Amazon just dropped prices at Whole Foods – yes, including the price of avocados. Now, we won’t have to choose between smearing our favorite veggie on toast and saving up to buy a home. Home ownership, here we come!
Whole Foods might soon shed its “Whole Paycheck” nickname, now that Amazon has dropped prices on some items up to 43 percent.
The discounts don’t extend to all items, but the grocery giant dropped prices on many essentials. Some of the most popular newly-discounted items are bananas, brown eggs, almond butter, certain cuts of beef, salmon, and kale.
Business Insider compiled a basket of groceries that a typical shopper might buy for the week. They conducted a before and after experiment at the Whole Foods in Gowanus, Brooklyn. According to their research, “the total cost of the basket on Friday – pre-acquisition – was $97.76. On Monday, we returned to the Gowanus Whole Foods and checked back in on the same items. This time, the total cost of the 15 items was $75.85. That’s a nearly 23% drop in the total cost.”
This is exactly the opposite of what some, particularly left-of-center, experts predicted would happen after the acquisition. A professor from Harvard Business School told MSNBC that Amazon’s big purchase would mean less competition and therefore higher grocery prices. The New York Times ran an op-ed titled, “Amazon Bites Off Even More Monopoly Power.” There is no shortage of examples like these, and they point to a distorted world view.
If corporations are inherently bad, then anything that makes them more powerful must also be bad. But if corporations are incentivized by the free market to lower prices, we see outcomes like the one here: Amazon, a thriving company, took over Whole Foods, a struggling one, and distributed its products for far cheaper.
These nicer prices are here to stay – and more might be on the way.
According to the Chicago Tribune, “More price cuts on more items are expected at the 470 Whole Foods stores in the United States, Canada and Britain, and Whole Foods said the price cuts were not temporary.”
If you’re an Amazon Prime member (and what good Millennial isn’t?) then you’ve got special discounts to look forward to. Amazon plans to instate further discounts that are only available to Prime subscribers.
The real test isn’t how the new Whole Foods compares to the old Whole Foods, it’s how the new Whole Foods compares to Wal-mart. Some posit that Walmart is now Whole Foods’ biggest competitor, and the pricing race between the two is closer than you might think.
“As of today’s price cuts, Whole Foods is beating Walmart on price for things like organic milk, almond butter, organic pasta sauce and organic bananas, for example,” reports TechCrunch.
The grass-fed beef, crunchy-granola, organic Mecca that is Whole Foods is now out-pricing the nation’s largest discount retailer. That’s a win in your grocery cart, delivered by the free market.
