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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.
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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."
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
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She's like 50 now dude.
She's 37, has 2 kids, and is still hot.
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)
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...
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Right below the eggs.
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That's wheely bad spelling.
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
Not sure if AC and I are in different markets... but I have quite good experience buying groceries online. I shop about 75% from Amazon and 20% from another online vendor who has a better supply chain of products, AND lower prices but at the cost of worse service. The remaining 5% is bought in physical stores.
I have never had groceries come in a box! Amazon groceries come in sturdy paper bags (which we use for recycling) and the competitor brings HDPE bags without drain holes (which we use for garbage).
Returns are drop dead easy. Perishable items, in 100% of cases they just write off the item and refund, without even asking for a photogram. Once, they sent me an entire bag of groceries from someone else's order. They said I could dispose of or eat everything. And they refunded whatever I claimed was missing.
Freshness and quality of customer support are the main reasons I switched to Amazon. The primary drawbacks are poor integration with Alexa, poor website search for groceries, and most of all, missing key items that I buy somewhat regularly. And for those, I keep the competitor on retainer for the niggling 20% of orders.
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That is a crazy way to spend your money. Did you know that grocery stores bank on 60% of your cart revenue to come from things that you did not intend to buy?
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Give an example? I don't give a toss about an organic label... I buy food that looks good and tastes good. I am willing to pay more for it.
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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.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I go the other way: I show up, buy whatever's cheap (based on years of getting groceries), and figure out what to do with it afterwards.
The upshot is that it's cheap, usually means you'll pick up whatever's in-season, and you get exposed to all kinds of random stuff. The downside is that some of this random stuff is... interesting sometimes. I ended up with okra for the first time from this in my 20s (having grown up in an area where its unheard of) and thought the entire batch went bad, with how slick and goopy it is.
If that is your buying style, then a freezer and a coupon file would save you tons of money as well. See: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307... America's Cheapest Family
(Obviously not pointed at you directly, but someone who shops similarly and wants to save more money)
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Grow them and eat crappy tomatoes in the off season. It is interesting how used to "perfect" food children get, you have to repeatedly assure them the little spots on the farmer's market produce are fine and so on. Once they take a bite they won't mind for that item, but the next type of produce they're used to seeing the perfect looking grocery store example and you have to start over.
Tomatoes... true, you can't get them in places like Albertson's, but you can get good ones at the local Mexican market. Those guys actually eat ripe fruit, avocados, etc. so in my experience they have what you are looking for.
Now I live in London and we have easy access to great tomatoes, generally grown in hot houses in Spain. Back on topic to the article, Amazon delivers them to me weekly (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01MFD3H7P).
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If he budgets the money to be spent and actually ends up eating everything he buys and meeting his dietary requirements it isn't a terrible idea, but perhaps not the best. I limit my impulse buys to the produce section since you can't really plan on when a bumper crop is going to come in.
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.
...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 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's prices suck for groceries on almost all their products I've shopped for. Fucking Kellogs oatmeal was at least 2 times the cost. I'd rather just go in the store. Nowadays a bunch have curbside pickup so it's a quick stop on my way home from work if I do it that way. Plus Costco has great prices and I have to go in there.
Think how much money AC just might have saved you, AC
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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!