Amazon is closing all 72 of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations, shifting its focus to Whole Foods locations and grocery delivery from Amazon.com. But the company isn’t ready to walk away from the much-ballyhooed Just Walk Out technology that powered many of its retail experiments. Instead, Amazon plans to double down on marketing that technology as a service to third parties.
At its peak, 27 of the 44 Amazon Fresh stores used Just Walk Out, which allowed shoppers to grab items and leave without stopping at checkout. Amazon removed the system from all U.S. Amazon Fresh stores in 2024—not because it failed, but because customers showed a preference for more traditional checkout options.
“Amazon’s innovative unattended retail experiments are failures in the same sense that early versions of lightbulbs, automobiles, and other great technical innovations were failures,” said Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “These aren’t technical failures in the sense that they didn’t work at all, but rather commercial failures because they weren’t able to be produced and distributed efficiently at scale sufficient to make them a profitable venture for the company.”
Moving to B2B
Amazon hasn’t given up on Just Walk Out. The company is reaffirming its commitment to a B2B strategy, positioning the system for use by third-party operators such as sports venues and hospitals.
“Our Amazon Go locations served as innovation hubs where we developed Just Walk Out technology—now a scalable checkout-free solution operating in over 360 third-party locations across five countries,” Amazon noted on its blog. “The customer impact has been transformative, from reducing cafeteria wait times from 25 to just 3 minutes at BayCare’s St. Joseph’s Hospital, to enabling sports fans at Scotiabank Arena to grab concessions in 30 seconds.”
Apgar noted: “I don’t think this is the end of unattended retail, but rather a crucial step in the evolution of a commercially successful model.”
Goodbye to Amazon One
Not all of Amazon’s retail technology is getting a second life. The company is fully retiring its Amazon One palm recognition ID system on June 3, and says all user data will be automatically deleted.
The technology was installed in Whole Foods stores as recently as 2023 and was even piloted in healthcare settings in 2025. Ultimately, however, customers proved reluctant to move away from fingerprint- and face-based authentication.
