Slashdot Mirror
Amazon To Buy Whole Foods Market For $13.7 Billion (usatoday.com)
Amazon said Friday it would buy Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion as the giant internet retailer makes a deeper push into the grocery space. From a report: Amazon has dabbled in brick-and-mortar operations, experimenting with a bookstore that opened in New York last month and plans to open "no-checkout" convenience stores. But the Whole Foods acquisition represents a dramatic departure from its early business model founded on online retailing and related technology. Grocery retail is a notoriously thin-profit-margin business. And Whole Foods -- often derided as "Whole Paycheck" -- has struggled in recent years to keep up with emerging competitors that are expanding nationwide with cheaper items. Traditional grocery stores have also widened their organic food selections in hopes of retaining customers who are increasingly looking to eat healthily.
stop going to WF.
If only there was a way to prevent customers from checking prices online...
Ezekiel 23:20
I had anal sex in a Whole Foods bathroom once. It was an interesting experience and looking back, I regret asking Bill Cosby for his autograph.
I kind of figured Amazon would try to get into the grocery business in a big way but this is not the strategyI would have expected. It's an interesting approach from a business perspective. Whole Foods is struggling with cost and pricing but has a good brand and Amazon is amazing at the back end stuff. Might work brilliantly if they do it right. Might be a catastrophe. It's certainly well outside Amazon's wheelhouse to get into traditional retail in such a big way but it does give them immediate access to a high quality group of supplier relationships in groceries.
Now in addition to having your whole paycheck, they'll have all your purchase data.
"Sure. That will be 47.25"
Wow, that's a great price. Make it 4!.
It'll be interesting to see what comes of this. At one point grocery stores used to be somewhat all-purpose in suburban areas, sometimes they'd have a decent sit-down restaurant, a section with more housewares, sometimes clothing or a limited amount of furniture, etc. We even had a chain around here that folded-into Smiths, then Fred Meyer, and ultimately Kroger that had a garden section similar to what you'd find at a Home Depot or Lowes. At some point most of the stores did-away with these extra features except for a few that retained "Marketplace" tacked-on after the name of the store, but even those usually limited themselves to a little bit of interior decor and some housewares like you'd find at a Bed Bath and Beyond. Everyone basically pushed to the bottom, basically going to mostly food.
Now that trend seems to be reversing. Local grocery stores are even opening wine bars inside, plus restaurants and the like. The amount of non-food stuff hasn't grown yet but I'm curious if it will, if grocers expect people to get tired of making multiple stops. With Target and Walmart having increased the size of their grocery departments this sort of expansion within grocery stores might be a way of fighting-back against Target and Walmart.
It'll be curious if Amazon uses the grocery stores as a means to receive Amazon purchases quickly without having to have a Prime membership; if ship-to-store for next-day pickup on things that normally would require several days becomes a thing. That might be one of the ways to appeal to customers that might be able to afford Whole Foods pricing.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
When someone mentioned this in a comment on a different story, I thought this was a joke. OTOH, I don't shop at Whole Foods. I just bend over and get screwed at Safeway instead.
for over priced food.
You've obviously never been to a Whole Foods :)
Seriously though, I'm mad at Whole Foods for buying out and shuttering all of the other chains of "Health Food" stores.
They're really stores that just sell high quality foods that are more pricy than the usual factory farm product. And some feel-good hippy branding to go with it. Oh, they also have really fucking good deli foods.
Point is Whole Foods is a bunch of dicks, run by a bunch of dicks.. We'll see if Amazon does them better.
Am I the only one that yelled "WHAT??!!" when I saw the headline? Not that it's a bad idea. Just surprising. Whole Foods has taken a lot of shareholder flack lately, but they're still a well-run, profitable operation. My guess is Amazon will run things hands-off, like they do with Zappos.
Amazon's no checkout will be stopped by liquor laws unless they have an person on staff to check id's also city's / states may try to pass laws like the ones that say you can't pump your own gas just to keep people working.
i love the smell of my own farts
Point is Whole Foods is a bunch of dicks, run by a bunch of dicks.. We'll see if Amazon does them better.
And Amazon is just a tator-dicked dictator... surely it'll be more evil. My guess is that they'll keep the high prices and do away with whatever minor healthyness the foods might have. As you said, they are just high-quality foods rather than "healthy" foods... the healthiness was always a pretense anyways.
if you stink when you are sick simply take a shower
Point is Whole Foods is a bunch of dicks, run by a bunch of dicks.
All the cute lesbian clerks are lady boys?!
It's not better quality food anyways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_IoNQHMFLk
Captcha: amateurs
Whole Foods + No price check = profit.
a kombucha dash button. Thank god! Someday we'll all wonder what life was like before that.
You evidently have never shopped Whole Paycheck if you think profit margins are thin. It's ripe for home delivery since the people who shop there have more money than time what with all the Hot-room Yoga and Reki to get done. But home delivery is a serious logistic problem, at least if you plan to make money at it and not just burn your Angel investor's stash before auctioning off your sock puppet mascot. Amazon has that figured out. And it works both directions. As long as you are going the the Store, why not pick up your amazon order there a day earlier. Finally if you are going to deliver things by drone they need to be small, lightweight, and expensive as a $22/oz lavender oil douche.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Not a big deal. They'll have to have some staff anyway. Either there will be no alcohol or and more likely I expect that the no checkout will be more like the self-checkout lines where if the system sees you're buying alcohol it sends an alert to the clerk monitoring to check your ID. One person could easily check IDs for all customers leaving.
That's easy to deal with. You must rope off a separate "liquor store" inside the larger store. People who are buying liquor have to check out there.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Expect to see a 'Free Shipping to your local Whole Foods Markets' click-through ad when you make a purchase through Amazon. Amazon will be able to push a large amount of people into secondary purchases as they start opening up local stores. They already need to have the infrastructure in place to ship supplies to the store. Adding a few more items should be easy to automate. The other chain stores have started doing this too.
Sadly Amazon is taking over. I hate using their website, how they use one product to lock you into another, how they degrade their normal services to push you into paid services, and have been trying to find alternatives, but more and more the alternate sites are simply links back to their Amazon items. Despite all of Amazon's problems, they're still the easiest site to use (when you ignore their horrid loading times and resource usage). Why do most companies fail at making easy to use sites. Sigh.
Or, depending where you live, grocery stores don't carry liquor, wine, or beer; I've actually never been to a whole foods that did have alcohol...does such a thing exist?
Something else that Amazon won't bring to Canada. Hooray.
I've been hoping we'd get something like Whole Foods or Wegman's here but people seem perfectly happy with wal-mart's groceries for some damn reason.
many signs of effects from media hypenosys od, feeling peculiarly uninformed is the presenting symptom,, .. no one is to blame.. cease fire stand down.. sing along.. http://strangesounds.org/
Eating organic != eating healthy. This is one of the most effective marketing campaigns in history.
If you're charging $9 for a tomato, the margins are probably fatter than average.
Worth mentioning that chains like Publix do well enough to pay out dividends while adding stores pretty much every year.
Calculating profits vs investment is kind of awkward in supermarket retail. To give an example: I know of one UK chain that actually was able to rake in huge profits, for several decades, simply by delaying their payments to suppliers by up to three months as a matter of policy (suppliers knew this up front, they weren't being ripped off), banking the money in the mean time (earning interest.) There was sufficient interest earned that the company was able to sell everything for less than they paid, and make a profit, and this particular technique meant their balance sheet looked thinner than it was from a practical point of view - think "Our assets are a store that's $50,000, containing $4,940,000 worth of stock, and our liabilities are $5,000,000". MOinvestment into that supermarket is $50,000, and it probably makes profits measured in tens of thousands. But it's amazing how a balance sheet can hide that.
(The chain's name was Kwik-save FWIW, it did eventually go bust, but after about 50 years, so it's hard to claim it was their business model that was the problem.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"You've obviously never been to a Whole Foods :)"
Well, considering that the nearest one is like 1000 kilometers away from me (about 10000 football field lengths for you US types), the answer is indeed "obviously not".
Point is Whole Foods is a bunch of dicks, run by a bunch of dicks...
...for a bunch of dicks? On the other hand, at least they shall not perish this way.
Ezekiel 23:20
They are also cashing in on people who equate:
All Natural = Healthy
GMO = Poison
Preservatives = Part of big food.
Now the food quality is probably rather good, because they are not competing on price, so they can pick the quality products. And if it doesn't have all this "bad stuff" listed above then the food is probably fresh, as it will probably spoil soon.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's not better quality food anyways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_IoNQHMFLk
Captcha: amateurs
That video is about the difference between organic and non-organic. I agree there's no difference in taste.
Whole Foods isn't just about organic food. Sure they market it like that. There's a ton of bullshit in their marketing: natural = healthy, organic = healthy, additives = unhealthy and a whole host of other bullcrap. They sell homeopathic "medicine" FFS, of course they're full of bullshit!
The simple, gullible people of this world are easily sold on the fact that it's "natural" and "organic". They'll happily part with their money for suce nonsense. However, just because Whole Foods are pushing bullshit marketing doesn't necessarily mean the food isn't genuinely of a better quality.
Bbehind all the bullshit, the food is genuinely better quality. I only know the flagship store in Kensigton, London, so I don't know how that differes from US stores or "regular" London stores, but the quality to me seems undoubtably better.
Most of it seems down to freshness. The most well known "upmarket" food store over here is Waitrose, and the difference is unbelievable. I buy quail eggs from Waitrose and more often than not they are rubbery and have clearly been sitting on the shelf for too long. The air sac is larger which means they've been in storage for longer as the amount of air let inside the shell is directly proportionate to the time they've been exposed to air since hatching.
The differenct varieties of a single food item is much better in Whole Foods. In the south-east of England, fruit is the main food crop. If you go into a regular food store, you'll see the same old varieties sold over and over again. For apples, you get things like Royal Gala, Pink Lady, Golden Delicious, etc, etc. These are chosen because they are varieties that produce large fruit in abundance and make more produce per acre of land. The varieties that taste better aren't such abundant producers so they don't get stocked by food stores that focus on cheap prices.
The meats are better tasting, because they've been aged for longer in the right conditions. This costs more but produces a better product.
The fish is fresh. It's not been sitting around on a boat off-sea for weeks, it's often caught in dayboats which means it was caught within the last 48 hours. This costs more, but improves the product.
The wine is better because it's from smaller vinyards that focus on quality rather than mass production. The large food store chains can't do this because they need to reduce the number of suppliers they have to reduce overheads.
The fruit and veg is better because it's been picked wen ripe and transported quickly. Most food stores buy the food when it's unripe and have it ripen in slower means of transit.
None of this has to do with whether it's organic or not and in fact I ratrely buy organic from Whole Foods if I have the choice.
One of the last big union strongholds was grocery, with Kroger and Safeway/Albertsons employees being unionized. They've been facing stiff competition from non-union Walmart, Trader Joe's, Costco, and Target and some new non-union entrants like Aldi.
Now with Amazon 's big push into the grocery business, unions are setup for even bigger losses.
I've often wondered if you could get around those laws by creating a co-operative and having your customers be part owners and employees of the co-op. Basically create a gas station where in order to purchase from it you are required to be a member (owner) and employee which permits you to pump your own gas.
I'm not sure if the powers that be would like this blatant end-around of their shitty laws or be enthralled at the communal hippie co-op that's replacing evil capitalist enterprises. I suspect that they might try to pass a law that says you can't pump your own gas even if you are an employee, but this is where we can introduce some libertarian thinking so that employees aren't pumping gas for themselves but for a corporate entity that they are representing, like the crazy people who insist they're not driving, just traveling seem to do.
I don't know if it would be as easy with liquor, but at the same time the person would also be guilty of selling the liquor to themselves, which may prevent people from doing it, but doesn't help the company avoid losing its liquor license.
What could possibly go wrong?
It should be interesting when Amazon decides to look for efficiencies in the Whole Paycheck experience.
I think there's a bit more to the Whole Foods business model. The high prices keep traffic low.
There's a local chain here called "Market Basket". It's a family run chain that was in the news a few years back when the employees went on strike to defend the ousted CEO. The customer service is excellent, the meat and produce good, and the prices are the lowest of any of the local chains. The problem is that it's always *packed* with shoppers. The aisles are congested, and sometimes I can't even find parking. Every day is Apocalypse preparation day there. At times I've had to wait twenty minutes for deli service, even though they've got five guys behind the counter working like sled dogs.
So if I need one or two things in a hurry I can't at the convenience store, I'll breeze into my local Whole Foods. I'll park withing fifty feet of the front door, walk right up to the meat counter and then right out to checkout, and there's seldom anyone in front of me. An expedition that would take over half an hour at Market Basket is done and dusted in five minutes at Whole Foods, and I pay for the privilege.
By any objective standard, Market Basket is a more sensible place to buy groceries; Consumer Reports ranks it second out of sixty American chains in their most recent evaluation; Whole Foods comes in #27, largely because of their obscene prices. But it's almost like they're in different businesses because they provide different customer experiences.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
to avoid Whole Foods
I never liked the store anyway - too posh and the people attracted by this. There is now one in the city I live for half a year or so, I never went there.
Not a Health-Food store, but Trader Joe beats it by miles.
Many states require a seperate store for liquor purchases, some do not. This is usually where the seperate liquor store thing comes from. In Florida, they recently tried to abolish the seperate liquor store requirement, which would have been a bad idea since it would have destroyed local businesses and would have allowed hard liquor in stores where children might see them and become curious about them, and might encourage impulse purchases. Rick Scott wisely vetoed the bill, having seen the effects of alcoholism in his family.
The seperation laws often do not include wine or beer which can be sold in the main store.
How does a good Christian virgin boy like you know about lady boys? Got some issues creimer?
Love market basket. Agree that it is crazy sometimes. Have you tried saturday mornings? The ones closest to me are an entirely different experience on saturday mornings vs sunday afternoons - they actually have open checkouts without lines!!!!
That's easy to deal with. You must rope off a separate "liquor store" inside the larger store. People who are buying liquor have to check out there.
As someone who's been inside the Amazon Go, I don't see it working out like this. You don't check out within the store. You touch your phone to a scanner to enter, pick up your items, and then leave. Then a few minutes after you're outside the store, you get a notification with your receipt. They DO have They must also be confident about something if they end up using the automated checkout in Whole Foods.a place in the store where it looks like they have plans to carry alcohol, but there's currently nothing there. They must be trying to figure out the logistics of that still.
How does a good Christian virgin boy like you know about lady boys?
I work with a lot of ex-military folks. Most of the Vietnam vets have gone through Bankok at one time or another during the war. I've heard quite a few stories about the prostitutes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know it's redundant to say given what makes Americans what they are is what they do not know.
Other countries with BETTER food (more regulations) spend TWICE as much on food as we do. We complain as a bigger portion of our income goes into food and act like the world is ending but in reality we spend less of our income on food (for what we get) than most the planet. Our extremely cheap clothing and extremely cheap food has us BLINDED by the fact our incomes have been dropping for 40 years; which is another aspect to the problem which fuels this sick food industry.
It's junk food... and I don't mean fast food... they literally put fillers like DIRT into coffee, other foods have sawdust, pink slime... oh, your chicken nuggets are still slime... pink chicken slime without taste (and pad it with soy, possibly sawdust too?)-- they add coloring and flavoring... all so they can say it's chicken. Juices do lesser but similar things while still able to claim it's 100% juice.
Industrial farming lowers quality of legit food as well; which is a global problem. Trace minerals have been gone from our diets before we were born. So we take supplements and fortify things which do not get absorbed properly.
Oh damn....thanks for pointing out that patent they approved. I didn't think of that. That's twisted. https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
Right now Whole Foods pays their employees a reasonable amount (as I understand), provides benefits and employee discounts. Good things, even if their prices are rather high.
I think Amazon is going to ruin Whole Foods as a company. The MBAs will squeeze out the soul along with more cash. Amazon will do the same thing that they do to their own employees: work them into the ground.
Nothing new there... I'll keep shopping at Trader Joe's, thanks.
-
All Natural = Healthy
GMO = Poison
Fake news
The high prices are part of the appeal. Keeps the riff-raff out so you don't have to spend time in line with peasants.
Are American children particularly vulnerable to this, because everywhere else (say, in Europe) alcohol is available without id and yet children are somehow strong enough to not succumb to alcoholism or impulse purchasing vodka or whatever on the way to school.
I think that works rather the other way, alcohol being illegal until way into adulthood (21) makes it an attractive target since outlaw stuff is cool. Maybe if we don't make such a big deal about it and stop having ridiculous cut-off ages and times, there would be less binging also.
Or, depending where you live, grocery stores don't carry liquor, wine, or beer; I've actually never been to a whole foods that did have alcohol...does such a thing exist?
I've never seen one that didn't.
A river bought out the entire foods market!
Where did a river get $137B?
How many companies did it have to buy?
Is it just a badly set up headline?
My wife used to work in the wholesale food business, and she could tell you about how produce is graded. The cheap stuff is never the top quality. The real low quality stuff is animal feed, the next rung up is stuff that ends up canned or made into sauces (think spaghetti sauce). If you want an interesting contrast, compare the fresh produce at Whole Foods to the fresh produce at Walmart. The place they really get you at Whole Foods is the prepared food. People will pile up at the food bar - the foodl is mediocre at best, but it is fast and better than eating at Icky-D's.
"The air sac is larger which means they've been in storage for longer as the amount of air let inside the shell is directly proportionate to the time they've been exposed to air since hatching."
Holy hell they must be old if they're already hatched!
Grocery stores are practically recession proof. Everyone has to eat even when times are hard.
That's true to a degree but it is definitely not true for upscale grocery stores like Whole Foods. If people fall on hard times shopping at Whole Foods is among the first things to go by the wayside.
Fake fake news
In an economic downturn Whole Foods would be a boat anchor.
Grocery stores are practically recession proof. Everyone has to eat even when times are hard.
True, but as disposable income shrinks, most people start to reconsider whether $6 a dozen cage free, no-stress, gluten free-fed, artisan handmade coop housed eggs are really worth the price premium over the $2 a dozen regular eggs.
There is a demographic of people that "always" have money, and you want them as your customers. Do you think Rolex or Louis Vutton were really hurt that much during Great Recession of 2008? That is the market that Whole Foods tries to go after.
As a good Christian virgin boy, you must have told them they're going to hell, right?
The whole foods near you don't let you self serve growlers of beer?
It's what happens when we let alcoholics write the liquor laws.
It's not the GMO part of GMO that's the problem, it's the fact that it's been genetically modified to be resistant to herbicide, and the fact that crops are drenched in glyphosate herbicide just before harvest in a process called 'dessication', which leaves detectable amounts of glyphosate residue in those crops, which ends up in your body, fucking up your metabolic processes that's the problem.
Shop in places that already have that with automated checkout. You can go register your credit card with them and it then asked if you are that person if you checkout with booze. Been in other places where it lights up and a person comes around to verify.
Plenty of solutions already in place for that.
As a good Christian virgin boy, you must have told them they're going to hell, right?
These men have already gone to hell for their country. I thanked them for their service.
Whole Foods also only sells homeopathic medicine, which is one of the biggest fraud industries out there.
The problem is that it's always *packed* with shoppers. The aisles are congested, and sometimes I can't even find parking. Every day is Apocalypse preparation day there. At times I've had to wait twenty minutes for deli service
Isn't all of that solved by just opening more locations?
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Whole Foods was never a majority of our grocery budget, but we've always gone there fairly regularly, until now. Buh-bye, Whole Foods! It's too bad. They had some really good stuff that we couldn't get other places.
I don't respond to AC's.
Whole Foods also sold items that weighed less than labeled. I am sure that helped their margins.
Whole Foods staff appear to be giving a man a beat-down at the entrance to their Union Square store in NYC [Image stabilized version]
Whole Foods chain faces NYC probe after investigators found 'worst case of overcharges'
Whole Foods drops security firm after Calif. store attack
Whole Foods goes 'full mafia' on 70-year-old woman
"drenched in glyphosate".....you literally have no idea really of how little glyphosate actually is used. Plus there's no credible evidence that "detectable" amounts (some tiny ppm?) even are bad for you in any way. The LD50 number for glyphosate says that it is less toxic than caffeine or table salt.
There is a demographic of people that "always" have money, and you want them as your customers. Do you think Rolex or Louis Vutton were really hurt that much during Great Recession of 2008? That is the market that Whole Foods tries to go after.
There is a big difference between selling a $1000 purse and selling a pint of ice cream for and extra few bucks. People buy a Rolex because they can show off how rich they are. Lot harder to do that with stuff you eat.
Oh STFU. We're not talking about 'falling over dead from glyphosate poisoning' here, we're talking about strange chronic health problems that doctors can't figure out WHY you have them, but that started showing up in countries that use Roundup shortly after Roundup use started to skyrocket.
I'm not even going to bother debating this. Nobody will know the truth about any of it until long after we're all dead from old age, or Monsanto goes out of business, whichever comes first. Believe whatever the fuck you want.
I would expect the margins are thin enough that they need an extreme amount of sales per store to keep things running.
They went through BangCock?
Great, now I have even more reasons to avoid Whole Foods.
Which is sad, cause it's on the bus route that goes past my house.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This is exactly how movements like the ant-vaxxers get started. I personally don't doubt that trace glyphosates are problematic, I worked as a medicinal chemist for 20 years, so know a thing or two. But the attitude that "I'm right, you're wrong, and nothing you have to say is relevant, important, or worthy of discussion" is exactly how we end up with outbreaks of measles in the 21st century.
This is trivially solved by flagging liquor as special items that need a human ID checker. Target and other stores already do that already for self-checkout. Or just have customers' IDs/licenses tied to their Amazon account. It's all in their profile anyway.
Oh, you naive fool. I've worked checkout. I know people who've done that. Kids will always try to steal it. Always. Flag away. Won't stop them. They put a lot of time and effort into trying to get it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How many Olympic pools is that?
Just because a women rejects your advances, doesn't mean she is a lesbian.
Love Market Basket, too. It's better priced than Walmart on most items. They'll have some specialty prepared meats that have just a different label than ones at Target at 1-2 bucks cheaper.
The grocery business is very labor-intensive. Unless Amazon has a plan to automate, they are unlikely to succeed, unless there is enough of a market for Amazon Prime Rib, delivered by drone.
My problem is the lack of labeling.
Look- if GMO producers simply labeled as GMO and charged 10% less, after less than a year most people would be eating GMA and have no problem with GMO. They are going about this the wrong way.
It should be "GMO and lound and proud" instead of "we are sneaky basters who spend millions to hide the fact something is GMO and that shouldn't make you suspicious at all!"
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Oh STFU. We're not talking about 'falling over dead from glyphosate poisoning' here, we're talking about strange chronic health problems that doctors can't figure out WHY you have them, but that started showing up in countries that use Roundup shortly after Roundup use started to skyrocket.
Sound just like the EM sickness and the anti-vaxxers. Oddly enough, those people can be found in clusters around Whole Foods locations. Clearly they know their market!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's not the cheapest of brands. That have good market penetration for upper income neighborhoods. They can also re-purpose under producing stores into smaller stores while using the extra space for shipping service storage. It also gives them bases of operations for possible drone delivery operations. It gives them even more buying power for their grocery services. Amazon also has more money than it knows what to do with and equity you can leverage is a good thing. Although smaller on the whole it's a shot across the bow of Costco and Walmart. I can even see the day coming when Amazon with likely buy out Costco.
252 Libraries of Congress (Library of Congresses?), but I think I may have missed a unit conversion somewhere.
The irony of a lot of people on TV who tout and boast of just how easy it it is to order something on the Web on commercials - as compared to Brick and Mortar stores.. They say Nothing about returning the item: You have to re-wrap the item, put it in a box, wait in line forever at the post office. And try again!. If something doesn't fit me or appeal to me at a brick and mortar store. I can also put it back up on the shelf or quickly drive back if I find it to be broke. Return facilities at the store are usually pretty quick. And most of the times you can wait till you need something else at that store, so it's not a wasted trip. Office Max gives you 2 weeks to return an item. This alone, makes Office Max my first choice for items! I want to encourage more time limit.. It will lessen online shopping! Online shopping is still priceless for hard to get items. On the other hand if online beats brick and mortar, my next car or motorcycle may have to be bought online with me never sitting in it. - Or test driving it. Example: Officemax sale - I liked being able to hold my home/office 24 port switch in my hands to see the craftsmanship.. Examined it in my hands and eyes. Read the side of the box to get all the information I could get out of it. Took it home and it been running cold as ice.. and it's intelligent. Sped up my network a bit, and has been running nice since I got it. (Got a 2 year warranty on it. So I'm not worried about failure.)
Damnit.. I have more questions than I have answers when it comes to eating wheat and what it does to me and I get shouted down and name-called when I even BOTHER to try to find answers to those questions. Worse, I get people telling me "LOL it's all in your head, eat your wheat and STFU" when I've proven over and over again that it's not the case. I've even accidentally eaten something with wheat in it, for weeks on end, only discovering it had wheat in it after wondering why I was having problems again. It's not gluten because I can eat other grains that contain gluten (spelt, oats) and I have no problems, so it's clearly something else in wheat. Having read all that, are you going to sit there, having been a 'medicinal chemist for 20 years', and tell me it's all in my head? If you're going to mock or ridicule me don't even bother responding, I've had quite enough of that over this subject over the last 15 or so years, but if you want to have a rational, intelligent conversation about it, then please do.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
It's the old accounting koan: when a fixed costs variable and variable costs fixed?
When they're unit costs. The way you get prices down is to amortize your fixed costs like store rent over as many shoppers as possible. Even the aisles at MB are noticeably more narrow than typical.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
EM sickness is real, it's just that the cause is mental rather than physical. You can think yourself into being ill and these people end up doing so. The placebo effect isn't inherently good.
http://www.wisebread.com/7-thi...
Pharmacy can't be members only fed and liquor (some states).
If people don't want modern preservatives, BPA, MSG, GMO, or whatever today's vilified buzzword is, I'm generally ok with it.
What peeves me is when the primary difference is labelling and presentation. It's increasingly a problem everywhere, but Whole Foods does it more than anyone:
* Sugar => Evaporated Cane Juice
* Contains 10% whole grains => Made with 100% Whole Wheat (and other ingredients)
* Raisins => Gluten-free, Vegan, Kosher certified dried grapes
* High Fructose Corn Syrup => High Fructose Cactus Syrup (agave syrup)
* Artificial vanilla flavor => All Natural vanilla flavor (made from fermented grains without any vanilla pods)
Even the cold, hard numbers of the nutritional facts are being gamed through reduced serving sizes and rounding.
It is. I also shop at Market Basket (I've been to 5 of them). If you go during the odd hours there's few people there, such as right before they close. A completely packed store was poorly designed for the area it's in. They could have had wider isles, made a second story (Wegmans does that), etc... They probably couldn't buy enough retail space to make the store they needed in key!'s location.
By the way, their prices have gone up since the strike. If you've kept blindly buying there because they have historically had the best prices then you should lift up your head and look around more.
You can reduce your margins to nothing and if you double space end up with a paper even longer than one with large margins.
Man, you really need that seminar!
You sound much like my ex-wife. She had a problem with gluten for a long time and for most of the time, doctors told her it was "all in her head" since tests for Celiac disease all came back negative. We finally figured out while we were married that she was gluten-sensitive (all gluten, not just wheat like you), and if she avoided eating it she did much better and didn't get migraines and have CFS like she did with gluten.
But the long-term fallout was that ended up distrusting the medical profession greatly, and believes in just about any "alternative medicine" BS that promises to make her feel better. It was a significant factor in our divorce--that quackery costs a lot of money, and she simply couldn't be convinced that it was BS, despite the fact that she visited these quacks for years until *I* came along and figured out for her that her problem was gluten, and I'm an engineer, not a doctor (or quack-doctor); none of the quacks, despite all their talk about "holistic health" and all the various fads they jump on, could figure it out, and just fed her with a bunch of expensive "supplements" based on some stupid arm test.
So be careful not to go the other way. The medical profession does (did?) seem to have a problem in not acknowledging that there's a whole lot about human biology they don't understand yet, and ascribing symptoms they can't explain with existing tests to psychosomatic illness, but just because the medical profession is flawed doesn't mean the alternatives are any better--they're not.
It's really too bad that doctors aren't trained to be more like engineers. I can point to a bunch of things where the medical profession was lacking, or outright wrong, and it took a long time for them to come around. Phrenology is a famous example in the far past, but gut bacteria is a very current one: they're only now acknowledging how much of a role it has in our health, and how different it can be person-to-person. It wasn't very long ago that they thought the appendix was completely useless, and only now are they finally acknowledging its true purpose. So unfortunately, there's really not enough scientific thinking in medicine, and too many assumptions about the completeness of their knowledge. Personally, I think part of the problem is the lack of scientific background on the part of the practitioners; many of them tend to be religious after all, so they have a hard time accepting the role of evolution in our biology, and how that makes us all rather different from each other in very small but important ways. When you believe the "God created us in his image", that mindset isn't very compatible with how biology really works.
Wait, why would they drench a plant in herbicide just before harvesting? You use the herbicide to kill off the weeds while the plant is growing, to reduce competition for resources. I can't think of a reason you'd need to really, really kill new weeds just before collecting the food from plants that are already fully grown and ripened.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Bezos: "Alexa, buy me something from Whole Foods" Alexa: "Buying Whole Foods" Bezos: Shit Jeff Lewis @ChicagoPhotoSho https://twitter.com/ChicagoPho...
How does that add to the conversation? Long before self-checkout your statement was still correct, so how is it naive to think that self-checkout can compare when there are tens of thousands of stores that have self-checkout and already do compare?
The fool is you.
Why should GMO producers charge 10% less? Perhaps the GMO has a benefit that makes it work more than its Non GMO counterpart.
The problem with labeling is that GMO is considered Scary. And having this warning label for GMO products is just to discourage people from using it without any Proven Science to back up why they shouldn't.
I would say that there should be tough standards so a product can post that it is non-GMO. Because chances are some of these GMO free products are still in some part made with GMO.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Sure they are safe. Because corporations always declare the safe levels honestly. See https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html
organic = healthy,
And they're totally right about that! I used to only eat inorganic foods because they were cheap. I had almost no energy, was getting thin, and incredibly constipated. The doctor told me to start eating organic foods and I started feeling better in hours./P.
I think there's a bit more to the Whole Foods business model. The high prices keep traffic low.
Where do you live that is so hipster free? I live within walking distance of a Whole Foods and they have about 15 registers open all day and the checkout line alone takes 10+ minutes. I've been to one in DC that is worse, that has over 25 registers and the line to checkout goes to the back of the store. That DC Whole Foods uses the Fry's Electronics model for its express checkout. It has about 10 express checkout registers with a single line that goes pretty quickly, but is insanely long.
I don't have 'beliefs' to speak of, and I don't 'believe' in so-called 'alternative medicine'. I make the most rational choices I can based on the best information I can. Some of that information may be personally anecdotal; you have to do what works best for you. The 'Blood Type Diet' turned out to be largely nonsense, but it did get me to stop eating wheat long enough for the problems I was having to reverse themselves.
It's really too bad that doctors aren't trained to be more like engineers.
I don't have a college degree; I couldn't afford to get one. But I will claim to have an 'engineering background', and have been a Maker of Things in places I've worked. If you've got an engineering background, then you know there are 'engineers', then there are 'Engineers', if you catch my drift. The same goes for doctors. There are doctors who just learned everything by rote, they don't think too hard or too deep about most things, and for the most part they could be replaced by a robot. Then there's Doctors, who are a cut (or several) above the rest; they are few and far between. I've met a few. They're hard to get in to see usually. So you get people with weird digestive problems, and your garden-variety doctor, more interested in quantitiy than quality, labels it 'Irritable Bowel Syndrome' and sends you home, never looking deeper into the problem. it's a cookie-cutter approach to medicine, when peoples' physiology can be as varied as anything.
Since we're having a rational intelligent conversation about this, I'll share with you the current Plan to discover if glyphosate residue in modern wheat is what causes me the problems I used to have: I train for and race bicycles, and it's race season, but when that's over in September or so, I'll get some non-GMO, certified 'organically grown' wheat bread, and try eating that every day for a while. The point is the non-GMO/Organic stuff never has Roundup (or any other herbicide, so far as I know) touch it, so there shouldn't be any glyphosate residue. If I don't have problems, then I might be on to something (although it could be something else associated with 'traditional' farming techniques and practices, too). If I do have the same sorts of problems occur again, then I'm back to Square One. Sound rational enough?
For the record, the problems that wheat cause me, cumulatively over time, run like this: First, progressively worse constipation, with death-farts. Over time I start experiencing bouts of excruciating pain in one of two areas of my lower abdomen, which can last for a week. Over time I begin to progressively lose physical endurance; in my current state of good health I can ride for 4 or 5 hours, no problem, or run on a treadmill for as long as I can stand it, but as the problems progress, I lose endurance to the point where 20 or so minutes on a treadmill makes me feel like I'm going to collapse. Meanwhile I experience bouts of inexplicable depression, and overall mental fogginess.
Back in the day, six weeks after I stopped eating all wheat products, all the above symptoms started to disappear; I remember running on a treadmill for a full hour, and being a little scared at the sudden change enough so that I stopped even though I felt otherwise like I could keep going.
Once I made a huge mistake and bought a gigantic box of Quaker-brand granola breakfast cereal at Costco; I hadn't noticed
Every big food company does that shit and account for like 90+% of all food products sold.
I'm sure it's physically possible to be allergic to wheat. At least it's not corn.
I have to avoid sugar, and it's not diabetes. Doctors don't have a clue.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It sounds like you have a pretty good handle on the problem and a good approach to isolating the exact cause: create a theory and then attempt to falsify it. It'll be interesting to see how your experiment turns out.
The same feeling I get after going to Whole Foods and realizing I payed way too much for food.
Everything you described suggests you have a food allergy to wheat. It is not unheard of for people who are allergic to wheat to have no reaction to spelt which is unsurprising since they are two separate species of plant. Wheat is one of the eight most common food allergies in the US (Milk, Egg, Fish, Shellfish, Tree Nuts, Peanuts, Wheat, Soybeans) and food allergies can manifest with numerous symptoms involving the bowels. Allergies can also develop later in life. The FDA requires spelt to be labeled as wheat because of the gluten content in spelt.
I have many similar symptoms as you. I will periodically have pains throughout the colon region of the abdomen as well as around the stomach and esophagus. I have long periods for passing bowel movements which isn't considered constipation due to the soft consistency of movements. I went to my doctor because the pain had me concerned about my heart. He referred me to a GI where they performed an endoscopy and discovered inflammation in the esophagus and are referring me to an immunologist to test for food allergies. I'm expecting to find out that I'm allergic to egg or wheat as those are the two foods in the top eight that I regularly consume.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Ironically enough I have really bad allergies to pretty much everything that grows and blows; it's easier to list what I'm not allergic to (bird feathers, animal dander, and house dust, i.e. dust mite corpses), I've taken antigen injections for years now, there's no antihistamine on the market that really works as advertised (I currently take 360mg of fexofenadine daily, twice the normal dose, barely does anything, and sometimes also take montelukast daily), have to keep an albuterol inhaler with me, and perform a sinus rinse anywhere from twice to a dozen times daily, depending on what state I'm in (i.e. if I'm sick, it's closer to a dozen) which actually helps quite a bit -- but so far as my allergist can tell, I don't have food allergies, so The Search Continues.
Just goes to show you that not all of us who claim problems with wheat are nutjobs. ;-) Thank you for being open-minded; "Some faith in humanity restored" :-)
Best craft-brew selection second only to the big-box-alcohol mart here.
Here read this:
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
TLDR its actually the substance vital wheat gluten which is added to all breads that is the most likely culprit. Perfectly explains the recent rise in this sort of sensitivity. I dont have it myself thank god, as i love all breads.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
I never thought she or others who claimed a problem were a nutjob, I was just issuing a warning that just because the medical establishment has some real problems with sometimes getting stuck on wrong and unscientific thinking for certain problems, or refusing to look at certain things, that this is no reason to jump to alternative medicine which has no scientific basis whatsoever, and that this is a real danger because people (and this is how alt-med thrives in fact) because people who have real problems who aren't getting any help, and frequently even any acknowledgement of their problem, from their medical providers can easily be lured into alt-med, similar to how people can get lured into a cult because their existing support systems are lacking and the cult takes advantage of this.
Exactly. Anyone who wakes up at 6am or before on weekends knows that before 10am all shopping is luxurious! I realized that after I had kids and never ever shop after 10am anymore.
Week nights after 9pm are also nice, but lots of single people at that time. At 7am there are lots of old people who move slow, but they aren't on their phones and absentminded like the singles in the evenings.
Its all about timing.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
I've never been a big buyer of whole foods goods - here's why: Back when I actually DID buy things I started reading labels. I left the store, never to return, when looking at organic vegetables in the freezer case that were grown in China - if there's one place on earth where I do not want food coming from, it is there. This was NOT a national brand, it was their store brand. And their prices on CONVENTIONAL produce and fruit are significantly higher than Kroger/Safeway/Walmart. What is the appeal of the place? Every time I've tried to interact with an employee to ask a question - it went like this one, that I had on an early December day a few years ago. I asked "Do you have dried candied orange and lemon peels?" He responded "Oh, you mean for, like fruitcake?" "Yes, " said I. "Oh, we have them at, like, Christmas, " said he. "It is December and Christmas is in 3.5 weeks" to which I got a blank, deer in the headlights, stare. Thanks, but no. The people of walmart may dress funny but at least they are more entertaining.
That's because they don't. I have to admit, I'm not a fan of herbicides - but they do not drench plants in herbicide just before harvest because, as you mention they're just about to harvest and it doesn't matter if there are weeds, now.
Glyphosate is a common agent to induce going to seed or ripening or whatever - used for non-resistant crops. It's not just used for herbicide. Look it up. This is a different issue that has nothing to do with GMO.
No worries, I wasn't casting aspersions in the direction of your wife, not in the least. I am agreeing with you, there are plenty of people whose distrust of science has grown to the point where they're totally irrational about it, though, and their gullibility when it comes to 'snake oil' cures for things has risen to epidemic proportions. I think the anti-vaccination people need their heads examined, and that snake-oil salesmen should be run out of town on a rail. Things like 'homeopathic medicine' with it's whole 'water has a memory' riff is beyond the pale. Then there's the 'healthy at every size (HAES)' crowd. All the above raise the noise floor on the Internet so much that it makes it tough to find actual reliable information on some things. I really don't appreciate them for that.
Just to amplify: I roll my eyes at people who claim that EM fields cause all the stuff they claim it does. I have a friend who refuses to own a microwave oven because she doesn't seem to understand the difference between RF radiation and nuclear radiation; I just smile and nod. It's weird though because otherwise she's a logical, rational, above-average intelligence person. Would I want double-digit watts of terahertz RF energy right next to my head? Hell no, I don't need my brain matter cooked, but using Bluetooth headsets? Yeah, no problem. Also as I commented elsewhere I think the anti-vaccination people need to get their heads straightened out.
Amazon's no checkout will be stopped by liquor laws unless they have an person on staff to check id's also city's / states may try to pass laws like the ones that say you can't pump your own gas just to keep people working.
They'll just do what they did here in the UK, have one person to check ID's at 20 self service checkouts. The checkout detects any item that requires verification and wont complete the sale until a staff member clears it.
Thats why I go through a manned checkout when buying my booze. Also £1.80 for a bottle of ale, highway bloody robbery.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
there are plenty of people whose distrust of science has grown to the point where they're totally irrational about it, though, and their gullibility when it comes to 'snake oil' cures for things has risen to epidemic proportions.
Yep, this sums things up quite well.
But one other place I'd blame is the education system: most people just have no idea what science is and how it works, so they get fooled by quackery and pseudoscience. Schools should really be teaching kids how to distinguish real science and medicine from BS, but they'll probably have lobbyists working against them if they do.
A dollar for every year since the beginning of time.
Well, I said
"
My problem is the lack of labeling.
Look- if GMO producers simply labeled as GMO and charged 10% less, after less than a year most people would be eating GMA and have no problem with GMO. They are going about this the wrong way.
It should be "GMO and lound and proud" instead of "we are sneaky basters who spend millions to hide the fact something is GMO and that shouldn't make you suspicious at all!"
--
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"
In response to your question is that IF GMO would simply charge less, then most people would give up all their objects to GMO as long as it was labeled and cheaper.
Just like people will make insane efforts to protect their privacy and then provide intimate details to get a free electronic doodad on facebook.
People would voluntarily- eagerly give up their objections to GMO if it were simply labeled as GMO and on the shelves at 10% the price.
Do you want whole wheat bread at $3.50 a loaf or GMO whole wheat bread at $3.15 a loaf?
Do you want a gallon of milk at $5.00 a gallon or GMO milk at $4.50 per gallon?
Sure, some people would still pay $8 a gallon for organic milk from cows roaming on pastures free from pesticides for 5 years. But most people would get the $4.50 a gallon milk.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I can't fucking wait until I can get same-day drone delivery of some fucking $50 bananas from Whole Foods.
So it's a "two hells for the price of one" kind of situation?
Ezekiel 23:20
The herbicide is used to kill the plant so the grain will lose moisture and be ready to harvest sooner. Waiting for the grain to dry naturally delays harvest and risks damage from weather events.
Also if the harvest is delayed new weeds have time to grow and set seed. This causes problems with harvest equipment and contamination of the grain with foreign matter.
I went to a private school through Junior High, because of ADHD, and because I'm brighter than average. Small class sizes (largest I was ever in was 13 kids) and all the individualized attention you could possibly need. That is what I credit with being able to think straight at all. So far as I can see, public schools either don't have the time or don't have the desire to teach kids to actually 'think', all they seem to be interested in is getting them to pass standardized tests so they can continue to receive tax dollars. So far as I can see, kids don't start getting taught to think until they reach college -- assuming it's a decent college or university, that is. Even then if someone hadn't taken them under their wing long ago and started teaching them how to think before that time, they may never really learn to think. Probably has to do with how their brains develop during elementary school years; no stimulous to think, you don't develop the wetware to think all that well. Dunno. But it does seem to me that people are getting dumber and lazier instead of smarter and more overall productive, and the consumer goods industries just seem to be supplying them with more and more toys to enable them to be dumber and lazier. That's just my opinion based on my observations over the last 20 or 30 years; we keep adding to our knowledge base, but people aren't getting smarter. As with all things: your mileage may vary. No warranties implied or otherwise with regard to my opinions.
I read that to,Still funny though.