"Amazon wants hundreds of Go supermarkets in Europe"

Amazon wants to open hundreds of ‘Go’-like checkout-free stores in Europe in the next three years: 260 in the UK alone, and furthermore in Germany, Italy and Spain.

Focus on UK

The American juggernaut is gearing up to take the British supermarket sector by storm and challenge retailers like Tesco and Sainsbury’s. The e-commerce giant has detailed plans to open hundreds of checkout-free supermarkets across the country in the next three years, City AM reports.

Sixty new stores are to be opened next year; with a hundred points more to follow in both 2023 and 2024. Moreover, Amazon plans to open similar supermarkets in Germany, Italy and Spain. Former Amazon CEO Brittain Ladd told Charged Retail, not without a sense of drama, that this would constitute a “Pearl Harbor moment” for the grocery sector.

Analysts asks themselves, though, how realistic those plans are. Amazon already had announced plans to open 26 stores in the UK this year, City AM reports, but only seven of those are actually operational. As “Pearl Harbor”s go, the damages so far seem to be rather limited…