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Imagine you buy 10,000 T-shirts wholesale. Then someone asks you how much did you pay for this good part? You would say:

  • I purchased all this stuff at wholesale prices.

  • I purchased all this stuff at a wholesale price.

  • I purchased all this stuff at the wholesale price.

Which one of the above structures is more common / grammatically correct / natural?

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Colloquial and idiomatic: I paid wholesale. or I got it wholesale. Just as you say in your first sentence: Imagine you buy 10,000 T-shirts wholesale.

More formal:

I purchased this lot of T-shirts at the wholesale price.

If you buy several lots, or lots of different items:

I purchased these items at wholesale prices.

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  • One might reasonably expect that there are several wholesale prices for different lot sizes, for example 25LE each for 100, 20LE each for 1000, 15LE each for 10,000. I would therefore respectfully suggest that a wholesale price would be more appropriate than the, as the price you paid is one of many wholesale prices.
    – JavaLatte
    Commented Mar 12, 2017 at 15:43
  • I wasn't taking the T-shirt example literally. It could just as well have been ounces of gold. the wholesale price could be used to refer to the going price of something on the open wholesale market; a wholesale price would have the more general meaning, "wholesale" (not retail), suggesting that the wholesale price varied, or that there was no going price as the item was not being traded like a commodity.
    – TimR
    Commented Mar 12, 2017 at 16:12

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