Amazon Fresh’s high-tech approach to grocery shopping has come to an end on Long Island, as parent company Amazon announced the closure of all its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go brick-and-mortar stores nationwide, including its two locations in New York state, both on the Island.
The 47,300-square-foot Oceanside store, at 3620 Long Beach Road, opened in July 2022 with fanfare over its easy shopping features. A second Long Island location, in East Setauket, opened in October 2024; a Plainview location that debuted in October 2024 closed less than a year later.
The Oceanside store’s final day of operation was Feb. 1. For shoppers like Michael and Jill D’Ambrosio of Oceanside, the closure was disappointing.
“It was great, absolutely great,” Jill D’Ambrosio said. “It was just easy. No lines. You pack your bag as you go, and everything’s taken care of. What a shame that it’s gone.”
Amazon Fresh stores allowed customers to scan a code on their phones or use Dash Carts — smart shopping carts equipped with cameras and screens that track items and tally totals in real time. Shoppers could then exit through designated lanes without stopping at a register.
“You could just scan your phone and everything gets paid for,” Michael D’Ambrosio said, contrasting the experience with longer checkout lines at larger supermarkets and warehouse clubs.
Jillian Kostal, another Oceanside resident, called the store “very futuristic and a bit odd.”
“It’s a shame to lose,” she added.
The closure also affects employees. Alex Roemer, who worked at the Oceanside store before leaving for college, said the announcement came as a surprise.
“I was very surprised to hear about the store shutting down,” Roemer said. “I enjoyed Amazon Fresh as well as working there. I think it came as a shock to everyone who worked there, and to be completely honest, it’s upsetting, because now I have no job when I come back in the summer.”
Amazon declined to disclose how many employees would be affected, but said it was working to find them other positions in the company.
In a blog post, Amazon said it had not “created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for a large-scale expansion,” despite “encouraging signals” in its physical grocery stores.
The company operated 57 Fresh stores in eight states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey and Virginia. The California locations will remain open longer to comply with state requirements. There are 14 Amazon Go convenience stores in several states, though none are on Long Island.
Retail analysts say profitability — not novelty — likely drove the decision.
Joe Feldman, a senior managing director at the Manhattan-based brokerage firm Telsey Advisory Group, said the stores may not have performed poorly, but struggled to justify the significant investment in technology.
“They’re unique in the technology that they brought,” Feldman said. “But if someone needs to go buy bananas, strawberries and some bread and milk, technology is not going to draw them.”
Instead, Feldman explained, proximity, freshness, assortment and service tend to be primary factors influencing where customers shop.
Amazon purchased Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017, as it sought to expand its grocery footprint and compete more directly with mass retailers such as Walmart, the nation’s largest grocery seller.
According to Chicago-based market research firm Numerator, Walmart held about 21 percent of the U.S. grocery market share in the year that ended Sept. 30. Whole Foods ranked 12th, with 1.62 percent of in-store sales, while Amazon — including Fresh and Go stores’ sales and Whole Foods’ online sales — ranked 14th, with 1.56 percent.
Amazon opened its first Fresh store in Woodland Hills, Calif., in 2020. The company paused new store openings in 2023 as it worked to refine the concept, then resumed its expansion in the summer of 2024 before announcing the nationwide closures.
The company said it planned to focus instead on growing its online grocery services and expanding Whole Foods, with more than 100 new stores planned in the next several years. Amazon also added perishables to its same-day delivery service in 2025, and is testing Amazon Now, a rapid-delivery service promising groceries and household items in 30 minutes or less, in select cities.
For Oceanside shoppers, however, the end of Amazon Fresh marks the loss of a store many saw as a glimpse into the future of grocery shopping — even if that future proved short-lived.
