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Did Amazon Really Lower Whole Foods' Prices? (bustle.com)
While Whole Foods "strategically marked down select items like avocados and almond milk, overall prices have dropped very slightly -- about 1 percent -- since Amazon ownership, according to an analysis by research firm Gordon Haskett." An anonymous reader quotes Bustle:
This hardly seems like big savings, and Gordon Haskett noted that since the initial price cuts in August, the cost of some items have been slowly ticking back up. "The price of frozen foods, for example, was 7 percent higher on Sept. 26 than on Aug. 28, when Amazon officially took over," Abha Bhattarai reported for the Post, which is owned by Amazon. "Snack items had risen 5.3 percent in that period, while dairy and yogurt were up 2 percent. (Among categories where prices are lower: Beverages, down about 2.8 percent; bread and bakery, down 6.8 percent; and produce, down 0.5 percent...)"
For shoppers like me who buy mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, it did feel like I was saving money. However, one industry insider said there is a strategy behind how prices are cut. "The whole game is that you want the 100 most recognizable things -- milk, apples, bananas -- to be cheaper," Jan Rogers Kniffen, an industry consultant and former department store executive, told the Post. "If you can do that, you can build a perception that the whole store is competitively priced."
From July through September, Whole Foods brought in $1.3 billion in sales for Amazon.
For shoppers like me who buy mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, it did feel like I was saving money. However, one industry insider said there is a strategy behind how prices are cut. "The whole game is that you want the 100 most recognizable things -- milk, apples, bananas -- to be cheaper," Jan Rogers Kniffen, an industry consultant and former department store executive, told the Post. "If you can do that, you can build a perception that the whole store is competitively priced."
From July through September, Whole Foods brought in $1.3 billion in sales for Amazon.
" overall prices have dropped very slightly -- about 1 percent " so the yes. /article
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
1 %
"Abha Bhattarai reported for the Post, which is owned by Amazon"
The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, not Amazon.
in nyc whole foods is in the most expensive rent parts of the city. no way prices are dropping. at least not on the stuff lazy millennials will buy the most of, like frozen foods.
for me, I go there for the fresh fruits and veggies
everyone does the basket thing. wal mart pioneered it. you figure out what people tend to buy in groups. mark down one or two of the items and raise prices on the rest. it's a 20 year old strategy.
Keep giving your paychecks to Amazon, you dumb fucks. Keep going.
I don't respond to AC's.
Meanwhile, crude oil went from $46 to $52, an 11% increase. Unlike what the article suggests, Whole Foods is actually cutting prices, just not relative to the dollar.
They let you buy amber ale on food stamps?
lucm, indeed.
you shouldn't be shopping at Whole Foods to start with.
Whole Foods is not where you go to save money.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"it's a 20 year old strategy."
So, you're a millennial? Cause, grocery has always been low margin with price leaders.
And, Walmart.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Why would fat porn lovers look at a middle-aged failure that barely registers as "alive", never mind sexually active?
THIS is fat porn, you loser.
Here are some Creimer's posts from his account that was blocked and renamed by Slashdot management:
"Nah... I just do it to piss off my trolls and make coffee money off of them."
https://slashdot.org/comments....
"Which doesn't violate the Slashdot TOS. If you got a problem with that, take it up with management."
https://slashdot.org/comments....
This year I've posted ~4,000 comments.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
We have different priorities. You want to climb the corporate ladder. I want to own the corporate ladder.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
My employers don't care about what my Slashdot trolls think. Now go off and lick your balls somewhere else.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Try even further back (1917):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As soon as you had fixed prices that people could choose themselves, this was standard practice.
CREIMIER SAID:
All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Shitposting, Amazon affiliate spam, being fat, and being a general nuisance.
CREIMER SAID:
Only on Slashdot.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
So why hasn't managed to ban this intentionally disruptive user? According to him his "trolls" can't help themselves.. he is the one in control willingly and maliciously creating disruptions. Reasons that slashdot has stated they will ban accounts at their discretion.
Why isn't creimer banned? He degrades the slashdot experience for everyone and attempts to monetize these efforts. This is effectively stealing from Dice.
Just the other day creimer attempted to dox a user by posting her name and ip address. How many chances should he be given?
Chris' case is getting worse, he spends all day replying to himself as AC on /.
The tests we ran on Chris have shown that Chris has the intelligence of an ameba:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So, technically, he is able to conceive some kind of agenda but it will be silly or impossible to follow on a human scale.
For example, Chris had an agenda to post anything he felt like on Slashdot which did not work well because it was based on his false beliefs that he had an infinite number of karma points as he wrote here several times.
Several people here explained to Chris that karma maxed out at some level like 50 or so but Chris kept on insisting that his python script had confirmed that he had millions of karma points!
Oh well, as I wrote before: "It isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody."
For the valuable /. users that might already have read the following, please note that there is an important update.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education has invested money to buy Chris a new chair:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...
Information about Christopher Dale Reimer and autistic people:
Autistic people have obsessions about things normal people don't care. For example, one of our autistic patient went haywire when he realized that there was a penny missing in his pocket change.
To calm him down, one of our educator pretended to have found it on the floor and gave a penny to him.
The autistic patient condition went even worse because he realized it wasn't the same penny!
Chris has an obsession with budgeting every penny. He doesn't understand that most people do not budget to the penny and have a flexible amount they allow for miscellaneous items.
I am Nancy Guerrero and I am Director of Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. We use Chris' (a.k.a. creimer,cdreimer) picture in our document because he is the hardest case we have ever had to handle:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...
Our artists were inspired by the low carb diet that Christopher follows scrupulously for the small lunch box and by the picture linked below for the rest. I am sure that you will notice the similarities such as the bump on the side of his chest and more:
https://ibb.co/gVad65
Please be easy on Christopher although, I am aware that some of our staff handling Chris post joke comments here and obvoiusly, the Santa Clara County Office of Education disapprove that behavior vehemently:
https://school.discoveryeducat...
But it isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody.
Thank You dear users,
---
Nancy Guerrero
Dircetor
Special Education
Santa Clara County Office of Education
Thanks Nancy,
Your posts are always enlightening and right on topic! Keep up the good work over there at Special Education!
Also, I have noted that Chris uses child psychology to convince his so called trolls to give up by pretending they just give him free publicity. That's adoring! ;-)
---
Silvia Bunge
Psychology Department
University of California, Berkeley
Why would anybody shop there in the first place? Sounds scammy to me
Well, I think we can conclude from creimer's exhaustive analysis of the price point of 3 items that he buys "every few weeks," that the price hasn't changed at all.
Or, we could believe the analyst who is actually paid to answer these questions, who concludes that overall, prices are down 1%. Pro tip for all the millennials who want their organic fair trade artisanal artichoke hearts for a penny a pound: If you buy something yesterday for $100, and today, the same item costs $99, you are saving fucking money. Your feelings do not entitle you to a larger discount just because you feel like you deserve it.
Looks pretty much exactly like the old one: same fat guy, with massive man tits and rolls of fat on his upper arms, shoulders, and back, a double chin large enough to land a fucking Dreamliner on, and a too-tight t-shirt which is barely holding together at the seams under the explosive back-pressure of all that fat.
1/10, would not bang.
I knew what the article summary says going in - they probably only cut the price on a handful of popular things, things I probably wouldn't buy there anyway...
However it did get me back into the store just to look at it, so mission accomplished. They actually have several things there I like quite a lot that are unique to the store, so while I don't do much general shipping there I do go back about once a month to get a few things.
I am a little surprised the convergence with Amazon has not meant more though. Not even a little discount for being Prime for example?? Seems like they have a huge potential to make small changes that would make people even a little more likely to come in.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It didn't take a genius to see this coming, only someone who had previous dealings with Amazon's so-called Subscribe And Save program. It promised exactly the same lie. They are merely repeating the same tactic in brick and mortar.
Amazon buys Whole Foods and lowers the prices on some items. Amazon gets all manner of free press about the lower prices. Once the initial attention wears off, Amazon slowly raises the prices back to prior levels. This doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is that others seem to be surprised at this chain of events.
There is a yahoo support group for people who interact with creimer.
My sense is the prices aren't really lower.
What's worse: my most frequent purchases were at the food bar, where the choices became less healthy after the Amazon take-over. WF already had a problem with sugar, sugar-laden juice and/or starch added to most prepared dishes. Recently, the tastiest healthy dishes were eliminated, replaced by plain side dishes like plain quinoa that are only edible if some unhealthy starchy sauce is applied. My last two visits, I've left empty handed. And after hearing the new corporate ethos explained by the manager, I don't know when I'll go back. Amazon doesn't have a clue about what's healthy.
WF is now WTF?
They treat their employees like crap and underpay while overcharging. In other words it is turning into another Walmart.
It was once like another Costco or Sams club that used to see value in their employees. None of the Alexis team is still employed just as an example. I appled to work in their IT department in a local office and they wanted a System Administrator but only wanted to pay $35,000 a year. Worse, I would need to work in the warehouse during the busy season and expected to work long hours for no extra pay.
Jesus...you need to get a real job.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
the answer is no.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Loss leader is old, the innovation gp was talking about is applying that concept to smaller groupings of items.
I make $4,250+ per month.
protip: if you feel like you have to include hundreds and below when you bring up your monthly income, you're poor.
lucm, indeed.
After or before taxes
Uh, did you see that little + after the number? Chris is making Trump-level money, especially considering he only works one hour a day and spends the rest of the day sleeping in, errr, cleaning the storage closet.
I bet there's a pile of empty boxes and thousands of crumpled printer test pages with a sasquatch-sized indentation in there!
"If you can do that, you can build a perception that the whole store is competitively priced."
If you market to morons then soon you will be hiring morons. Merge with failure and reap destruction.
Comparable to Kroger prices, where I mainly shop. The other food looks expensive. (I use WF mainly for fast food. One of the few places you can quickly get a wide choice of cooked veggies.)
They moved the tags closer to the floor.
#DeleteChrome
Why would anybody shop there in the first place? Sounds scammy to me
Because in many places, if you want organic this and that and GMO-free this and that, it's the only option because there are no food coops, farmer's markets, or Trader Joe's.
So if you live "in the city" it all depends on if you want organic/GMO-free. If not, you can certainly find a store with healthy food at a cheaper price.
HOWEVER: Where food coops and Trader Joe's DO do exist in close proximity, it's a "status symbol" thing.
Plus, they have a hipster bar with a dozen or so micro brews where you can order hipster pizza by the slice and get a nice buzz while your significant other shops. Sometimes, I'll pay extra for that.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Chris
You're on first name basis with creimer?
( -.-)
lucm, indeed.
merchants have been doing this a lot longer than walmart has even existed. walmart just perfected it.
This blind trust and worship of monopolies these days is unprecedented. While people debate fake bogey men political issues, we are losing competition and ultimately our freedoms to a handle full of monopolies.
about reducing prices. I was beaten for that and then raped anally with a piece of a 19" server rack for saying that. I almost bled to death for calling Bezos on his lies. His thugs rape engineers anally to death too damn often for telling the truth against his lies. I almost died. After over $24k worth of medical bills, I'm almost back to normal after the Bezos fans anal raped me. That is how those Amazon.com people be. It's how they be.
Even being in middle class, it's distressing to get an $200 bill for a week worth of supplies from Safeway. Upon close inspection, prices are Ok for obvious stuff like milk but pretty outrageous for anything slightly unusual like shampoo. It's also not down to making the margins, as Costco and asian grocery stories obviously manage to survive without such tricks. I can afford to swallow the increase, but I feel really sorry for common people who can't afford to drive to a further away store or just are not educated enough to figure out the nuances, If you have nothing but 7/11 in your neighborhood, you are fucked.
You people seriously need to get a life, and stop spamming.
Given that they dropped their price on avocados and that some millionaires and politicians keep attributing the poor millennial's inability to afford to buy houses to their consumption of avocado on toast I would say Amazon's price drop is attempting to single-handedly solve* the housing affordability crisis facing our next generation.
* For those of you who don't get the obvious sarcasm, this was obviously sarcastic.
"overall prices have dropped very slightly -- about 1 percent "
Most groceries/supermarkets/discounters have less than 1% profit margin, at least in Europe.
reported for the Post, which is owned by Amazon.
Why are we linking to shitty sources that lie, and including their lies in the summary? That Bustle article that's quoted has a clear grudge, they try to paint Amazon as big evil even after explaining the practice is commonplace among grocers. The stltoday article is a straight-up reprint of the original WaPo article that just doesn't link back to the original or the original sources. Bustle links back to the same WaPo article no less than five times, suggesting it's really just a repackaging of the same article, and it is, they just write it with more of an obvious grudge against Amazon. Hey David, maybe take the "editor" bit out of your name, you don't edit anything you fool. You can't even filter out bullshit repackaged month-old stories.
Went into the local Whole Foods about a week after their first price cut. Their rotisserie chicken, a small dried out thing, priced dropped from $10 to $9.99. Sorry but their other store items are about twice the price of any competitor.
Shocking!
I am not at all surprised by the findings. It succinctly summarizes the retail Food Industry in first-world nations.
During "one of those conversations" ... note that this is purely anecdotical ... a casual acquaintance piped in about a discussion on the day's grocery purchases and people's general food buying preferences. I liked Safeway, due to the quality of fresh meat and produce offered there, and someone said that they shopped at The Great Canadian Superstore, another food reseller in western Canada, owned by the Weston family, a massive conglomerate of food industry companies that dominate the Canadian market. They claimed Safeway food prices were "too high".
I replied that careful shopping (using a list being the most prominent) meant I didn't pay any more and that Superstore meat was of marginal cut quality (the grades were fine; but if you bought, say, a tray of Pork Chops, underneath the nice looking cuts were others that "looked like they were cut with a chainsaw").
Then the acquaintance piped up. He said he and his family had participated in a study by the Canadian Federal Government consumer agency whereby they created a standard shopping list, buying whatever they normally did but sticking strictly to the list they created themselves, and shopping at four major food resellers, alternating by month.
"The overall grocery bill was the same. There was almost no difference. You might save here, but they nail you there. The specific items changed from store to store, with one item lower in price while it may be higher elsewhere, but in the end, taken as a basket of goods, there was no difference. None"
I fully expect(ed) that Whole Foods, which is not "the same as everybody else" price-wise, would have the essentially the same outcome, in that, taken as a basket of goods, the overall price would be unchanged from before the Amazon buyout.
Aldi and Lidl grocery stores are upsetting the game a bit, as their market space only partly overlaps the major grocery chains.
Many items are offered as one brand - private label, which does lower upstream costs. Many items offered at the major grocery chains are not offered at all.
Store layout seems to violate the usual practice of trying to keep customers in the store longer to increase the amount of "temptation" purchases. My time in store to get the planned on items seems to be less.
How the other stores react to this remains to be seen.
...but not the guy with two websites dedicated to his mediocrity, his twelve cashew accounts here, and his various delusions about his relevance?
You aren't shopping at whole foods in the first place. So who cares?
200$ PER MONTH!? Chris, you're so full of shit even the shit flies are repulsed.
http://www.sandiegocounty.gov/...
http://www.sandiegocounty.gov/...
It's TWO THOUSAND dollars per month! Your tiny reptilian brain simply saw the number 200, completely ignored the % sign, and just made up a bullshit story on the spot.
How exactly does spam-bombing his comments on Slashdot change any of that?
The websites are not going away. The fat cashew accounts have been quiet for a week, probably because the AC running them got bored after a month. Every entrepreneur has delusions about relevance.
Chris, bitching about it in the comments changes nothing. Don't like it? Complain to the management.
PS: Chris, the word "entrepreneur" is French, it relates to being enterprising, doing things. What have you done?
You're probably the same guy started the support group. Must be lonely talking to yourself and lashing out at Chris all the time from hurting your covfefe.
"You wouldn't know that since you got the dollar sign on the wrong side and you're not a US citizen. Don't let that inconvenient fact get in the way of your stupidity."
You enumerated TWO "facts", yet you refer to "that" fact, Chris. I know your crammar, I can smell your bullshit through my screen. You're not even original enough to come up with new "catchphrases". Don't let THOSE inconvenient facts get in the way of your deceptive bullshittyness.
You said "you can only make $200 or less per month. I make $4,250+ per month.". That is the present tense.
Then you said as AC "" The $200 figure that creimer quoted was from 2011 when he worked 20 hours per month at $16/hr for six months""
So which is it? Is that 200$ figure for NOW or six years ago, you fat failure? This is your typical argument style, Chris, just randomly changing your story around as your fat ADHD brain rattles along from one moment to the next.
"he income limit for a single person is $1307. Creimer makes THREE TIMES"
It's a federal limit, so whether you're sleeping in a garbage bin in Santa Clara or San Diego is irrelevant.
Chris, talking about yourself in the third person is extremely unhealthy, even David Miscavige isn't that narcissistic. That 200$ figure is meaningless since the limit is a federally mandated number connected to the poverty level, not your income.
Chris, take a breather. You're making an even bigger fool of yourself. Hard to believe when you weigh 375 pounds, but there you go.
... we shop at three or four different places just for groceries, and it's really clear what is cheaper where, and what to buy where. You can top 100 yourself all you want, it's not going to lull me into thinking the other 3 stores aren't cheaper on many different items. Yawn.
"You're probably the same guy [MISSING A WORD HERE, CHRIS] started the support group"
Yes, Chris, I am. Your crammar alone deserves its own group!
" Must be lonely talking to yourself "
It's just you, your twelve personalities, and your "team". The amount of effort you are putting into this is incredible. The entertainment I get in return for typing a few paragraphs in a Tokyo cyber-café is worth it!
" lashing out at Chris all the time from hurting your covfefe."
Not even sure what you're trying to convey here, Chris.
from shopping at WF, because I know they'll be more expensive.
The only time that I shop there is as a last resort, when some fruit/veg are going out of season, in the chance that they might have a better selection.
Can't get enough CREIMER???
If you love C.D.Reimer's writing sure to rate these other POSITIVE KARMA creimer pen-names!!!
Anonymous Cashews:
https://slashdot.org/~Anonymous+Cashews
I Tape Fat Cashews:
https://slashdot.org/~ITapeFatCashews
Can't get enough CREIMER?????
If you love C.D.Reimer's writing sure to rate these other POSITIVE KARMA creimer pen-names!!!
Anonymous Cashews:
https://slashdot.org/~Anonymous+Cashews
I Tape Fat Cashews:
https://slashdot.org/~ITapeFatCashews
This support group?
I tried to join it but the guy running it hasn't approved my membership BUT!!!
I can tell you hate it so:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/creimer_support/info
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/creimer_support/info
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/creimer_support/info
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/creimer_support/info
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/creimer_support/info
This is one of those lies that I first heard from Trump and he keeps repeating even though it's false. Amazon does NOT own the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and happens to also be the CEO of Amazon. This does not place WaPo under Amazon's control.
Amazon does not own the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos != Amazon.