Amazon has shuttered the last of its two Fresh Pickup facilities, marking the end of its experiment with a drive-in and drop-off grocery service.
At the Fresh Pickup sites, customers would place a grocery order online, then schedule a time to pick up their items. Shoppers would drive up to the store and wait in their car while a grocery worker loaded their bags into the vehicle — seemingly foreshadowing the no-contact shopping that became so normalized at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amazon launched Fresh Pickup in 2017 and opened two facilities in Seattle — one in Sodo near Starbucks headquarters and one in Ballard on the busy 15th Avenue corridor. At the time, the Fresh Pickup concept was considered yet another signal that Amazon was serious about entering the grocery business and one of many brick-and-mortar shopping experiences the company was testing.
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