Amazon Go: the cashierless store Amazon spent eight years shrinking

Amazon Go opened in Seattle in 2018 as the store of the future: cameras and shelf sensors tracked every item, and shoppers walked out without a checkout line. The 'Just Walk Out' technology became the signature of Amazon's physical-retail push, and a handful of Go stores opened in US cities over the following years.

The concept never scaled — Amazon Go stayed a tiny experiment while the technology itself proved less automatic than advertised. In 2024, reporting revealed that more than 1,000 workers in India were manually reviewing transactions: in 2022, about 700 of every 1,000 purchases were verified by people. Amazon began replacing the technology in its Amazon Fresh supermarkets with Dash Carts.

On January 27, 2026, Amazon announced it was closing all 57 Amazon Fresh and 15 Amazon Go stores, most of them by February 1. The original Seattle Go store that had debuted the technology was among the closures. Amazon said that despite 'encouraging signals' it could not create 'a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion.'

Workers were offered 90 days of full pay and benefits, and some Fresh locations were slated to reopen as Whole Foods. 'Just Walk Out' itself survived only as licensed technology, running in more than 360 third-party locations — the concept store Amazon built to sell it was gone.