Amazon Fresh: How the supermarket of the future became the creepiest store on the high street

tHere is a specter of the west hanging over Britain's high street. It's bright and empty, ubiquitous without being local, seemingly financially viable even though it's a bit unlikable, a novelty that lost its appeal as soon as it opened. It is not the fleet of American sweet shops that invaded Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street in a few months, a “curse” that everyone hates so much that it has even become the touchstone of the next general election. It's much worse than that. I am referring to the liminal and sinister space that is Amazon Fresh.

First officially launched in Chicago and Los Angeles four years ago, Amazon Fresh became Jeff Bezos' foray into physical retail in the pandemic era. With no cashiers, no cash registers, and no vibrations, they heralded a distinctly dystopian new retail experience. Here, shoppers would be watched by surveillance cameras, with the vague promise that “Just Walk Out” technology would know what they bought without their purchases being individually scanned. Amazon Fresh, an early adopter of the cashless society that Surrey village health food stores are now railing against, simplified everything on our existing Amazon accounts, cementing the idea that without a Prime account you're kind of a Technophobic social outcast, the kind of person who covers their webcam with a sticker and rejects cookies out of spite. And, the theory goes, by tracking what we pick up and return, Amazon Fresh could eliminate potential profit losses from human error and, in the process, the need for human contact altogether. Even Foucault might have thought: a little too much.

The first customers thought so too and described him as possessing a “Eldest brotherquality that not only operated from a position of inherent distrust, but also outed them for their body measurements in the process: In 2021, just a year after its initial launch, a class-action lawsuit was filed in New York because Amazon Fresh did not alerted customers. who was monitoring their body shapes and palm prints. Still, Bezos forged ahead; As of July 2022 there were 38 stores across the United States and, interestingly, at its peak, 19 locations more concentrated in London.

This perhaps explains the sinister panoptic energy of Amazon Fresh in this city; There aren't many, but compared to a continent that spans 3,717,792 square miles, there are a lot. At its peak, there were basically half as many Amazon Fresh locations in London as there were in the third-largest country on the planet. And yet, have you ever heard anyone rave about them? Or even criticize them? Does anyone really care about these neon green hubs of Poundland-do-wasabi capitalism? Does anyone really shop there?

To find out, I went to one in what I hoped was a suitably liminal and cursed place: that stretch between Shoreditch and the Barbican. Nobody was shopping there. Obviously. Which was, really, the only notable thing about the experience. The overall atmosphere of Amazon Fresh in real life is one of eerie soullessness; the lights relentlessly bright, the shelves eerily well stocked, the staff suspiciously helpful. Maybe it's because I'm used to the experience of being followed around a store by a burly security guard (I think it's because I have a sneaky aura or, more likely, because I was a prolific teenage shoplifter), but the lack of evaluation of these figures, and their replacement by lazy Amazon employees prepared to help explain the supposedly easy (but actually tedious) experience of paying without checkouts or cashiers, was baffling. “So I just tap on the app?” one asked. “Well, you can get a meal deal,” he replied. “The only thing I really want is the halloumi salad.” “Well, the halloumi salad is actually more expensive on its own, so you might as well get a meal deal.” “Oh,” I say. “Good.” I have a hard time tapping the app because my phone's battery sucks and I always turn the brightness down too much to save power and then it never recognizes a QR code correctly. I apologize a lot, Amazon employees apologize a lot. Halloumi salad is like, good.

This is the overwhelming impression that Amazon Fresh leaves you: that everything was good. It's not good enough or novel enough to make you run away, nor bad or dystopian enough to make you create a furious Twitter thread about the commodification of the worker, or whatever. Maybe that's why, after an initial flurry of interest, everyone stopped talking about it and, if they had ever started, they stopped shopping there too. While at his peak Bezos may have had 19 workplaces in London, last July he closed three of those branches, including the first to open to much fanfare, in Ealing, citing “disappointing sales figures”. The initial wave of attention on these new frontiers of shopping wasn't monumental either; Influencers who post “watch me walk through Amazon Fresh” videos barely surpassed 100,000 views. Even Novara founder Aaron Bastani, in a video titled “Will Amazon Fresh Kill Main Street?” could not arouse the curiosity of more than 23,000 people.

Basically, this was supposed to be the future of retail, and yet no one in Britain was buying it. In the halcyon days of the pandemic, the company planned for 260 stores to flood the UK's high streets, although today the only Fresh stores still clinging to existence are dotted around the city and in soulless “lunch” centres. to the desk” in London. not in the leafy suburbs of Ealing Broadway. What, however, is the difference between Wandsworth and East Sheen and Liverpool Street and Kensington?

Amazon didn't help answer this. True to a trillion-dollar business that continues to thrive, despite routine accusations that workers had to urinate in bottles to escape the relentless scythe of Amazon's performance targets, their statement was bureaucratic and vague. “Like any brick-and-mortar retailer, we regularly evaluate our store portfolio and make optimization decisions along the way,” they said. “While we have decided to close three Amazon Fresh stores, that doesn’t mean we won’t grow – we will be opening new Amazon Fresh stores this year to better serve customers in the Greater London area.” They promised that they were “committed to our investment in groceries and, as we grow, we will continue to learn which locations and features resonate most with customers.” None of this, obviously, means anything.

The limit of technological advancement, when it comes to something people need to use again, like a physical store, is novelty at the expense of convenience. If they're expensive or finicky or don't serve a purpose that a self-checkout at any other store can't, things that are shiny and interesting won't really take off. No one you know uses the Oculus Rift, right? No, they do not do it. Once the novelty wears off, one must be lured by convenience or brand loyalty. Amazon Fresh fails on both. Convenience, thanks to the fundamental weirdness of the entire shopping experience – and the fact that they only live in areas with high concentrations of shiny polyester suits and bad cocaine – means it will never be a healthy or convenient visit. corner store alternative.

And despite the ubiquity of the Bezosphere we live in, no one really has brand loyalty to Amazon. People use Amazon Prime in the privacy of their homes because it's easy, but they can feel strange because of the conspicuous consumption, because of the supposed labor practices that support being able to receive what you want, when you want, at your door in 24 hours. hours. We know we shouldn't trust Amazon, but we do, because it's just… easy. But there is no pride in this. It's the equivalent of buying porn online, the brown box you throw in the recycling bin is the browser window you close in disgust. It ticks a box, it's not something you're particularly proud of, it's not something you would advertise.

But we constantly hear that the UK's high street is on its knees. People buy Stanley mugs and Drunk Elephant products because TikTok tells them to and they don't have to leave the house to do it. Lack of investment and sky-high real estate costs mean that the only things that can really survive in the real world of retail are faceless humanoid chains that no one likes but that everyone just waits for: that's why we have such a parasocial relationship with the Tesco food deal and why we all still shop at Pret even though we basically all hate it at the moment. And even when a chain fails, like Wilko last year, which closed more than 100 stores, there is nothing to replace it. The units are empty and depressing and no one can be bothered to go shopping because ASOS has free returns and you can order whatever you want at your desk, while enjoying your Amazon lunch provided by the robot. Luckily, somehow, there is still an often empty Amazon Fresh store right next to the office!

The saddest thing about Fresh's continued presence is that, even though no one wants him there, he will remain there until Bezos decides otherwise. It is a truism to say “Amazon is too big to fail” and yet… Amazon is too big to fail. Then the Ealing location closed. So the one in Shoreditch could follow in three years. Bezos will simply move on to something else new and useless, whatever he wants, and find new ways to making our landscape more arid and dystopian in the process with whatever colony you decide to build next. When I checked my email I realized they also overcharged me for the halloumi salad, which is annoying.