Amazon Begins Push to Be Your Supermarket, Too

Company expanding AmazonFresh project, which delivers food
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 4, 2013 6:41 PM CDT
Amazon Begins Push to Be Your Supermarket, Too
The logo for Amazon.com.   (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Amazon plans to expand a grocery-delivering experiment in Seattle to metro areas across the US through 2014, reports Reuters. If successful, AmazonFresh could mean seriously bad news not only for supermarket chains such as Kroger and Whole Foods, but delivery services such as FedEx and UPS, writes Alistair Barr. Delivering perishables is obviously trickier than, say, electronics, but Amazon is apparently not all that concerned with making a big profit—or even any profit—on groceries. The idea is to take another step toward becoming America's all-purpose store.

"In the not-so-distant future, you could be using your Amazon phone to order groceries online from AmazonFresh before you watch a movie ordered through Amazon Prime using an Amazon set-top box for your TV, which you purchased on Amazon," observes Gina Chon at Quartz. Amazon hasn't confirmed the Reuters story, which is based on anonymous sources. AmazonFresh will reportedly expand to Los Angeles this month, then San Francisco. After that, anywhere from 20 to 40 cities might follow. (More Amazon stories.)

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