Internet retail giant Amazon is closing eight of its Amazon Go convenience stores in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City, amid wider cuts in the tech giant’s brick-and-mortar stores. Several of the stores are located in Seattle’s troubled downtown district where crime and open-air drug use are crowding out big business.
Breitbart News reported in September on planned cutbacks at Amazon, which included the closing of all but one of its U.S.-based customer call centers.
Via GeekWire:
Amazon announced Friday that it is permanently closing eight of its high-tech Amazon Go convenience stores, including two in Seattle. It’s the latest move by the tech giant to pull back on some of its brick-and-mortar retail operations.
“Like any physical retailer, we periodically assess our portfolio of stores and make optimization decisions along the way,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
The two impacted stores in Seattle are located downtown, in the Macy’s Building at 3rd Avenue and Pine Street, and at 4th Avenue and Pike Street. Both stores have been closed for some time, according to Amazon, and are located in a part of downtown that has been especially troubled by crime and open-air drug use.
The latest closures come a year after the company announced plans to shut down 68 physical locations across the U.S. and UK. It also comes a week after the tech giant paused construction of its second headquarters in Virginia, which was expected to house 25,000 employees when complete.
With economic growth slow, many tech companies have shifted to cost-cutting measures, and are reconsidering expansion plans. Meta, for example, is planning to cut thousands more jobs on top of its 13 percent workforce reduction last year, which affected 11,000 employees.
Despite the closures, an Amazon spokesman told TechCrunch that the company is still committed to Amazon Go, citing a recently opened store in Puyallup, Washington.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.