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Amazon's Grocery Push Keeps Stumbling After Whole Foods Purchase (bloomberg.com)
Bloomberg reports that Amazon is struggling in the $840 billion grocery market, more than a year after it spoked the industry with the $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods last year. "The number of Amazon Prime members who shop for groceries at least once a month declined in 2018 compared with 2017, according to the results of an annual consumer survey released Wednesday by UBS analysts," the report says. "The drop was surprising given the company's Whole Foods investment and expansion of two hour delivery service Prime Now, the analysts wrote in a note to investors." From the report: A separate study by research firm Brick Meets Click found that households using grocery delivery and pickup services from physical retailers spend about $200 per month and place orders more frequently than Amazon grocery shoppers, who spend $74 a month. The number of households with access to online grocery delivery and pickup options will reach 90 percent next year, up from 69 percent in 2017, thanks to big investments by food retailers of all sizes, the report states.
I just need to pick out my own groceries. Furthermore, grocery shopping is not at all unpleasant, and smart stores have interesting samples etc. Furthermore, the best stuff comes from the farmer's market.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Amazon wanted to be the everything store. Well, 90% of everything is shit (Sturgeon's Law). 90% of amazon is shit. Do you like to eat shit? Sure, I'd stick my tongue up Natalie Portman's turd cutter but I'm not going to eat knockoff Chinese shit from Amazon!
How Whole Foods is very non-tech and amazon high tech. I spend about what they say and I am an amazon prime member and the only I do not like is that Whole Foods never answers the phone anymore. I hope they fix that very soon. I always go to the store myself even though there are delivery services. Most recently I tried to call to see if they had any gardening tools. It turned out they did but since they didnâ(TM)t answer the phone I had to wait a ridiculously long time to find out
The local Fred Meyer looks almost like Whole Paycheck after the recent changeover. The prices are still Fred Meyer prices, however, at least for now.
How is this profitable? Are the major grocery stores doing this at a huge loss? It seems like delivery should add a hefty fee on top of the grocery bill.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Buying groceries from Amazon costs more.
The same items in just about any grocery store in the world will be less. When you consider frequently purchased and/or pricier items it gets to hundreds of dollars pretty quick. You also have fewer choices, zero presence of many key items and no way to fully inspect the actual item you're buying for defects or quality issues. Oh, and returns are less convenient.
I wouldn't even compare the two, they're just not the same thing. Amazon 'groceries' are for people who are willing to pay a little more for a little more convenience (except for dealing with all those boxes, that's pretty inconvenient) on certain types of items where quality is less likely to be an issue. Anyone with a tight budget is not even considering it except for maybe a handful of lower cost items.
I often go to the grocery store without a complete picture of what I want to buy. Being there and seeing it is what spurs me to purchase a lot of items. I need more than the same thing every week. If they work out VR where I can "ride" with the shopper and pick out items, I might be interested.
A secondary problem is that it no longer was the exclusive retailer of whole foods, but now has competition. You can buy real foods at all outlets, even Walmart, even your locally owned grocery store. I don't because for a lot of the items it actually costs less at Whole Foods.
But ever since Amazon has bought the stores it has accelerated a decline that begin in that began in the 1990's. At that time they began to replace some of the lesser selling staples with candy. They began to hire workers not based on competency, but on an appearance that would be more suitable to snowflake suburban customers.
Amazon has continued to remove products to the point where there is no predictability, so I jut order direct from the manufaturer. They have no inventory control, so ordering Prime Now is a gamble. Honestly, even if one is in the Whole Foods demographic, there is really no reason to buy from them. Any competitive advantage they may have had is all but gone.
Amazon is going to have to invest some serious cash to bring back the real Whole Foods brand if they want the stores to remain. However, I really believe that they were just looking for centrally located warehouse locations, so it may be that the retail spae iteself it secondary
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They’re running it like Amazon.com. I used to go to Whole Foods to buy fresh organic food. Now, it’s ultra fresh, and mostly not organic. Amazon loves big data, they love making decisions from it, but they have no ability to use common sense. Some products probably didn’t sell well at Whole Foods, but they where THE reason customers came to the store in the first place. Remove those oddball items and you lose the customers.
Whole Paycheck, as we know it, is still as overpriced as ever. While they do have some products not available elsewhere, where they have exactly the same products to compare, their prices are routinely 30% above other stores.
Even a reasonably paid professional will find it hard to justify WF price premium (particularly when excellent groceries are available at several competing chains, esp. in our area thanks to "ethnic" chains moving in). As long as WF will remain priced as it is, I don't see it making any gains.
Anecdotally, I moved from buying 50% of my groceries at WF 10 years ago to virtually nothing (the only thing I buy there nowadays is bread)
I totally believe you, website that deeply understands computer hardware as evidenced by the fact that they totally didn't make a story up out of whole cloth about magical Chinese chips that could be soldered onto random unpopulated pads on any PCB to steal every bit of data ever.
We've recently taken all of our buying elsewhere since they've hired baggers that can't even bag. When I was sixteen, I knew the rules for bagging. Now, my wife of 5 foot 2 inches has to carry bags of up to sixteen pounds... because they put all the milk, juices, and frozen turkey in the same single bag. And then it breaks. And always remember to put the chips in at the bottom :-)
We've shopped at Whole Foods since before it was Whole Foods (back when it was Fresh Fields). No longer. There is simply not a single positive aspect to being a customer.
I really think Amazon is soon just going to use the physical location as a pickup station for Amazon orders. No shopping, no selection, just lockers for Prime customers. With wilted vegetables.
Delivery for high quality perishable products is hard. It shouldn't be the initial focus. One thing Amazon has is the customer reviews. I just searched for customer reviews of local produce and farmer's markets, and most of the front page links were to TripAdvisor with a few also to Yelp. So, here's what Amazon could do...
Free listings for non-taxable food where the delivery method is customer pick-up in a store smaller than 5000 sq ft, provided that the vendor sells at the advertised price, giving customers who bring an "I saw it on Amazon" QR code generated by the product page a 5% discount, and the code verification gives Amazon a report of those sales (which can allow the customer a "verified purchase" notation if they review the product). Vendors who rack up lots of sales with positive reviews are targets for deals that make their product carried by the nearest Whole Foods.
Local produce vendors get visibility.
Amazon gets leads for popular local products to carry in their stores and gets to condition shoppers to check their site when looking for tasty local food.
Customers get to learn where to obtain tasty locally produced food via an easy search, with reviews from other customers.
I actually do shop there more since the Amazon acquisition, because there are a few products they carry I can't get in any of the several other grocery stores around. They also have decent bagels (New Yorkers feel free to remain silent thanks).
They have pretty good produce compared to many other options, and aren't even the highest priced place for a number of items...
They do have a more limited selection though, so I could see if people were sticking to just one or two stores Whole Foods might not be a, well, prime choice...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's wheely bad spelling.
THERE WILL BE SAUCE FOR YOUR FRIES, SUPER SHOPPER KENDALL!!!
I'm not sure why I said that. I feel like I've been conditioned to expect something in this space.
I live literally 2 blocks from Whole Foods and frankly? It's just too damn expensive. I prefer to drive 15 minutes to Costco and buy all of my groceries there. I feed a family, and fruits, vegetables, even eggs and milk, are all super expensive at Whole Foods. I'll only buy there if I am stuck in the middle of the week without a few items.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
I shop at both Costco and Whole Foods (and some other stores).
Each has strengths, there are some things only Whole Foods has.
Plus sometimes I don't want to get 24 heads of broccoli or 10 mangos, I just want two.
I will say that for fruits like raspberries and blueberries, Costco is really great - they do an amazing job with having pretty good quality and a quantity that while large, is not unmanageable and two people can actually eat in a reasonable amount of time.
Whole Foods is defniantely not my primary shopping store either though,
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your life is boring faggot shit. You don't really need to show off like anyone cares, you'll never fit in with non-INCEL normals you faggot.
Amazon bought Whole Foods, one they feed there employees, Country kitchen a convenience store to get money back from there employees pay, no outside venders.
And I would not recommend it I didn't like picking food with a minimum of 3 months left till expiration date. Food can't be first in first out. And for a food recall you would have to hunt all locations down. They pack anything in any openings to get it stocked in.
They keep trying to "just in time" EVERYTHING and operate without ANY back-stock.
Basically that's a recipe for disaster. Because you CANNOT model grocery trends on a daily/hourly basis.
And, even if you could, you're STILL limited by shipping constraints.
All they're doing is destroying Whole Foods with their "grand experiment".
That's fine by me. I never shopped their anyways. Too high a smug content in their offerings.
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THANK GOD!!!
I gave an example. Organic food. They're pulling it from the shelves. I fortunately/unfortunately, have an immune system that's doesn't like something farmers in the US are putting on non-organic produce/wheat/etc. So, yeah, love tasty food too, but not into spending the day on the toilet.
Whole Foods is too expensive for most people. I've only been there once and wouldn't go back due to the prices. I know it's seen as a "higher class" supermarket, but it's just not worth the money for similar products that are much cheaper elsewhere.
There are a lot of people commenting on shopping at Whole Foods stores... WHICH HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ARTICLE.
The article is about how Amazon's non-Whole Foods delivery offerings have not benefited from the purchase of Whole Foods.
Sorry, but that's a bullshit statistic, because it means nothing more than "90% of US homes are near a Wal Mart" or something like that.
Me, I'll never use this shit, because I don't see the fucking point. I look at the sale flyers, pick what looks good this week, pick whatever meat looks good and is on sale, which determines what I'm cooking.
If a certain kind of produce looks like crap this week, or is way overpriced, I might change what I'm buying or even what I'm cooking if something is a great deal. There is at least one store I will drive to instead of going to the local one because their meat department is far superior to the one close to my house.
I'm not letting some fucking idiot in a warehouse pick something at random of a shelf, I want to look at it and decide which one I want.
And I certainly have no intention of inviting an asshole company like Amazon to track and manage every fucking aspect of my goddamned life. My wife buys some stuff off Amazon, but certainly not everything.
Sorry, I'll pick out my own groceries, in a store of my choosing. Amazon adds nothing of value to me in this process, nor does anybody else.
I refuse to fall for the "organic is better" bull shit. So, I go to the local supermarkets instead of WF.
Maybe its because they got rid of amazon fresh in a bunch of markets?
We were using them all the time then they (or their algorithm) decided it wasn't profitable enough for them and pulled out so we switched to instacart! Im sure a lot of other people did the same. :/
...it's an easy way to get good prices, quick and easy delivery (especially if you are a Prime customer), and an excellent return policy.
I'm not sure that same set of factors applies to Whole Paycheck - oops, I mean Whole Foods. A brand that has quality items, but is infamous for being ridiculously overpriced and having a mindset akin to Gwyneth Paltrow (asparagus water for $6 - seriously?)
I'm sure Bezos will get this sorted - but it may take a while and not be an obvious win for Amazon during that period.
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it's still Whole Foods at Whole Foods prices. In my case, WF's real selling point are things that either need to be experienced in the real world - like produce or perishables - or aren't available or impractical for delivery like baked goods or their prepared foods. For other things, if I wanted to have them delivered I'd do like my neighbor does and use Peapod or one of the other alternatives at a much lower price point. I can barely manage to justify going to the new WF in my area as it is. And even at lower prices, commodity goods delivery just doesn't make fiscal sense to me. I have the time, I'm single with no kids and semi retired. And I have grocery stores AND local produce markets within a short drive. I'm guessing that Amazon isn't seeing me as a potential customer, but it looks like there are more like me out there than they planned on.
I don't see this as becoming the norm for most people like myself who prefer to pick out produce and meats in person. I do see people confined to their homes or requiring a delivery service for awhile due to illness could benefit. But this isn't a large number of people that would require this service.
With inventory commingling, there is a chance that amazon will send me counterfeit food products. I don't want to risk eating that stuff. I will never buy food from amazon.
I still go to Whole Foods every week or so, but when they ask "Are you an Amazon Prime member" I answer no. I can't be arsed to pull out my phone, start their app, and show them a code to scan, and I think the cashiers are happy to skip that step.
Amazon used to have a limited but well priced non perishable food for Primenow customers. Which I would use.
Enough of those deals went away that I no longer even think of using PrimeNow for groceries.
Whole foods was a bad match for Amazon. They should have considered Trader Joe's
you pass the full pop for everything, it usually adds about 20% to your bill. My bro hates shopping so he looked into it and that's why he still shops. It woulda been around $150/mo to get his groceries delivered.
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There is a reason they call it Whole Paycheck! Their prices are outrageous this is WHY many don't shop there. Amazon promised to drop the prices by 20% but only did so for a few weeks and then they jumped right back. Whole Paycheck needs to permanently lower their prices as promised!