Why Amazon Go stores close on weekends

Amazon Go now operates six
stores in three cities.
Getty/Stephen
Brashear

• There are now six Amazon
  Go stores in existence, located in Seattle, Chicago, and
  San Francisco.
• Four out of the six stores are closed on the
  weekends.
• New data from InMarket shows that the peak time for
  Amazon Go store visits is around noon, meaning the stores
  are more lunchtime destinations.
• The visitation data combined with the store hours and
  assortment suggests Amazon
  might be leaning into that model.
• Still, the Amazon Go format has already proven to be
  flexible, with the different stores varying in size and offering
  different products. 

Don’t try visiting most Amazon Go stores on the weekends.

Four out of the six Amazon Go stores currently open in
Seattle, Chicago, and
San Francisco do not open on either Saturday or Sunday. 

They are listed as selling “Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snacks” on
Amazon‘s
website dedicated to the Go stores. The two stores in Seattle
that are open on the weekends also sell “Grocery Essentials.”

The one exception so far is the newest store in San Francisco,
which is not open on the weekends but also sells “Grocery
Essentials.”

It makes sense that Amazon Go would not be open on the weekends,
according to new data
from InMarket, which tracks visits to stores via beacons
embedded in mobile apps.

For the five stores it included in its report, the peak time for
Amazon Go store visits is around noon. The analysis was conducted
over a 60-day period, concluding on October 22. Weekday visits
are much more common than visits on the weekend. Wednesday is the
busiest day, followed by Thursday. 

That means customers are likely using the stores as a lunchtime,
weekday grab-and-go option.

Amazon Go’s customer visitation patterns are more like a
convenience store than a grocery store, but it has aspects of
both.

Amazon Go is “sort of a hybrid because people are going in during
the workday, which shows that it trends more towards convenience
stores, but the dwell time is a little bit higher than you would
expect for those at 27 minutes,” Cameron Peebles, chief marketing
officer at InMarket, told Business Insider. “So it’s sort of
become [its] own thing with those two characteristics in there.”

The visitation data combined with the store hours and assortment
suggests Amazon might be leaning into the prepared-food model,
but it’s likely Amazon will tinker with that as Amazon Go expands
and the company is able to test it in more markets.

The Amazon Go store format has proven to be flexible, with the
different stores varying in size and products. The stores even
have different operating hours in different parts of cities.

Amazon Go is also successful in other areas, including having an
above-average rate of customer retention of 44%, and a high dwell
time — meaning the time customers spend in the store — of 27
minutes.

Amazon is considering opening as many as 3,000 Amazon Go stores
across the US by 2021,
according to Bloomberg.