Here's how Amazon is looking to take on Walmart at its own game

MW Here's how Amazon is looking to take on Walmart at its own game

By Bill Peters

Amazon is closing its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores, and is looking into opening a new supercenter retail store

Amazon is looking into opening a supercenter retail location, while closing its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores.

Amazon.com on Tuesday said it would close its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical grocery stores while leaning into its Whole Foods chain - and also floating a bigger push into physical mass-retail locations and supercenters.

The e-commerce giant made the announcement as it recalibrates its mix of physical retail stores, while tying to focus more deeply on its bottom line and compete more directly with mass retailers like Walmart.

Shares of Amazon (AMZN) were up 1.7% in recent midday trading Tuesday, while Walmart's stock $(WMT)$ was down 1.3%.

Amazon said that it would convert some of the Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores to Whole Foods locations. The company said customers could still shop for Amazon Fresh online where delivery is available, and that it would open more than 100 new Whole Foods stores over the next few years. Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017.

With most shopping still happening at brick-and-mortar retail stores, Amazon also said it would continue to develop a "mass physical store format," and said it was exploring "a new supercenter physical retail concept" that would allow customers to buy groceries, household basics and other items.

"They definitely see an opportunity to take on Walmart at Walmart's own game," Zak Stambor, a senior retail and e-commerce analyst at eMarketer, said in an interview.

Along with its massive investments in artificial intelligence, Amazon over the years has been trying to make its online delivery network bigger and faster. Last year, it began making same-day deliveries of perishable goods - a service it plans to expand this year, escalating the threat to delivery apps and other retailers.

Elsewhere, Amazon wants to build a massive 230,000-square-foot store in Orland Park, Ill., south of Chicago, that would be bigger than many Walmart and Target (TGT) stores, according to the Wall Street Journal. A new Whole Foods store in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., also has a smaller fulfillment center that contains items from the grocery chain plus household goods and personal-care items sold on Amazon, allowing people to shop for both.

However, not all of Amazon's efforts in physical retail have worked out over the past decade. In 2022, the company said it would close its book stores as well as its 4-star stores, which sold items that were popular on its website.

Stambor said the decision to shut down Amazon Go locations - Amazon's play on a corner store - as well as its Amazon Fresh grocery outlets wasn't a surprise.

He said that at Amazon Go, the costs of the rollout, as well as smaller margins on smaller purchases, never added up. He also noted that Amazon last year pulled the plug on its Fresh outlets in the U.K., and said the locations never stood out in a sea of well-established grocery chains.

Stambor noted that Amazon's checkout-free technology in stores never exactly caught on with consumers.

"I think that was too jarring a shift in the grocery-shopping experience that consumers are accustomed to, and they didn't buy it, so to speak," he said.

-Bill Peters

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January 27, 2026 13:07 ET (18:07 GMT)

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