Amazon halts Fresh expansion

Amazon has halted the aggressive expansion of its checkout-free convenience stores. The online retail giant is understood to have walked away from talks on dozens of sites for its Amazon Fresh stores, and has called off the search for more locations. There will still be a handful of openings this year at sites where Amazon had already committed to a lease. Its first checkout-free store in the UK opened in March last year, in Ealing, west London. Since then, it has opened another 18 stores, predominantly in the capital. It is believed that sales at most of the stores have fallen short of expectations and the fit-out costs are multiple times higher than with a standard convenience store. The Times (£)