This almost never happens: Amazon ($NASDAQ:AMZN) is giving up on a marketplace. After four years of attempting to take a bite out of the restaurant delivery industry, Amazon is shuttering its Amazon Restaurants operation. Originally launched in Seattle in 2015, Amazon Restaurants was aimed squarely at GrubHub ($NYSE:GRUB) and Uber Eats ($UBER) as an alternative for Amazon Prime customers.
If you can’t see Amazon Eats in the maps in red, that’s exactly why Amazon is likely throwing in the towel. For every Amazon Restaurant in Los Angeles, for instance, there were 125 competitor restaurants being delivered by DoorDash, UberEATs, Grubhub, and Postmates. In LA, Amazon delivered for 126 restaurants. The others delivered for 15,733.
In New York, the food-delivery capital of America, Amazon Restaurants delivered for 485 restaurants. The others deliver for 22,062. That means that for every Amazon Restaurants location, there are more than 45 for others.
Country wide, the data is even more one-sided: by its end, Amazon Restaurants delivered for 6,235 restaurants. The others did so for 842,746 restaurants. That’s a ratio of 135:1. It’s little wonder, then, that Amazon is packing things up in the food delivery space.
… Interestingly, Deliveroo CEO Will Shu is from Connecticut, and while he now lives in London, it wouldn’t be too surprising if he had a personal interest in expanding his business in the states now that he has some Amazon capital and infrastructure at his disposal.