Amazon’s new “Amazon Now” ultra-fast delivery for household essentials and fresh groceries passed the speed test on Tuesday.

During a trial of the newly launched service, it took 23 minutes from the click of the order button on the Amazon shopping app to the drop of the items at my house. That time easily meets Amazon’s promise of 30-minutes-or-less delivery.

Amazon Now is rolling out to eligible neighborhoods in Seattle and Philadelphia. Customers using the Amazon app or website can browse a curated selection of fresh produce, meat and seafood, pantry staples, frozen foods, beverages, household supplies and more.

Customers are able to track their order status and tip their driver within the Amazon Now feature. Prime members pay discounted delivery fees starting at $3.99 per order, compared with $13.99 for non-Prime customers, with a $1.99 “small basket” fee on orders under $15.

GeekWire reported last week that Amazon was building out a new rapid-delivery hub at a former Amazon Fresh Pickup site in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. (That site did not fulfill the order I placed on Tuesday.) Amazon this week revealed more details about Amazon Now.

Permit filings detail how employees pick and bag items in a back-of-house stockroom, stage completed orders on front-of-house shelves, and hand them off to Amazon Flex drivers, who are expected to arrive, scan, confirm, and leave with a package within roughly two minutes. The operation is slated to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, “much like a convenience store,” according to the filings.

Keep reading for details on how the process works.

The shopping

My wife prefers to do all the shopping for our household and she does so at several different stores including Trader Joe’s, Fred Meyer, Town & Country, and Costco. Our neighborhood, Ballard, isn’t exactly a food desert, and prior to conducting my Amazon Now test, I passed a Safeway en route to stops at Walgreens and Metropolitan Market within a few blocks of my house.

But for the sake of speed and convenience and this test, I browsed the Amazon Now selection looking for a few items we could use. I chose a Red Baron frozen pizza ($4.37); 365 by Whole Foods Market multigrain bread ($2.85); a 4-pack of Duracell AA batteries ($5.47); Saltine crackers ($4.05); Sabra classic hummus ($3.95); and a 6-ounce pack of blackberries ($2.17).

The six items totaled $22.86, plus the $3.99 delivery fee, 64 cents in tax, and a $3 tip for the driver — $30.49 total.

There’s either a reason why my wife does all the shopping or groceries really are very expensive these days, because $30 feels like a lot for six items. Although, $7 of that does include delivery fee and tip — the price of on-demand convenience!

The tracking

I placed the order at 12:38 p.m. and the Amazon app and a confirmation email both immediately estimated that delivery time would be 1:05 p.m.

A status bar in the app showed where my items would be in the chain of events: ordered, packed, out for delivery, and delivered.

Within just a few minutes the status changed from ordered to out for delivery, and I watched as a small Amazon vehicle icon made its way west across Seattle toward my house. The delivery estimate time dropped a couple minutes to 1:02 p.m.

When a white van showed up in front of my house in less than 10 minutes I was sure this story was going to go in a different direction about just how speedy Amazon Now is. But my neighbor was getting a bunch of stuff delivered from IKEA — no one shops in stores anymore, I guess.

For what it’s worth, transportation software company INRIX released its annual Global Traffic Scorecard this week, with details on how much time people lose sitting in traffic. INRIX says Seattle congestion is climbing again, especially in last-mile corridors that delivery fleets rely on.

“The [Amazon Now service] may end up distributing demand more evenly across the transportation network, rather than concentrating congestion via larger hubs,” Bob Pishue, transportation analyst at INRIX, told GeekWire.

The delivery

I watched via the app as the Amazon vehicle icon neared my house and I stepped onto my front porch at 1 p.m. to see my driver arrive. Wearing his blue Amazon vest, the driver placed a brown paper Amazon Now bag in my hand for what amounted to a 23-minute process from start to finish.

The driver said he made his pickup from an Amazon Now-specific facility that is located near a Whole Foods location at Roosevelt Way NE and NE 64th Street — roughly 3.5 miles or 15 minutes from my house.

The driver had not heard anything about the planned Amazon Now delivery hub just down the road from my house in Ballard, at 5100 15th Ave. NW.

The groceries

The six items I ordered were packed as neatly as you’d expect, even if the loaf of bread did get a little smooshed.

The frozen pizza was still cold, and so was the hummus. The blackberries looked like any random, small pack of blackberries I might find in the fridge and finish off in one sitting.

The batteries were really the only thing I needed at the moment, and I’d have preferred to be able to buy a more economical pack of 12 or 20, but a four pack was the only option. Maybe four batteries is all anyone needs from their fast-delivery convenience store.

Final thoughts

I’m old school-ish. I like going to the grocery store. I like seeing people, browsing aisles, and talking to the cashier (if they haven’t all been replaced by self-checkout). We’re not in Covid times. No part of me really needs or wants a bag of six random grocery items quickly delivered to my front porch in the name of convenience.

I’m clearly not the target audience for Amazon Now. My 18-year-old watched me as I stood at the window waiting for the driver and asked, “What is it, like DoorDash?”

“I guess so,” I said.

But if I was sick on my couch and wanted soup, Saltines and a ginger ale in 30 minutes or less, and didn’t want to move to go get it, I might use the service again.

Or if I’d already been to the store that day and forgot some items that were needed for dinner, I could see biting the bullet. Especially if the drive back to the grocery store was not so quick.

While at Met Market earlier that morning, I watched a woman in self-checkout pull at her receipt and the whole roll of tape fell out of the machine and rolled across the floor unspooling.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it!” said the human employee monitoring self-checkers. “I need to show I’m essential.”

Amazon on Monday officially launched Amazon Now, a new ultra-fast service it’s testing in Seattle and Philadelphia that promises delivery in about 30 minutes or less for household essentials and fresh groceries. 

The announcement confirms reporting by GeekWire last week that revealed Amazon was building out a new rapid-delivery hub at a former Amazon Fresh Pickup site in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. Permit filings showed the company planned to test a new delivery concept using Amazon Flex drivers dispatched from the location at 5100 15th Ave. NW.

In a blog post, Amazon detailed the new service, available inside the existing Amazon shopping app and website. Customers in eligible neighborhoods can look for a “30-Minute Delivery” option in the navigation bar, browse a curated catalog, track orders in real time, and tip their drivers. Prime members pay discounted delivery fees starting at $3.99 per order, compared with $13.99 for non-Prime customers, with a $1.99 “small basket” fee on orders under $15.

Amazon Now covers a wide range of items that people tend to need quickly — including milk, eggs, fresh produce, toothpaste, cosmetics, pet treats, diapers, paper products, electronics, seasonal items, and over-the-counter medicines, plus snacks like chips and dips.

Amazon did not provide a timeline for expanding Amazon Now to additional markets.

To hit the 30-minute window, Amazon is using smaller, specialized facilities placed close to where customers live and work.

As GeekWire reported last week, permit filings detail how employees pick and bag items in a back-of-house stockroom, stage completed orders on front-of-house shelves, and hand them off to Amazon Flex drivers, who are expected to arrive, scan, confirm, and leave with a package within roughly two minutes. The operation is slated to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, “much like a convenience store,” according to the filings.

By operating its own Amazon Now micro-stores, the company aims to better control inventory, labor, and pickup efficiency as it pushes deeper into “sub-same-day” delivery — a sector where it is competing with quick-commerce and micro-fulfillment players such as GoPuff, DoorDash, and others.

The new stores could also boost Amazon’s recent effort to integrate fresh groceries directly into Amazon.com orders, letting customers add produce and other chilled items to standard same-day deliveries.

Amazon previously shut down “Amazon Today,” a same-day delivery service that relied on Flex drivers picking up small orders from malls and brick-and-mortar retailers, after reports that drivers often left stores with just one or two items.

On a recent trip out to Washington D.C., I visited Whole Foods’ Daily Shop store that just opened in Arlington, Va.

It’s a new concept — a smaller, urban-focused version of the traditional Whole Foods grocery store. The first three Daily Shop locations opened in New York City over the past year, and Whole Foods announced Wednesday that it will open two more stores in Brooklyn and New Jersey in December.

The store in Arlington sits at the base of a Booz Allen Hamilton office building in the Crystal City neighborhood, near Amazon HQ2. It replaced a former Amazon Fresh store — a reminder of Amazon’s ongoing experimentation in the $890 billion grocery industry.

“Pick up your grab-and-go meals, snacks, and weekly essentials,” noted a sign at the front door.

Outside, several black vertical metal-frame signs reading “Produce” and “Deli” are mounted on white subway-style brick tiles, giving the storefront an upscale, modern feel.

Inside, it feels much like a regular Whole Foods — green-painted walls and a produce section just past the entrance.

The Daily Shop occupies more than 10,000 square feet — roughly a quarter to half the size of an average 40,000-square-foot Whole Foods Market, according to the company. It still manages to fit the essentials — produce, prepared foods, packaged meat and fish, alcohol, toiletries — without feeling cramped.

It’s also the first Daily Shop to offer Amazon pickup and returns.

When I visited around 3 p.m., one staffed checkout and six self-checkout stations reinforced the store’s grab-and-go focus.

It’s hard to place Daily Shop into a grocery category. It is larger than a 7-Eleven but smaller than a Safeway — closer to a mini grocery store. In some ways, it felt like a Trader Joe’s, which have an average footprint of around 15,000 square feet.

In a press release announcing the Arlington Daily Shop, Jose Gomez, the store team leader, said: “If you want a quick lunch, need some ingredients on your way home from work or you’re stopping in for a meal to-go ahead of a flight, we’re ready to serve you!”

In fact, I was actually heading to my flight at the nearby Reagan airport — in the target market for the new store.

The Daily Shop in Arlington is just a short walk away from a full-sized Whole Foods adjacent to Amazon’s HQ2 campus. So I walked less than a mile to compare the experience.

Prices were identical at the traditional store, compared to Daily Shop ($6.99 for a pound of chicken breasts, $5.29 for a dozen extra large brown eggs, $4.29 for a slice of pizza). Given its larger size, it also had much more to offer — a robust hot food bar (Daily Shop only had pizza slices and chicken), a coffee shop, a fresh meat/seafood case, etc. There were also advertisements for holiday catering and an area for grocery delivery orders.

Whether grabbing a quick lunch, a to-go meal before a flight, or a couple of ingredients for dinner — I prefer the larger Whole Foods location. The expansive hot bar and wider selection of items make it a better option for me. There’s also a Costco a few blocks away.

Some of the initial Google reviews for the Daily Shop store reflect this sentiment.

• “Also, it’s not a Whole Foods if you don’t have a hot food/salad bar. Total waste of space. Disappointing considering it’s next door to my favorite movie theater.”
• “Not sure what the point of this place is. Went in a week ago looking for hot/cold dinner; they had a couple slices of pizza.”
• “It’s a smaller version of the same store right around the corner, except the ‘fresh goods’ are not very fresh.”

Other customers praised the store for friendly staff and cleanliness.

Whole Foods reported Wednesday that 42% of shoppers at the Daily Shop location in New York City’s Lenox Hill neighborhood were either new or re-engaged Whole Foods customers — “proving the concept is successful at driving new business to the retailer.”

I could see the stores attracting more traffic in a “food desert” where there aren’t many other grocery options, including a traditional Whole Foods location. It seems to primarily serve urban professionals, commuters, or nearby office workers.

“At our new store formats, we’re tailoring every square foot to the unique, fast-paced needs of urban lifestyles, ” Whole Foods exec Christina Minardi said in a press release last year.

The grocer said Wednesday that berries, grapes, and avocados are among the top-selling items across Daily Shop locations, along with ready-to-eat foods and rotisserie chickens.

Daily Shop may appeal more so as a place to return Amazon orders. Several customers mentioned their desire for a package return service in reviews of the Daily Shop in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

The stores could also serve as a testbed for new Amazon grocery technologies — as the company did with its “Just Walk Out” checkout-free system, which debuted in Amazon Go stores before expanding (and later being removed) from Amazon Fresh locations.

Other retailers are finding recent success with small-format stores, which need to be more selective about which products are stocked but can offer a faster shopping experience and appeal to urban customers that just need a few items, Business Insider reported.

Whole Foods has tried small-format concepts before, including its now-discontinued “365 by Whole Foods Market” stores.

On a recent earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he was “very excited” about Daily Shop and said the initial three stores in New York City were off to a “very good start.”

Amazon has had mixed results in grocery overall, dating back to the initial launch of Amazon Fresh in 2007 to the $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017 and beyond. It has introduced new store formats, paused and restarted expansion, and shifted away from its “Just Walk Out” technology.

Last week, Amazon revealed another grocery experiment: a “store within a store” model that uses automated micro-fulfillment to bring name-brand items into Whole Foods locations.

It’s part of a recent effort to weave Whole Foods into its broader grocery business.

The company’s grocery arm is led by Jason Buechel, the CEO of Whole Foods who expanded his role earlier this year to also oversee Amazon’s Worldwide Grocery Stores business. Whole Foods workers will become Amazon employees in December.

Amazon said it had more than $100 billion in gross sales of groceries and household essentials in 2024, excluding sales from Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh. The company is also pushing tighter integration of fresh grocery delivery with other Amazon.com products.

Amazon this morning offered the first official glimpse of a new “store within a store” concept it’s testing to bring name-brand items to Whole Foods Market without sullying the grocer’s signature organic vibe.

The approach, first reported a few days ago by The Wall Street Journal, puts screens on the shelves that let shoppers scan a QR code to browse a wider Amazon selection in the app — picking items like Kraft Mac & Cheese, Tide Pods, or Pepsi for quick pickup at a nearby counter after they check out.

Behind the scenes, a 10,000-square-foot automated “micro-fulfillment center” inside the store uses robots to pull items from Amazon’s expanded inventory: popular snacks, cleaning supplies, frozen foods, personal care products, etc.

The system, built on technology from Silicon Valley startup Fulfil, prepares orders within minutes so they’re ready for customers by the time they finish shopping.

It’s one of the tightest integrations between Amazon and Whole Foods since the tech giant bought the grocer for $13.7 billion in 2017. Under Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel, who now oversees all of Amazon’s grocery stores, the company is looking to bring more of its tech expertise to a brand known for its strict ingredient standards and natural-foods identity.

Amazon has been trying to figure out the broader grocery business for 18 years, dating back to the original launch of Amazon Fresh delivery in the Seattle area in 2007. Thin margins and huge volumes make grocery one of the toughest and most tantalizing segments in retail.

The company has reported recent success with an initiative that offers perishable groceries for free same-day delivery as part of a unified cart when people check out on Amazon.com. CEO Andy Jassy called this approach a “game changer” on the company’s earnings call last week.

As part of its Whole Foods announcement this morning, Amazon confirmed that it’s testing the new concept at a store in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., and said for the first time that it plans to expand the approach to additional Whole Foods locations after gathering feedback.

It’s not the only concept currently in testing. The Wall Street Journal also reported on a separate trial in Chicago where Amazon replaced a coffee shop in the flagship Whole Foods’ lobby with a 3,800-square-foot “Amazon Grocery” kiosk to sell brands like Doritos and Chips Ahoy.