I was standing in the checkout line at Whole Foods on Saturday, holding a bag of the good coffee and some of that overpriced hummus I keep buying anyway, when my phone buzzed with the news. Amazon is buying Whole Foods. All of it. $13.7 billion, $42 a share, done deal pending the usual regulatory stuff. I actually laughed out loud in line, which got me a look from the guy bagging my groceries.
I've been going to that store for probably six years now. It's the one with the good olive bar and the kombucha on tap and the checkout guy who always asks if I've tried the new oat milk. It's also, let's be honest, the store everybody calls "Whole Paycheck" because a rotisserie chicken there costs more than dinner for two somewhere else. And now the company that sells me paper towels and phone chargers and got me through three consecutive years of Christmas shopping at 11pm on December 23rd owns the place where I buy vegetables.
I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, and I don't think I'm supposed to have a tidy opinion by Monday. Part of me is genuinely curious what Amazon does with a chain of 460-something physical stores when their whole identity for twenty years has been "you never have to go anywhere." Do they put Echo devices on every shelf endcap? Do they start doing two-hour grocery delivery like the Amazon Fresh thing that apparently exists in Seattle and a few other cities but not here? Does the guy who asks about oat milk still have a job in a year?
The other part of me, the part that's had an Amazon Prime membership since college, knows exactly what happens next because it's happened before. Prices drop a little on staples to get headlines. Some integration rolls out with Prime that makes the checkout line faster or gives you a discount for scanning your app. A year from now nobody remembers a time when this felt strange. That's basically been the pattern with everything else this company has touched, going back to when they were just the website that sold books cheaper than the bookstore downtown could. My local bookstore closed in 2013. I'm not saying that's Amazon's fault exactly, but I'm also not saying it isn't.
What strikes me more than the deal itself is how boring the reaction has been from most people I know. I've mentioned it to like five people since Friday and gotten some version of "huh, weird" and then we moved on to talking about something else. Maybe we're all just used to this now. Maybe after Amazon buying the Washington Post, and Twitch, and basically eating retail alive for a decade, one more acquisition just doesn't register the way it should. I keep thinking it should feel bigger than it does.
Anyway. Small tangent, but the actual grocery-buying experience matters more to me than the corporate chess game part of this. I do most of my shopping the boring, embarrassing way: I go to the store on a Saturday, I wander around without a list, and I buy whatever looks good plus the same six things I always buy. I've tried the grocery delivery apps a couple times and they always send me the wrong brand of something or a bruised avocado when I very clearly needed a firm one for Tuesday. I don't trust an algorithm to pick my produce, and I don't especially want Alexa asking me if I want to reorder paper towels every time I walk past a speaker in my own kitchen. That part I could do without.
I'll say one genuinely positive thing though: if this actually does bring prices down at Whole Foods, even a little, that's good for actual people who want good tomatoes and don't want to spend nine dollars on them. That's not nothing. My skepticism about the company doesn't erase the fact that groceries in this country are stupidly, unnecessarily expensive at the nicer stores, and if a $13.7 billion acquisition means my Saturday grocery run gets 10% cheaper, I'm not going to pretend I'm mad about that specifically.
I don't have a neat ending for this one. I'm just going to keep buying my coffee and my too-expensive hummus and see what the store looks like in a year. If they start putting Dash buttons on the shelf next to the actual product, though, I'm out.