On a humid afternoon in August, a few hundred shoppers lined up outside an Amazon Fresh supermarket in a Philadelphia suburb, eagerly awaiting the store's grand opening. A person in a banana costume hyped up the crowd, while Amazon staffers handed out free samples of cold brew coffee.
The event was a long time coming. Since 2022, the Fresh store in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, looked ready to open. But month after month, it sat vacant, with Amazon's familiar smile logo plastered on a sign overlooking an empty parking lot.
"I kept thinking it would open, but it didn't," Joe Knowles, Bensalem Township's council president, told CNBC. "All of a sudden, bang, it was ready to go."
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