As tales of massive markdowns spread across social media from closures across the country, any bargains were long gone at the Capitol Hill Amazon Fresh by the time CHS showed up Sunday to check things out.
The store was closed up for good — a day earlier than reported.
CHS reported here on the abrupt closure as the tech and retail giant said it was pulling back on smaller format stores in favor of larger groceries and its Whole Foods holdings — including the store a few blocks away at Broadway and Madison.
On E Pike, the closure of the near-8,000-square-foot grocery on the ground floor of the AVA Capitol Hill apartment building will poke a new hole in the Pike/Pine commercial real estate market.
The Capitol Hill Amazon Fresh closed seven and a half years after CHS first reported on rumors surrounding the then top secret project and ten years after the first early paperwork indicated a grocery was in the works.
Now we’ll need to start keeping an eye on any paperwork and filings for 610 E Pike again to find out what might come next for the block.
HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.
definitely sad about this – this store was super convenient with much better prices than qfc or safeway
I agree 100%.
Honestly, it was so cheap it seemed kind of impossible (especially given the cost of just building the place/installation & operation & maintenance of the many cameras/sensors everywhere, like they were saving a BIT on labor but likely not anywhere near enough to make up for all that); in retrospect I’m pretty sure they were operating at a loss intentionally to get people in the door.
Yes, that’s likely true. Definitely seems like it was an experiment and that experiment didn’t work.
Not if you use your Advantage or Club card.
In New York, Amazon is trying small format Whole Foods. Could be a good spot for that here if it weren’t for the big one already
I popped in for a couple things when walking down the hill just a couple of weeks ago & there were so many empty shelves (I didn’t find any of the basic snack items I’d gone in for, even) I asked the 2 employees up front if the store was shutting down. They’d been told it was an issue with the store buyer position getting bounced around & that their jobs were fine. Bummer for them, I guess.
Not super sad to see what was a pretty blatant experiment/data grab gone, though. Hopefully something great (& maybe a bit more local) will step up and fill the space!
It’s hard to think of a more local company than Amazon, with its HQ less than a mile away. Certainly more local than any other grocery store likely to take its place. Do you just mean a smaller company?
Thanks to allowing drug addicted homeless and crime, the area steps closer and closer to becoming a Food Desert. The exact opposite of what a walkable neighborhood is supposed to be. But when you D3 folx support homeless crime and drug dealing, the result will be this.
Reconsider your politics. Stop supporting Socialists. Joy Hollingsworth was a great first step, but our entire are is still invaded by people arguing that park camping is OK and drug dealing is not a crime. When a business closes this is on you.
Bro, I know you’re already well into your victory lap for politicizing this store closure, but it closed because their model was a farce and required a bunch of offshored workers to confirm checkouts. Not a sustainable model under whatever economic model you prefer.