So last Monday, the 28th, was the day Amazon actually closed on Whole Foods. Not "announced a deal," not "regulators are reviewing it": closed, done, $13.7 billion, and by that afternoon prices were already different on the shelf. I didn't believe it until I saw it with my own eyes, which is why I dragged myself to the one near me on Saturday instead of doing literally anything else with a weekend morning.
Here's the thing nobody really captured in the coverage I read: it's not dramatic. I kept expecting some kind of visible seam, like walking into a store that had been quietly renovated overnight by a different company. It mostly just looks like Whole Foods. Same lighting that makes everyone look vaguely jaundiced, same guy weighing his own kale at the bulk bins like it's a solemn ritual. But then you get to produce and there's a sign over the bananas that's clearly new, clean vinyl, not the handwritten chalkboard style they usually do, and it says something like "lower price, thanks to Amazon." Organic avocados were down, bananas were down a little, eggs and some salmon too. I did not do a receipt-level audit because I'm not that person, but the avocado thing was real (I checked, because avocados are basically the only thing I consistently buy there).
What actually stopped me in my tracks was the endcap by the registers. Rows of Echo Dots and regular Echos, stacked like they were selling protein bars, right next to the gum and the emergency phone chargers. That's the part that feels genuinely new and a little strange to me — a grocery store, the actual produce-and-dairy kind, now doubling as a showroom for a $50 voice assistant. I get why, obviously. Foot traffic is foot traffic. But there's something about standing in line to buy spinach next to a wall of smart speakers that made the whole trip feel like an ad I'd wandered into.
I'll admit I'm of two minds about the price cuts themselves, or I would be, except I'm not really, because my actual opinion is that this is a loss-leader move dressed up as generosity and everyone covering it acted a little too impressed. Cutting the price on maybe a dozen SKUs company-wide is not the same as "Whole Foods is affordable now," which is the headline energy a lot of outlets went with over the weekend. It's still Whole Foods. I still spent more there Saturday than I would've at the regular grocery store four blocks further away, Echo endcap or no Echo endcap. My complaint, if you want the small petty one: the checkout lines were somehow just as slow as always. If Amazon can get a package to my door in two days I feel like they could figure out a second person running register on a Saturday at noon.
(Tangent, but a real one — I saw a headline Monday that China had banned ICOs outright, just flatly told exchanges to stop trading tokens raised that way. I don't follow crypto closely enough to have a strong take, but it was funny reading that on my phone standing in the Whole Foods line, two completely different flavors of "a big institution just reached in and rearranged how money moves" happening in the same 48 hours, one in a grocery aisle and one in a central bank memo.)
Anyway. I don't have some grand theory about what this means for retail long-term, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims they worked it out from one Saturday grocery run. What I noticed is smaller than that: the store smelled the same, the guy at the kale bin was still there, and there's now a speaker that can hear you standing forty feet from the rotisserie chicken. Draw your own conclusions. I bought the avocados. They were fine. Not life-changingly cheaper, just fine, which might honestly be the most accurate one-word review of the whole experiment so far.
Apple's also sent out invites for something on the 12th, the "Let's meet at our place" one, new building and everything, so that'll probably eat the next two weeks of tech coverage whole. I'll leave that one alone for now and let it happen before I have opinions about it.