Quick, Quiet Robbery Nets $60,000 at a Whole Foods The Whole Foods Market at 95 East Houston Street in Lower Manhattan was robbed of $60,000 on Sunday night. Past the colorful arrays of pumpkins and artisanal cheese, up the stairs and down the vitamin aisle, a gunman and his accomplice stalked through a Whole Foods in Lower Manhattan on Sunday night. They waited by a second-floor elevator, the police said on Tuesday, apparently aware of who - and what - would arrive there momentarily: a manager, an unarmed security guard and a shopping cart with roughly $60,000 in cash. "I'm not going to hurt you," one of the robbers said as he brandished a silver handgun, according to the store manager's account to the police. Get on the ground. The quick and quiet gunpoint robbery of the bustling supermarket on East Houston Street mostly escaped the notice of shoppers who filled baskets just before 10 p.m., an hour before closing. The men took the cash, in three bags, and fled through the bustle of Chrystie Street, the police said. On Tuesday, two employees whispered about the robbery on the stairway to the second floor, near where the robbery occurred, but neither would speak about it to a reporter. Another employee said talking about it would be "bad for morale." Even in the high-volume world of grocery sales, security consultants said the magnitude of the cash taken raised questions about the store's procedures for handling its daily haul. "Grocery stores are considered a soft target because of the long hours they operate and the kind of money they sometimes generate," said Curtis Baillie, a security consultant and a former head of asset protection for a grocery chain. Just the fact that they're transporting cash like that in a grocery cart when the store is still open - I could in no way, shape or form condone that. You're just asking for trouble. A spokesman for Whole Foods, Michael Sinatra, confirmed the armed robbery but declined to comment on the company's security procedures beyond saying that a security guard had been present during the robbery. "We'll be looking at whether procedures were followed," Mr. Sinatra said. If they weren't, we'll be moving forward to continue to ensure the safety of our customers and our team members. Detectives on Tuesday were investigating the possibility that the robbers had a connection to someone who worked at the store, a routine avenue of inquiry after retail robberies. The details of the crime suggested that the robbers knew where the money would be and when it would be there. "When you're doing a mass cash pull, you want to make sure you vary the time so you're not predictable," said Garth Gasse, director of asset protection for the Retail Industry Leaders Association. John A. Catsimatidis, the former Republican mayoral candidate and the owner of the Gristedes grocery chain in New York, said that at his stores any sum of money above a few thousand dollars was kept in a safe. Opening it requires two keys, one carried by a manager and one by an armored-car worker. He said the way the money was purportedly being transported at the Whole Foods when it was robbed raised concerns. "I think it's an inside job," Mr. Catsimatidis said by phone. After 44 years of being in the supermarket business, it doesn't smell right. The police said that along with the manager and the unarmed guard, another employee was with the cash cart when they encountered the two robbers, who wore baseball hats over their chest-length dreadlocks. As the gunman grabbed three bags containing the cash, the other man bound the hands of the manager with a plastic zip tie, the police said; both robbers fled down the vitamin aisle and out onto the street. Outside the store on Tuesday, customers and passers-by expressed surprise that the robbers were able to steal so much money, but many said low-level criminality remained a persistent problem, despite the gentrification that has swept the area. Roxanna Carrillo, 61, who has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years, said that her neighbor's bicycle was stolen last Thursday, and that hers was taken a year ago. "There are just these little moments," she said. There's a lot of prosperity, but there is still a lot of unemployment and poverty. A man who declined to give his full name and was wearing several coats said the area was a haven for drugs and sometimes violence. "Manhattan changes when you walk east," he said. Once you get past Broadway it's a whole other deal. But few people interviewed said that added precautions were needed to protect against crime in the neighborhood. Jeannette Corey, executive director of the Chinatown YMCA, up the block from the Whole Foods, said her organization had no security guards. "People feel safe," she said. We really haven't, thankfully, seen any crime. Even at Whole Foods, security on Tuesday morning appeared light. Without immediately attracting attention, a reporter was able to enter a back loading dock that was piled high with cases of beer and stocks of cosmetics and sea sponges.