“SO GOOD IT’S GONE” read the ones on any shelf that is temporarily empty.

But no matter! In place of human interaction, there are urgently perky signs. On the day I visited, there were three members of staff on hand: one at the entrance, which has gates you enter by using an app on your phone another standing guard by the booze and a third at the counter where you can pick up Amazon parcels. Some of the stuff is Amazon branded, but there are also – bizarrely – a number of things from my beloved Booth’s, the so-called Waitrose of the north. There are lots of meals for one in transparent plastic boxes, and an expansive selection of instant noodles. The store is, I would say, angled strongly towards the young and single. (Amazon Fresh’s USP is that it has no tills, so customers need not speak to a single soul.) This, I have read, is one of 10 branches in the capital so far by 2025, the company hopes to have 260 across the UK.įor a while, I wandered dazedly around, struggling to absorb the full – sorry, I’m going to have to use the word – dystopian weirdness. Now it stands there rather mournfully, its lurid sign seemingly aiming to attract either those who simply cannot be bothered to cross the road, or those who prefer to keep on their headphones as they shop.

There was, I seem to remember, a bit of a kerfuffle over its alcohol licence, but in the end it got the green light, in spite of the fact that there are already three large supermarkets mere metres away.

I still have no idea how Amazon got the go-ahead to set up a branch of the grocery wing of its rampaging empire in the grade-II listed building it now inhabits: an old tram depot that when I first came to this part of London was the home of lots of little antique shops (RIP). As any wellness guru worth the name could doubtless have told me, this way lay simmering despair and an almost overwhelming desire to buy a packet of Jacob’s Mini Cheddars. And yes, the result was predictably awful. But there I was all the same, curiosity having got the better of me. No, my decision to visit the branch of Amazon Fresh that has just opened near where I live was not at all a good match for the sweeping month-long programme of mindfulness and joy-sparking I tentatively set in motion for myself on 1 January.

A ll I can say is that I should have known better.

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