7 Amazon retail stumbles, from grocery delivery to clothing stores

Amazon has attempted to enter healthcare multiple times. In 2018, Amazon acquired PillPack, a delivery pharmacy model, and renamed it Amazon Pharmacy. That same year, the company started Haven, a joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, to lower healthcare costs. The program ended less than three years after launching.

In 2019, the company created Amazon Care, a telehealth service that provided 24-hour care in a mobile app. Amazon first rolled out the program to its employees before expanding it to private employers. In 2021, Amazon Care added in-person options before it shut in in 2022.

In 2022, the company pivoted its healthcare ambitions to Amazon Clinic, a marketplace for doctors to see patients virtually for minor concerns like acne and hair loss.

In February, Amazon acquired One Medical, a primary healthcare clinic chain. Amazon now offers Prime subscribers a $100 discount on One Medical memberships.

In 2015, years after it disrupted the bookstore business model, Amazon opened a bookstore in Seattle. In addition to books, the store also sold Amazon devices like Kindle readers and Echo speakers.

By 2017, Amazon had 12 bookstore locations and three underway. But an earnings report revealed the stores were generating almost no revenue.

In March 2022, the company closed all 68 of its locations, Reuters reported.

Amazon opened its first 4-Star store in 2018 in New York City. The premise was that the store would stock only items that had average customer ratings of 4.0 or higher on the company's website.

The product selection was eclectic, ranging from kitchen gadgets to games.

The 4-Star store format was one of three physical store formats that Amazon closed down in 2022.

In 2014, Amazon began testing a series of brick-and-mortar stores and kiosks that it called Amazon Pop-Up. The small shops were designed to showcase the company's tech devices, such as the Fire tablets, Kindle readers, and Echo home speakers.

In 2016, Amazon planned to open up to 100 pop-up stores in US shopping malls. The company had 21 locations at that time. Each shop was typically a 300- to 500-square-foot space.

Interestingly, the stores were run by Amazon's devices team, not the retail team which was responsible for opening Amazon's bookstores.

In 2019, Amazon announced it would close all 87 of its pop-up stores and invest in its 4-star and bookstore locations instead.

Amazon introduced its first brick-and-mortar fashion stores in January 2022. The concept combined online shopping with physical retail. While customers browsed clothing and accessories, they could use the Amazon shopping app to send pieces to a fitting room, browse similar styles, and request alternative sizes and colors.

Amazon Style opened its first store at The Americana at Brand in Glendale, California, and its second store at Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio.

In November, Amazon closed both stores, the Associated Press reported.

One of Amazon's first foray into grocery was its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service.

Amazon started sending groceries to a handful of customers in Washington state in 2007, CNBC reported at the time.

Amazon rolled out the service to other parts of the US over the next several years. But Amazon struggled with the logistics of delivering perishable foods.

In 2017, Amazon cut back Fresh's distribution area, ending delivery to certain zip codes in states from New Jersey to California, according to CNBC.

As of 2019, Amazon Fresh delivery was available to Prime members for an additional fee. Then, in August, the company said that non-Prime members in some cities could now order deliveries through Fresh.

Earlier this month, they tweaked the service again. Amazon is testing a $9.99 subscription fee for grocery delivery, which is an additional charge on top of a standard Amazon Prime subscription.

The changes show how challenging it has been for Amazon to break into the grocery delivery world over the past decade-and-a-half. Today, even Prime members prefer ordering groceries from Walmart instead of Amazon-owned Whole Foods, according to a survey published in June.

The Amazon Fresh name got a new lease on life in 2020, when Amazon started opening brick-and-mortar supermarkets using the name. The locations more closely resemble a traditional grocery store than Whole Foods, and Amazon promotes the value of its offerings at the store on its website.

Over the next two years, Amazon opened about 44 of the stores. That number has stayed roughly the same for most of the last year after the company put a pause on some planned stores and tried to get out of leases for others — leading to a growing number of "zombie" Amazon Fresh stores.

In November, Bloomberg reported that Amazon planned to resume Fresh store openings after rethinking its approach to the chain — and other parts of its grocery strategy. Amazon also spent the latter half of 2023 testing new formats for Fresh that included features such as self-checkout kiosks and a revised color scheme.

"Grocery is a big growth opportunity for Amazon," CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his annual letter to shareholders in April. But he added that Amazons "must find a mass grocery format that we believe is worth expanding broadly."