As grocery delivery services appreciate Walmart+ and Instacart are on the rise, Amazon is upping its grocery delivery game. For an extra charge of $9.99 a month, customers can get unlimited grocery delivery from Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh on orders more than $35.
Also: How to save money on groceries with Amazon Prime
Grocery delivery isn’t new territory for Amazon, but the current threshold of $100 for free delivery for Amazon Fresh orders and a $7 to $10 charge for deliveries from Whole Foods — which Amazon purchased in 2017 — means many people are turning to other services for smaller orders.
It’s worth noting that — before the new fees were instituted — Amazon already offered free delivery on Fresh orders over $35. What’s happening here is that Amazon drastically upped the free delivery threshold and is now offering to let users purchase under the old threshold for a small fee.
As a bonus though, customers can get 30-minute pick-up on orders of any size. Well, Amazon says orders of any size, but you have to visualize there are limitations for exceptionally large orders. This is the latest Prime benefit that Amazon has added this year, not long after introducing virtual healthcare services in August. And it was last month that Amazon made Fresh deliveries available to non-Prime members for the first time.
Also: How to switch to a Prime Student membership (and why you should)
As it stands, Amazon Prime itself is $139 a year or $14.99 a month. Will customers be willing to pay an additional $10 just for grocery delivery? If you’re getting regular deliveries from Fresh, there’s a good chance you’re at least getting close to the $100 threshold regularly, given the price of groceries these days. But if you’re getting consistent deliveries from Whole Foods, that’s a different story as the monthly cost is now the price of a single delivery.
Right now, the program is being tested in three cities — Sacramento, California, Columbus, Ohio, and Denver, Colorado. If it’s successful in those cities, we’ll likely see a larger rollout.
