New York  — 

Amazon is closing its branded brick-and-mortar grocery stores, with the company consolidating its physical strategy under the Whole Foods name.

The closures, which affect its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go locations, were announced Tuesday and amount to about 70 locations across the United States. In a blog post, the company said while it saw positive signs in the stores, it didn’t create a “truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion.”

As a result, some locations will be converted into a Whole Foods Market, with an additional 100 locations opening in coming years. That will include the expansion of its new, smaller spinoff called Whole Foods Market Daily Shop.

“We’re grateful to our team members for their many contributions over the years and are working whenever possible to help them find roles elsewhere in Amazon, including across our vast operations network, as we make this transition,” the company said.

Amazon said it’s “testing new physical store experiences,” including a store-within-a-store concept in Illinois that combines Amazon Grocery and Whole Foods Market. In a Chicago suburb, it’s also building a 229,000-square-foot retail space that resembles a Walmart.

However, the issue for Fresh and Go is that they didn’t offer a compelling reason for shoppers to visit, according to Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData. Fresh was “too similar” to its competitors and Go’s just-walk-out technology isn’t something shoppers “really care about,” he wrote in a note.

It’s the latest change to Amazon’s grocery strategy and options, which have had varying degrees of success. The company has partnered with local grocery stores for delivery, but those items took customers into different online stores with separate checkouts and delivery fees that sometimes left shopper confused.

The company has also built up its its own private label brands like Amazon Grocery and Amazon Saver to take on the expansion of low-cost competitors Aldi and Lidl and recently rolled out same-day delivery of fresh food to more than 2,000 cities.

But the closures of Fresh and Go doesn’t mean Amazon is failing at grocery, Saunders said, pointing out that it’s now a $150 billion business with more than 150 million shoppers that “continues to take significant levels of market share across grocery,” even against market leader Walmart.