Opening date for Elk Grove’s Amazon Fresh announced as stores come to life across Sacramento
As Amazon Fresh kicks off its first store in the capital region, the retail juggernaut has set an opening date for its highly anticipated, long-awaited Elk Grove location.
The new, 42,000-square-foot grocery store in The Ridge shopping center will open Thursday, Sept. 12, according to Amazon spokesperson Griffin Buch.
“It’s going to be in three weeks,” Buch said about opening. “I’m super excited to share this news.”
The opening at Elk Grove Boulevard and Bruceville Road comes three weeks after the Seattle-based company opened its Roseville location, at 6780 Stanford Ranch Road, on Thursday morning, the first in Northern California outside the Bay Area.
The space at The Ridge, decked out in hues of gray with green accents, has been closely watched in the Elk Grove community since it was first built in 2022. A sign branding the store has been up for well over a year and glimpses behind the exterior’s glass showed fixtures and lighting in place since last summer.
Amazon Fresh opened its first location in Woodland Hills in September 2020 and has since been joined by more than 40 locations in California, Illinois, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington state and New Jersey, as well as the Washington, D.C., area.
According to the company, Amazon Fresh is similar to other supermarkets while being a physical extension of the popular online shopping behemoth.
The stores feature innovations like “Dash Cart,” which uses “a combination of computer vision algorithms and sensor fusion” to allow customers to skip the checkout line and pay by phone.
Elk Grove resident Scott Barcellos used to meet up with friends and other community members every other Wednesday in the Amazon Fresh parking lot at The Ridge.
He and members of Elk Grove Motorcycle Riders, a community of bikers, decided they would occupy the space until the store opened. They did just that for about a year.
Barcellos said this month that the group felt that their time in the parking lot could soon come to an end as signs pointed to an eventual opening.
“We heard in the last couple of days that they are going to open the store, so we might find another spot,” Barcellos said weeks before the announcement. “We could probably go just a couple of rows over if we had to.”
The building’s exterior is similar to other vacant Amazon Fresh stores in the area, but it’s unclear if the company is leasing the building.
Buch, the company spokesperson who also is a Roseville native, said he’s happy Amazon Fresh is coming to his hometown as well as Elk Grove.
“The Elk Grove opening will be exciting,” Buch said. “It’s a big deal.”
The stores will operate daily from 8 a.m to 10 p.m.
This story was originally published August 22, 2024 at 8:23 AM.
