Amazon Offers Whole Foods Discounts To Prime Members (reuters.com)

Amazon-owned Whole Foods debuted a loyalty program on Wednesday that offers special discounts to Prime members, including 10 percent off hundreds of sale items and rotating weekly specials. "The new loyalty strategy will test whether Amazon's $13.7 billion deal for Whole Foods brings much-feared disruption and an intensified price war to the $800 billion U.S. grocery industry dominated by Walmart and Kroger," reports Reuters. From the report: Those perks are available now in Florida and will roll out to all other stores starting this summer. Amazon previously announced free two-hour delivery from Whole Foods stores for members of Prime, its subscription club with fast shipping and video streaming. The new perks could make Whole Foods cheaper than conventional grocers for about 8 million of its customers who already subscribe to Amazon Prime, according to Morgan Stanley analysts. Prime members scan an app or input their phone numbers at checkout to receive the discounts.

Comments

Re:It would be great

[Solandri]

if Prime video services worked on my non Fire android box.

Amazon isn't in control of that. Hollywood is. They insist that streaming video services be encrypted in one of two ways.

• As a software player on a general purpose computing device (i.e. a PC). In this case, Hollywood requires the video stream decryption happen inside an encrypted virtual machine so you don't simply save a copy of the decrypted video before it's sent to your video card. That's why Amazon, Netflix, Hulu in a browser requires Flash or Silverlight.
• As a dedicated hardware device. Amazon, Netflix, Smart TV makers, blu-ray player makers, etc. have to submit one of these devices running their service to Hollywood, who then approves it or denies it based on how secure they deem the hardware video decryption to be. If your Android box is custom or doesn't have a large market share, Amazon may not know it needs to submit it to Hollywood for approval. Prime Video works fine on my Nexus smartphone and Galaxy tablet.

If Hollywood didn't have a stick up their collective asses, you could simply download and install a generic Android Prime Video app and run it on any Android device. But because of Hollywood, Amazon (and Netflix, Hulu, etc) have to put code in their players to detect your device, and if it's not on the Hollywood-authorized list, bomb out.

(and Prime didn't increase in price 10-20% every year)

Prime was $79 when it was introduced in 2005. It just increased to $119 in 2018.

That's a 119/79 = 1.50 = 50% increase in 13 years. Or 1.5^(1/13) = 1.032 = 3.2% per year.

For reference, $79 in 2005 adjusted for inflation passed $99 in 2017. And Amazon announced the price increase the next year. So the price of Prime has been exactly keeping pace with inflation, except Amazon has added a ton of features to it since it was first introduced.

Re:Local chain here...

[93 Escort Wagon]

Correction: Is cheaper than Whole Foods USED to be.

Especially for Prime members.

Having been in Whole Foods before, I can tell you that taking 10% off “hundreds of sale items” is not bringing its prices anywhere near those at my local Winco Foods nor those of our local Fred Meyer - the two grocery stores we generally shop at.

Re:Why take the pill to begin with?

[ArmoredDragon]

Speak of stupidity...

Most of the post-WWII prosperity and middle-class growth in the US was thanks to the labor movement.

No it wasn't, it was because the rest of the world destroyed itself (especially Europe) while the US's infrastructure remained completely unscathed. This meant that the USA could scale up its manufacturing while the rest of the world bought practically everything from us. We WERE to the rest of the world what China is today. THAT is why the US saw big prosperity, not because you were giving a cut of your paycheck to the mafia. Similarly, the fact that the rest of the world has built up its manufacturing capabilities means that there are more global competitors, which means fewer buy from us, which means we manufacture less, which means we have less demand for those types of jobs. That, and better technology means less demand for the type of labor that you look at with rose tinted lenses. Besides, it's probably a good thing that fewer people give a cut of their pay to the mafia these days.