ONLINE retail giant Amazon continues its march on the capital’s high streets with the opening of two more till-free grocery stores in Islington and Richmond.

The new Amazon Fresh outlets add to the US behemoth’s eight existing London shops, the first of which opened in Ealing in March.

The rate of proliferation is accelerating with the most recent previous addition - a City-focused branch in High Holborn - having opened its doors just last week.

The first of the new shops is in the Mall by Angel station, at the busier end of Upper Street.

The other is in leafy Richmond, whose high street has taken a pummeling from the pandemic with a string of shut-down units leaving George Street like a row of boxer’s teeth.

This includes the flagship House of Fraser department store, once a major draw for the district’s middle classes and now being turned into a complex of upscale shops and offices.

Amazon workers in lime-green bobble hats handed out lime-green bananas on the precinct next to the main rail and Tube station to tempt passers-by into a building that was, until recently, a branch of Foxtons.

Map of London’s 10 Amazon Fresh shops

Masked-up assistants on the door help the less tech-savvy to download the correct app (‘that’s the American one.. It doesn’t work here’, could be played on a loop) before a train ticket style barcode swipe sees the glass barriers slip open.

Face masks are requested before admission following the re-introduction of rules to stall the spread of the latest Covid-19 variant.

Once inside, it’s a simple question of grab and go.

Prices and the range on offer are comparable with nearby Tesco and M&S metro branches. If the shop is bristling with CCTV and motion tracking sensors, the average shopper probably wouldn’t notice.

Bosses at Amazon have expressed confidence that their all-seeing tracking technology - which follows shoppers’ every move as they pick up items and stash them in pockets and bags before leaving - is shoplifter-proof.

An experimental visit eventually bears this out. Despite an ‘accidental’ change of both facemask and coat mid-shop, the emailed receipt that landed a couple of hours later was clinically accurate.

Reports suggest Amazon intends to open around 200 stores of this kind across the UK in the next two years.

Retail guru Nick Bubb, displaying a local’s eye for south-west London’s shopping hierarchy, comments: “I suspect the Amazon Fresh store in Richmond, next to the station, will do better than the one near Waitrose in East Sheen.”

Despite being a base for eBay, Paypal, Graze and notonthehighstreet.com, Richmond is not traditionally thought of as a borough at the sharp-end of the technological zeitgeist.

If locals here can adapt to this new fangled way of grabbing groceries, probably anywhere can.