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Amazon To Complete $13.7B Whole Foods Deal Monday, Promises Lower Prices and Prime Integration (geekwire.com)
Amazon announced today that its $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods will close this Monday, Aug. 28, and revealed how it plans to lower prices and integrate its Prime membership program into the Whole Foods checkout process. From a report: Amazon said that starting Monday, it will lower prices of items at Whole Foods like organic bananas, brown eggs, salmon, ground beef, and more. It also plans to "make Amazon Prime the customer rewards program at Whole Foods Market and continuously lower prices as we invent together," as Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon's consumer business, said in a press release. Amazon will place its Amazon Lockers package pickup machines in some Whole Foods stores. It will also make Whole Foods' private label products available on its website, on AmazonFresh, on Prime Pantry, and Prime Now. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey will stay in his current role, and Whole Foods' HQ will remain in Austin. The grocer will maintain operations under its current brand.
Supermarkets already track everything you buy and correlate these purchases with a whole host of other data to cater their inventories to the communities they serve -- but Whole Foods will have an advantage they don't: cross-references to your entire purchase history of sundries online. They can aggressively market to customers they already know they have (your billing and delivery addresses plus Prime membership, 'natch). Home delivery? You bet. Drone delivery? Maybe! Entire aisles of not-food products you would not be getting inferior versions of by purchasing from a supermarket? No doubt.
All for the low low price of a megacorporation knowing everything there is to know about you.
... continuously lower prices as we invent together"
Soon we're going to start seeing Whole Foods commercials on TV. They will feature smiling Whole Foods employees, standing next to their products under a large sign with the price. Then the smiling head of Jeff Bezos will bounce into the frame, hit the price and cause it to go down.
Then the motto will appear at the end of the spot - "Whole Foods. Continuously lower prices, always."
#DeleteChrome
Great. Amazon.com now sells grocery items.
Meanwhile, in Canada, Amazon.ca doesn't even sell their own Amazon Fire tablets.
#DeleteFacebook
'Whole Paycheck' was for those people who like to impress each other with how much the overpay (for the same stuff).
Yes and no. While I don't shop at Whole Paycheque on a regular basis, their pricing for staples wasn't that far out of line from the other grocery stores in my area. The big thing for me is that they are a reliable source for less common, high quality ingredients. My most common purchase there is organic whipping cream from one of our local dairies. Their cows are grass fed, and the cream itself is just straight heavy cream, rather than containing the usual stabilizers (Guar gum, carrageenan, locust bean gum) in your typical whipped cream. I'm not chemophobic or any of that crap, it's that it just whips up differently, and in my opinion, better than the commercial stuff. it just takes more skill to get there, and if you fuck up you wind up with butter.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Dear Amazon WFoods, Walmart, Meijer, Kroger, et al.
If you want my money, bring back Milk Crates. All of the 'get groceries delivered' services I've seen use most inefficient process possible. The store pays people minimum wage on the night shift to unpack boxes and palates of food items, arrange them on a shelf so that I can pay someone else to take it off the shelf and deliver it to me.
Cut out the middle man. Pack a milk crate full of what I want in a central warehouse. Pay drives to drop them on my front door. Cut out the electricity, real estate and overhead of running a store. When my next shipment comes pick up my empty milk crates. That way I don't have to breakdown a dozen boxes a week for recycling.
Milk crates are the ultimate utility cargo container. You can fit a single one on the back of a bike. They stack well, you can strap a large number down to a trailer. The large transit vans will easily fit a neighborhood's worth of them. They're strong, light weight and in a pinch can be used to build a college dorm room.
Stores need to be a fraction of the size they are now. I went wandering to see what my local big box store had. DVDs and CDs had almost as much foot print as produce. I can't think of the last time anyone I knew *had* to go get Grownups 2 at 2 in the morning.
Wholefoods was struggling due to competition from lower-priced rivals selling upscale food. That's the only reason they sold out to amazon in the first place. It would be stupid for Amazon to continue repeating the same mistakes of the previous owners. There just aren't enough people interested in wealth-signaling to sustain a large-scale over-priced grocery business.
Exactly. Amazon has bought a brand name as much as anything else, and I'm sure the marketing will be along the lines of "and now you can shop just your like pretentious Yuppie neighbors!" If there's one universal truth, it's that those lower on the economic ladder may bitch about their betters, but if the opportunity comes to buy the same goods and services, they'll ignore the irony and hypocrisy, and jump at the opportunity.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You had better believe that Kroger and the other supermarket chains are quaking in their collective boots over this. Amazon does this all the time. They find business segments that are poorly run - book publishing, TV/Movie/Music, etc. - with poor customer service and they swoop in and take over it.
Supermarkets are burdened with having to deal with literally hundreds of union locals. They have been slow to embrace technology. Supermarkets operate on extraordinarily thin margins. They were slow to catch on to the organic food trend, thus allowing the growth of Whole Foods and others in the first place.
Next time you're in a grocery store take notice of how it is laid out. Lots of vertical aisles. Impulse items at the cash registers. Necessities (eggs, milk, bread, etc.) at the very back of the store. Junk food is always between the front of the store and the necessities. Promoted products are at eye level on the shelves, other products at the bottom where you might not see them.
Every Kroger or Safeway store looks exactly like this. And it has for the past 50 years. This is not exactly an industry of innovation. Amazon, pardon the pun, is going to eat their lunch.
Depending on what you did with it, yes, especially if doing an A:B comparision. yeah, if you loaded it up with sugar and vanilla, it would be harder to tell, but if you're running it minimalist, it's pretty easy.
Due to the diet, the grass fed whipping cream will be more cream coloured rather than white. It also has a more pronounced flavour. This latter bit is obviously going to be masked if you add a bunch of Vanilla or other flavourings, but is detectable otherwise. When doing something simple like strawberry shortcake, the flavour is quite important.
The second difference I mentioned is due to the stabilizers. The stabilizers make it harder to over-whip the cream, and also help it hold its consistency longer. However, you can't get it quite as stiff, and it's just a different texture. This is even more important when using the cream to make other stuff, say Ice Cream or anything else that calls for heavy cream. The stabilizers muck with the chemistry and can radically affect the consistency of what you're making.
Anyhow, for a $0.50 price difference, for most things I'll take the good stuff.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
make Amazon Prime the customer rewards program at Whole Foods Market and continuously lower prices as we invent together
In other words, if you are a Whole Foods market supplier, you would better purchase a rope to hang yourself right now, because you may not be able to afford that in a few months.
Hippies and fags! LOL! Great post, racist grandpa!
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