Amazon makes grocery delivery free in ~2,000 US cities for all Prime members by removing the $14.99 per month Amazon Fresh fee
Amazon is turning up the heat once again in the world of groceries, and specifically grocery delivery, to make its service more enticing in face of competition from Walmart …
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's grocery-delivery pricing has never held still: the service launched behind a mandatory $299/year 'Prime Fresh' membership in 2015, and this move tears down the successor paywall entirely, folding unlimited Fresh delivery into standard Prime across roughly 2,000 US cities. TechCrunch frames it explicitly as a counterpunch to Walmart, which anchors the competitive frame for everything Amazon does in groceries.
The coverage since then reads like a pendulum: Whole Foods rolled its delivery perk back into a $9.95 fee in 2021, Prime members were put back under variable fees on smaller orders in 2023 (delivery charges for Fresh orders under $150), and by late 2023 Amazon was testing a separate paid grocery tier while opening delivery to non-Prime members. Today's announcement is the free end of that cycle.
First-order effects
- Prime members in about 2,000 US cities stop paying $14.99 per month for Amazon Fresh delivery, immediately lowering the cost of using Amazon for groceries and removing the main objection to trying the service.
Second-order effects
- Walmart's grocery delivery push now faces a rival that prices delivery as an included Prime benefit rather than an order-level fee, forcing the comparison onto basket size, speed, and selection instead of a monthly charge.
Third-order effects
- The documented swing from $299/year memberships to bundled-free to per-order fees to a $9.99/month test suggests flat 'free' grocery delivery has never covered its own economics at Amazon, so monetization keeps migrating toward subscriptions and thresholds — a structure any competitor entering grocery delivery inherits.
The trend: US online grocery delivery pricing keeps oscillating between bundled Prime perks and standalone fees, with Amazon and Walmart trading blows over who absorbs the delivery cost.