Amazon now owns Whole Foods — and the online retailer is slashing prices at its new chain of grocery stores.
Amazon promised Thursday that the same day its purchase of Whole Foods was sealed, it would cut prices at its newly acquired high-end grocery stores across the country.
Sure enough, as Whole Foods shoppers entered the store Monday morning, prices had been slashed on many popular items.
Whole Trade Bananas, Fuji and Gala apples, ground beef and eggs were just a few of the things with lower prices Monday morning at the South Lake Union store in Seattle.
Here are some more items:
Whole Foods’ store-brand eggs went from $3.79 to $2.99 a dozen.
Store-brand butter dropped 50 cents.
Organic bananas dropped 30 cents per pound.
Gala (pictured) and Fuji apples were $1 cheaper per pound Monday morning.
Grass-fed ground beef dropped from $9.99 a pound, according to Times photos Friday morning, to $6.99 Monday morning.
Farmed Atlantic salmon dropped $3 a pound over the weekend.
Whole chickens dropped by $1 per pound.
And Whole Foods’ store-brand almond butter dropped from $7.99 to $6.99.
In addition to these, the store cut the prices of Hass avocados by $1.50 each, New York strip steak by $1 per pound and Cheerios by $1, among other items.
Shoppers Kate Gomberg and Rick Boretsky, of Vancouver, B.C., don’t frequently go to Whole Foods, but as they sat outside the South Lake Union location Monday morning, they said that might change.
“It’s a bit weird for older people like ourselves, corporations buying and taking over different elements of commerce,” Boretsky said.
But it seems like a good thing, Gomberg said, if the prices are coming down.
Boretsky and Gomberg don’t shop online, so their experience was different from that of Erik Swanson, an employee at the Center for Infectious Disease Research two blocks down from Whole Foods, who stopped by to shop Monday morning.
Swanson has also bought food on AmazonFresh, Amazon’s grocery-delivery service.
“We’re just surrounded by so much Amazon here,” Swanson said.
Editor’s note: Photos in a side-by-side comparison on a previous version of this story incorrectly compared different types of bananas at Whole Foods.