New Prime benefit: Free food delivery in two hours

Amazon plans to begin delivering Whole foods groceries— including meat, produce and alcohol — free and within two hours to Prime subscribers in four U. S. cities, bringing a new level of competition to the already-booming food- delivery business.

The service is now available to shoppers in Aus- tin (where Whole Foods is based), as well as Cincinnati ( home to competitor Kroger), Dallas and Virginia Beach. Prime members can also pay an extra $7.99 to have their orders delivered within an hour.

The grocery delivery business — through an expensive endeavor for retailers — has become a hotly- contested space in recent years, as companies compete to relieve shoppers of the one of the few chores many do once a week, if not more: Buy food. Walmart, the country’s largest grocer, has aggressively expanded its buy- online-pick-up-instore option throughout the country and is eyeing same- day deliveries in New York. Others, like Costco and Target, are also rolling out grocery-delivery services in hopes of tapping into a growing pool of convenience-minded shoppers.

“Nearly every chain that plans on being in business in five years is moving to delivery,” said David Livingston, a supermarket analyst for DJL Research. “Most people buy the same groceries week after week, so they’re saying, ‘Do I really need to go spend an hour at a Giant or Walmart for this?’”

Itmight be a pain point, but many companies have struggled to fill the need.

Analysts said grocery delivery is a pricey business full of logistical and practical challenges. For one, grocery stores aren’t warehouses, so it often takes reconfiguring to efficiently find and package fresh food for delivery.

Thursday’s announcement comes six months after Amazon paid $13.7 billion to acquire more than 400 Whole Foods grocery stores around the country.