In March 2017, Amazon announced the beta launch of AmazonFresh Pickup, a drive-in grocery store for Amazon Prime subscribers where users shop online, reserve times to pick up the groceries, and have them loaded into their cars at the store.

[6] On November 2, 2017, Amazon announced it was discontinuing its Fresh service to some smaller towns and cities in California, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.

The stores featured cashier-less (UK: till-less) shopping, with surveillance cameras and other technology ensuring that shoppers' purchases were automatically registered without needing to be individually scanned at a checkout counter.

While presented to customers as an automated process, it relied on an India-based team of over 1,000 human reviewers to verify checkout accuracy.

[12] Amazon still plans to sell the Just Walk Out technology to other businesses, primarily smaller format stores.

[citation needed] A study of shoppers found that while customers appreciated not having to wait in line, they felt "a sense of embarrassment and doubt due to tracking and the over-control generated" by the very visible surveillance cameras through the Amazon Fresh stores.

[8] In 2021 a class-action lawsuit was filed against Amazon in New York for not alerting customers that it was monitoring their body shapes and palm prints.

[20] The first Amazon Fresh grocery store opened to the public on September 17, 2020, in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.

[25] On November 17, 2022, it was reported that the development of all upcoming Amazon Fresh grocery stores had been indefinitely paused “pending evaluation of the operation.”[26] In February 2023 two Amazon Fresh storefronts that had not yet opened in Brookfield and Westport Connecticut were abandoned and sold to Big Y Supermarket.