Amazon is closing its futuristic Go and Fresh stores—showing logistics and tech aren’t enough to make old-school retail work

As any local shop owner will tell you, running a brick-and-mortar business in the age of Amazon is an uphill battle. That’s a lesson that Amazon itself has just learned.

The e-commerce giant said on Tuesday that it was closing its “Fresh” grocery stores as well as its automated grab-and-go “Go” shops, adding to its list of failed brick-and-mortar experiments.

“While we’ve seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven’t yet created a truly...