I don’t avoid Amazon. After all, half of CC kiddos work there. 
I don't believe that Amazon is keeping WF as anything like WF, we will have to wait and see what the actual plan is. It is hard to imagine, as walmart hasn't been able to leverage local locations in the online context either. I don't know, in my location, who the WF customer is. Amazon now charges us tax, so that is recent enough to bite LOL.
We have a whole foods close and I’ve only just our based pure shea butter. The place is packed. I normally grocery shop at Kroger, except I go to Sam’s for steaks and some fruit, as our Kroger fruit is never ripe enough.
What is it everyone loves about whole foods? Going to 3 placed just never seemed appealing.
Whole Foods has a few products I can’t find anywhere else including the very delicious jarred fresh salad dressings sold in the refrigerator section, a superior challah roll my kids adore, a delicious Parmesan tilapia sold ready to cook at the fish counter and excellent soups at the food bar. Other than that I buy virtually nothing there.
We used to live close to 2 Whole Foods, and only went there for special occasions to buy something fancy (the pastries were always beautiful). We have moved out of the suburbs to a place where big chains are almost absent (retirement area not close to large metro area). Now we live over an hour away, so we have found local vendors for fancy pastries and the like. I just hope the local vendors can survive in our area. All the changes to retail are happening in the larger metro areas, and it will be interesting to see what happens in our area. We have a Dollar General store every three or four miles down the road, which we see as a result of the last recession.
The population of our county is exploding - 20% increase since 2006, but it is mostly retirees.
I have gotten prepared foods at WF when traveling. Good quality and well prepared…and a good selection. I buy this…and eat it at my hotel.
I don’t think the Amazon deal would help that!
I also don’t have Amazon Prime and have only shopped at WF once. It was so overpriced that I would never go back.
I shop at Stop and Shop, Costco and one of two local small chains. I disagree with the poster who said that they would order delivery if they lived in the city. When I lived in the city, I would do a big shopping once a month before kids and every weekend with kids, and would stop every other day or so for produce and fresh stuff. I still basically shop the same way. I had stuff, not produce, but things like toilet paper, juices, etc. delivered once this past winter when I got a discount and free shipping coupon from Google Express, but I didn’t sign up for the service. I did think that it might be a good thing when I get old and don’t feel like schlepping but, for now, I enjoy roaming the aisles at Costco. When the kids were younger, H and I would leave them with grandma and go on a date to Costco. We don’t live close enough to Costco to go every day, unfortunately, because stuff like milk and Half and Half that we go through more often are so much cheaper there.
I rarely shopped on Amazon when I had more disposable income. Now that money is tight, I unfortunately have to look for the bargains and can’t always support local businesses. If I need to shop on Amazon, I look for free shipping or buy on a friend’s account who has Amazon Prime.
I’m going to check out the prepared meals then, I hate to cook.
I’ve spent more on Amazon than I care to count. It’s the go to place to look for stuff when I need them, from little household items to big ticket.
I was the poster who said I would order online if I lived in the city…and I would. My DH lived there when we met…schlepping groceries was something you either did almost every day…or you ordered out or went out.
Truthfully…delivery in that situation would have been terrific. Third floor, small elevator…and no guarantee that there would be a parking space for your zip car anywhere near the building.
I think this will be a big hit with folks IN the cities who either find grocery shopping inconvenient, work long hours (if they live in a doorman building…no issue with delivery) and/or don’t want to schlep groceries…and household products (they probably already order those from Amazon!).
Stores like Whole Foods raise standards and reinvent shopping.
Before they made an impact on the marketplace, grocery stores by and large stocked lousy breads, boring selection of fruit/veggies, small selection of cheeses, etc. Now all my local supermarkets have olive stations, cheeses from everywhere and bread I’d serve a European.
So that’s exactly WF’s problem: it used to be exotic and unique, and forced local grocers to step it up in terms of choice and quality… and now WF is just another gourmet market. I don’t go there often, but I like having it as an option. And I know that at least they treat their employees well.
It will be interesting to see how the Amazon purchase affects WF, and the market. Some newspaper wrote that Amazon destroyed the mall and is now going after supermarkets. While I don’t necessarily agree, I will be curious what happens in the next decade or so.
For those that care about sourcing of food, environmental standards, humanely raised meat, etc. and are willing to pay for it (yes, it is still more expensive), WFM still has an edge and draws customers seeking that. But, yes, WFM success has greatly spurred competition in a positive direction. Over the years, WFM has actually led and informed the consumer in ways beneficial to food chain quality.
Like walmart’s grocery pick up, and I think even costco does this shop online and pick up at store at the city location here for a $ minimum values/business client. I haven’t used either but they both sound convenient.
amazon is like an octopus and has its tentacles(it has a lot more tentacles than a real octopus( just my awesome metaphor) in so many places that you may not even be aware of.
good article(IMO)
https://www.fastcompany.com/40432885/its-time-to-break-up-amazon
I don’t shop at WF because I’ve never lived in a place that had one.
My BIL was on a very low sodium diet and WF was wonderful. They have so many different no salt canned foods (such as beans and tomatoes) as well as good labels for foods. He was able to fix many of his favorite foods. They bought a lot of organic food.
For some people WF is a great resource when you have to follow a special diet.
Amazon is my retirement package. Keep buying people. Keep buying.
Whole foods was based originally around being the un-supermarket in a sense (whether that is entirely true is another story…). For example, the quality of produce in a typical supermarket in my area (the pathmarks, stop and shops, shoprite that we used to call snot rite because it was so dismal) was pretty bad, and you knew a lot of it was from agribusinesses that didn’t care how much pesticides they used, where tomatoes were factory farmed in crushed coral and gassed to be red, and so forth. The meat was not exactly great stuff either, it was likely meat that was raised on corn, in stock pens, and loaded with hormones and anti biotics to make it grow fat fast…and the seafood was, to say the least, pretty crappy, a lot of it was either farm raised or from overseas. Whole foods brought in good quality, the produce you knew where it was grown, they had organic products, with meat you at least knew it wasn’t using hormones and such, some of it was range fed. They had their share of crappy stuff too, the packaged goods there pretend to be healthier than a supermarket brand, but much of it has the same load of salt and sugar and chemicals processed foods have elsewhere…but you had a choice, though you paid for it, and then some, and I think some of their marketing themselves as this earth conscious company out to change the world was more marketing hype then reality, especially given who they were geared to serve…but it did set a model.
Things have changed, and whole foods has found themselves locked into an untenable model. Some people (like the people in my local store, which I don’t like much) will shop there still for snob appeal, but in the past 10 years or so it has changed. Costco for example has organic produce and greens and such, and is a lot cheaper than whole food (meat and such at Costco, though, is still the same old same old commercial product), my local supermarkets like Shop Rite (which at least locally, went from being a low rent store that looked like it was from the 1950’s, to a store today that is more like Wegmans) and Stop and Shop now carry organic items, and you can get things like organic milk and eggs readily and way cheaper than whole foods, and they have rather large sections with natural products, plus they have decent bake shops and such, even Walmart has started attempting to carry organic stuff (though in my local store it didn’t look exactly like they had much yet) and better quality products, and I can find things like range bred chicken and beef at my local supermarkets (haven’t really eaten meat in months, though), and Whole Foods has a hard time competing, because part of their cachet is being elite, and their profit margins depend on being high priced (and their stockholders, especially hedge funds and the like, are not patient if a company eschews profit margins for growth).
What I will be curious about is whether Amazon owning whole foods helps locally sourced providers, one of the big problems with supermarket chains is they are often locked into contracts with co-ops that represent not only local farms but are increasingly dominated by big agri businesses, would be nice if this provides and outlet for those kind of producers.
There definitely is a lot more competion, besides shop rite and stop and shop (pathmark having gone the way of the DoDo bird) picking up a bit, we are getting a Wegman’s and next year a Lidl, both of which are competitors to whole foods.
I just went today to check it out again. I thought the produce was good and purchased some ripe Anjou pears…yum. I went to check out the premade food. I thought the selection was mediocre and extremely expensive. I don’t think I’ll be shopping there again, except for the pears! Sams club had them last year, but mine doesn’t have those really ripe ones this year.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of the prepared food. Expensive and mediocre are good descriptors.
Amazon’s agreement with Bartell’s drugs doesn’t include prescriptions. I don’t know if there are any special local regulations regarding prescription delivery.
Even if it did, they couldn’t deliver out of state.
A mail order pharmacy needs not only to be licensed in its home state but needs to be licensed as an out of state pharmacy in the states where they want to deliver to. Some state’s require pharmacist be licensed in their state even if the pharmacy is located out of state.
There are no guarantees the insurance companies will let them join their network; with the exception of pharmacies located in an any willing provider state. Pharmacies have very limited leverage against the insurance companies.
Right now, the trend is to limit the number of prescriptions a pharmacist can fill per shift