Dive Brief:

• Amazon Fresh announced Wednesday that it is now hiring “hundreds” of full- and part-time employees for two new stores — one in Paramus, New Jersey, and another in Oceanside, New York. The company did not provide opening dates for the locations.
• Both stores will feature Amazon's Just Walk Out payment system, continuing Amazon Fresh’s trend of opening new stores featuring the frictionless checkout technology.
• These will be the first Amazon Fresh stores in New Jersey and New York. Reports note that several other locations in the region are also in the works, pointing to a concerted expansion effort in the Northeast for the fast-growing chain.

Dive Insight:

With the impending debut of its first stores in New York and New Jersey, Amazon Fresh is opening a new front in its store expansion campaign that now touches regions across the country.

The store in Paramus is a former Fairway location that Amazon purchased in 2020, after the New York chain filed for bankruptcy. Amazon also purchased the lease of a former Fairway location in nearby Woodland Park, though the company has not provided updates on when that store might open.

According to local reports, Amazon Fresh is also planning to open two locations on the Jersey Shore, one in Holmdel and another in Eatontown.

The Amazon Fresh location in the Long Island town of Oceanside, meanwhile, will occupy a former Waldbaum’s store that closed in 2016. According to a Newsday report from December, Amazon Fresh also plans to open stores in the Long Island hamlets of East Setauket and Plainview. The East Setauket location is another former Waldbaum’s site, while the Plainview location was formerly a Fairway grocery store.

Another store appears to be preparing to debut in Staten Island, according to a Staten Island Advance report earlier this month. The nearly 45,000-square-foot location has the telltale facade of an Amazon Fresh location, though Amazon did not confirm any connection to the site when reached by the publication.

The flurry of locations indicates that Amazon Fresh sees the New Jersey and New York areas as lucrative new markets. Moreover, the locations show how Amazon is capitalizing on real estate sell-offs by distressed chains like Fairway, Waldbaum’s and Toys-R-Us to fuel its expansion.

Amazon Fresh currently operates 30 stores across six states and Washington, D.C., featuring mainstream grocery products, prepared foods and private label items. A few of the stores, including its inaugural store in Woodland Hills, California, feature its smart cart checkout technology, the Dash Cart. But Amazon Fresh has sharply shifted its focus to opening new locations with its Just Walk Out technology, which uses machine learning and computer vision technology to log the products that shoppers take off shelves and automatically charges them after they leave the store.

Amazon Fresh will host a virtual hiring event for prospective workers for its Oceanside, New York, store later this month. In early June, it will host a two-day job fair for its Paramus store at a Marriott hotel in Saddle Brook, New Jersey. Amazon noted that positions at its Paramus and Oceanside locations will offer starting wages of between $15 and $18.55 per hour depending on the store and role type. The company said employees will be cross-trained across multiple roles, allowing them to do everything from working a register to filling e-commerce orders. 

The announcement also highlighted opportunities for advancement at the store and within the company at a time when retailers are struggling to hire and retain store workers: “Since the first Amazon Fresh grocery store opened in 2020, hundreds of employees have been promoted to roles with increased pay and responsibility. In 2021, a majority of store management positions were filled by employees promoted from hourly roles.”