Amazon Fresh
Opened: November 7, 2024
Amazon Fresh has lowered its prices! Their pricing strategy has been... confusing at best, but in the last few weeks and months Amazon Fresh has introduced a new ad campaign touting the new lower prices. And yes, they are actually much, much lower. I didn't do a full price comparison -- I took only a quick walk through the store -- but several staple items were quite low. A two-pound box of strawberries caught my attention at $3.79 (not on sale, compared to $5.99 at ShopRite across the street).
Signage is up inside the store and on the storefront advertising the new lower prices in a very easy-to-read red, and a matching graphic is used for Amazon Saver products, such as these on an endcap.
Now here's an interesting comparison. Organic Valley lactose free milk is not a product I typically buy -- it's typically a very, very expensive product. For comparison: $8.99 at Food Bazaar, and to my surprise, $7.49 at Kings. Below, on the left is the Woodland Park Amazon Fresh this week, where these half-gallons are $6.49 each. On the right is the Paramus Amazon Fresh, May 2024, where a single half-gallon of milk was $9.99. Sure, it's a specialty milk, but I just can't fathom paying $20 for a gallon of milk (for milk that's not, for instance, from a local farm or something). So the prices have been meaningfully lowered, and I saw a few examples of things like this across the store.
That doesn't mean the rollout of the newly-reinvigorated Amazon Fresh is flawless. In fact, the lower prices might simply be too little too late. Placer.ai says the ShopRite across the street is getting nearly 210,000 visits a month. The same tool says the entire Plaza 46 -- which includes this Amazon Fresh, a Kohl's, a Barnes & Noble, and numerous other stores and restaurants -- gets 215,000 visits a month, or basically the same as the ShopRite. A possible proxy: the Krispy Kreme donuts, which is located inside this supermarket, is estimated to get just under 29,000 monthly visits, and that sounds about right for this store's monthly traffic. The Lodi location gets 31,000 visits a month, and Paramus gets a sad 10,000 a month.
And let's face it: ad campaigns only go so far when in-store execution is... meh at best. Even at its grand opening, Paramus suffered from out-of-stocks, and that very simple issue doesn't seem to have been fixed after three years and several management changes. Several displays and aisle shelves were just empty or poorly stocked, so there's clearly no attention being paid to that. The ShopRite was pristine. Here's a crazy one: the store has not one fresh bagel, only packaged commercially-baked bagels in the bread aisle. The bakery department doesn't have any bagels at all. ShopRite across the highway, meanwhile, basically has an entire bagel department.
I have questions about Amazon Fresh's new ad campaign for lower prices, too. I have not come across a single ad for it in the wild: not on billboards, buses, TV, radio, newspapers, online, magazines, carrier pigeons, nothing. The only place I have seen it advertised is actually on-site at the store, and mostly inside the store. Okay, so the prices truly have been drastically lowered. How might anyone at all find out about this unless they're already shopping in the store? And even though there is some signage on the outside of the store -- see those posters in my first picture -- they're sure not visible from route 46 or Browertown Road. Heck, the store itself hardly is. Once again, I'm left wondering why a company as big and strategic as Amazon is failing at the basics of running a retail chain. We'll have to see if they nail down these inconsistencies eventually. Meanwhile, check out the rest of this weekend's posts here!
Opened: November 7, 2024
Owner: Amazon
Previous Tenants: Pathmark > Fairway Market
Cooperative: none
Location: 1510 US-46, Woodland Park, NJ
Photographed: June 18, 2025
Saturday
- Whole Foods opens new Daily Shop locations in Hells Kitchen and Stuy Town
- LIDL opens a new Downtown Brooklyn location as it prepares another in nearby Williamsburg
Sunday
- More LIDL news as we check out one of their new NJ locations plus another on the way
- Signage goes up for the latest SuperFresh coming soon
- An Indian supermarket moves into a strip mall once home to an ACME in Passaic County
- We check in on a renovated ShopRite and a newly rejiggered Amazon Fresh (this post) across the street from each other
I passed by here yesterday around 5:30 yesterday (Sunday). Hardly a car in the parking lot.
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