We've come to enjoy Amazon Prime. (For those not familiar, Amazon Prime is all-you-can-eat 2-day shipping, plus a lot of other stuff, for a single price.)
We've mentioned this before, but our daughter has a number of food allergies that make some of her staple foods pretty expensive. Ukrop's is kind to us and lets us buy soy milk several cases at a time, and at a discount to boot. Some of our daughter's foods are available, and competitively priced, on Amazon if we subsidize the shipping by buying from them regularly and subscribe to Prime.
The latest bonanza we found was our daughter's “non-itchy” lollipops: YummyEarth Organic Wet-Face Watermelon Lollipops. (“Non-itchy” means that she can eat them.) We had been buying bags less than 3 ounces for $2.29 each. These had maybe three of the watermelon lollipops in them. Now we can get four pounds of the lollipops for $20, with two-day shipping to our door included, and they're all the flavor she likes!
Granted, now we have about a three-year supply of them, but even if she gets sick of them after a pound or so, we're still ahead. Two gross for $20 runs circles around three or four for $2.29, don't you agree?
AHA! You might have caught that I didn't take the cost of Amazon Prime into account, and you're right. But — and this surprised me — we can apply the entire cost of one year of Amazon Prime* to this purchase, and the lollipops are still cheaper than buying enough bags in the store to get a comparable number of her favorites. Say we paid the entire $79 for shipping these lollipops. So now we've effectively paid $99 for 288 lollipops. That's under 35 cents each. Three or four out of a $2.29 bag is over 50 cents each. The math is pretty clear in favor of Amazon here.
Or Traverse Bay Dried Cherries. Four pounds for $26.57, or $6.64 per pound, again with two-day shipping to our door included. Compare this with 5.5 ounces for $3.99 in the store, or $11.66 per pound.
We're really liking Amazon's food selection. Foods that would be pretty expensive, but ones that give our daughter some semblance of a normal diet, are a fair bit less expensive for us on Amazon with Prime.
(Update May 2025: Updated some links and pricing)
*$79 at the time
This year I've learned a lot more about Amazon…like Gibble shared that they have diamond rings. And now specialty food. I can't shake my thought of them as a "stuff" (and mostly entertainment stuff) place.
That's great, though. It sounds like they're an excellent supplier and I suppose they can afford to carry more stuff since they've got such a broad audience.
I must admit that I've never thought about purchasing groceries or food from amazon.. I did buy some books there recently.
I'll have to check that out. Thanks
While using Amazon Prime makes this fast, you don't need it to make it worthwhile. Almost all of the food sold directly by Amazon falls under the "spend $25, get free ground shipping". It's relatively slow, but it's free. I buy freeze dried fruit from Amazon, and a case is almost always over $25, so I get the free shipping automatically. It doesn't come the next day but a little planning ahead saves me $79/year.
Hi,
ok, its no good for food =) but http://www.shoptoship.com is another Amazon based site that searches the amazon global sites at the same time (well the USA, UK and Canada anyway). It converts the $$s to the selected currency and attempts to check if the item can be shipped to the selected location in the search.
It seems that the US is pretty much the cheapest tho occasionally I have bought from the UK. For some reason Canada is quite expensive.
Amazon’s got a great customer service, I have been ordering books and occasionally also some food items from them for two years now and I got what I’ve expected every time, they were never late and the prices are just so competitive! Glad to hear that their specialty food can help people with allergies or maybe celiac disease live on a tighter budget. Do they offer gluten-free groceries?