Amazon Go is dead. Was grab-and-go retail a fantasy?

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When Amazon announced this week that it’s shutting down Amazon Go, its 8-year-old chain of cashierless convenience stores, the news did not come as a shocker. Almost two years ago, the company shuttered all its Go stores in San Francisco, along with some locations in New York and Seattle. Another round of closures came in 2024. Now it’s going from a few stores to no stores, a footnote given that the same day brought the news that...