring aisles filled with national name brands, produce, meat, seafood, prepared items, and household wares. But it’d be understandable if one has trouble keeping track of all the different Amazon-related grocery stores and outlets popping up.

There’s, of course, Whole Foods, the high-end brand that Amazon purchased three years ago for $13.7 billion, and also Amazon Fresh Pickup, which is mainly a hub for those picking up online orders. In February 2020, Amazon Go Grocery debuted on Capitol Hill — a completely cashless supermarket that was a souped up version of the Amazon Go convenience stores that are peppered around the city. There’s an Amazon Go Grocery in Redmond, too.

Now comes Amazon Fresh, which has several outposts in California and Illinois, with plans to expand to other states soon, besides Washington. Like Amazon Go, the store utilizes plenty of monitoring technology. There are Alexa kiosks located around the store, a pick-up window for those who ordered stuff online, and a gadget called the “Amazon Dash Cart” outfitted with sensors to automatically charge customers for whatever they put in their carriage, so shoppers can skip the checkout line. Unlike Amazon Go Grocery, however, Amazon Fresh stores have human cashiers, plus what appears to be a wider inventory.

Amazon did not reveal a timeline for when either of the Fresh stores in the area were going to open, but plans seem to be ramping up jobs-wise. The Amazon spokesperson tells Eater Seattle the company is “actively hiring for hundreds of full and part-time roles.”

• Amazon Fresh Grocery Store [Official]
• Amazon Opens Fresh, Its First Non-Whole Foods, Brick-and-Mortar Supermarket [Eater]
• Inside Amazon’s First Full-blown Cashierless Supermarket [ESEA]