Amazon will shut down its Amazon Restaurants food delivery service in the US on June 24, after closing in the UK late last year
Amazon will shutter its Amazon Restaurants food delivery service in the U.S. later this month, GeekWire has learned. — Amazon Restaurants first launched in Seattle back in 2015.
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon Restaurants began as a Prime Now perk with the 2015 launch in Seattle, then spread to L.A. and other U.S. markets on the promise that restaurant delivery would deepen Prime loyalty. The retreat started abroad: Amazon pulled out of the UK in December after barely two years there, per the UK closure announcement.
With the June 24 U.S. shutdown, the service is gone from every market Amazon originally built it for — and the corpus shows the pattern held: three years later Amazon also wound down its India delivery business as part of a broader restructuring (India shutdown), confirming this was a sustained exit from restaurant delivery, not a one-market retrenchment.
First-order effects
- Restaurants listed on Amazon Restaurants and Prime members using the Prime Now perk lose the service outright on June 24, ending a four-year run that started in Seattle.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's delivery capital shifts toward channels it controls end-to-end — consistent with its later plan to expand Prime Air drone delivery to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026 — rather than intermediating third-party couriers and kitchens.
Third-order effects
- If the arc holds across the UK, U.S., and India exits, the lesson is structural: e-commerce scale did not translate into restaurant-delivery economics, and Prime's perk stack gets curated aggressively — bundled services that fail to drive loyalty are cut rather than subsidized indefinitely.
The trend: Amazon is pruning experimental Prime-attached services and concentrating its delivery investment in owned last-mile infrastructure like drones instead of marketplace-style restaurant delivery.