This store was so new that it still had grand opening-style signage on the outside when it closed. That's never a good sight. Anyways, some more background on this store: It was part of the highly-popular Bellevue Square Mall (and from what I can tell, this store was quite busy when it was open, so it was a surprise for it to close so soon), and occupies a small portion of a former JCPenney. Interestingly, Whole Foods apparently leased the entire space, and agreed to terms that said that they would not close the store during the duration of their lease... this has led to a
lease dispute that, unfortunately, has left this entire space empty to this day.
Oh, and for Whole Foods 365 in general: It was supposed to be a lower-cost alternative to Whole Foods (relatively speaking -- still out of my price range!). It appears that Amazon wasn't on board with the concept, as they stopped opening new ones right away after the buyout and closed or rebranded all of the existing ones by 2019. I suspect that Amazon Fresh/Go stores have built on a lot of the 365 ideas, and in particular the tech features that were a big part of the 365 concept. (I doubt Amazon would ever admit that, though!)
That's a shame about the lease dispute, although it seems somewhat common in certain situations. Definitely brings into question even more the decision to close the store so soon after opening it, however. Why not just rebrand this one like the others?
ReplyDeleteSure is. And yeah, who knows... Amazon is notoriously secretive, especially when it comes to the physical retail business, so I doubt that they'd ever publicly mention whatever the reason was.
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