17 ms·

The Amazon-Ification of Whole Foods

109 points by IntronExon 9y ago

skywhopper 9y ago
> when a dad says to the smart speaker on his counter, “Alexa, I need brown rice and pork,” the product that arrives is an Amazon-branded box containing Amazon–Whole Foods–branded rice and pork. I question whether the author here has ever cooked a meal, much less shopped for ingredients. There's no way this style of interaction can produce the desired result here.
- m1n1 9y ago
  The system could conceivably learn what a particular user means by "pork" (which cut, how much) and "brown rice" on the first iteration, and then default to that next time if no further specification is given.
  - snaily 9y ago
    This is surprisingly subtle as a user interaction. Imagine the first time the user asks for "pork", Alexa asks follow up questions - "what cut", "how much", etc. There is a whole taxonomy! The next time, the user has learnt the flow and starts walking down the taxonomy path for pork by asking for "pork"- or so the user thinks! Alexa just immediately dispatches the same cut the user bought three weeks ago. User never trusts Alexa again.
    - dmix 9y ago
      > Alexa just immediately dispatches the same cut the user bought three weeks ago. User never trusts Alexa again. Obviously Alexa wouldn't just order it right away. It could easily say: > Alexa: "Would like like to order the same x cut from last time?" [Yes/No] > Alexa: "Okay great, the total will be x and the delivery estimate is 1hr, shall I submit this order?" [Yes/No] > Alexa: "The order has been submitted, I'll notify you when it's marked as out for delivery"
      - gowld 9y ago
        > "Would like like to order the same x cut from last time?" No, I think I want the one from 3 times ago? Or was it 4?
        airstrike 9y ago
        replace 'x' with the name of the cut.
  - Dan_Nguyen 9y ago
    I can't speak for other people, but I can see this being a bad feature for me. It'd be great for chicken where I usually get the same thing (~5lbs chicken thighs). For beef though it'd be an absolute nightmare. I vary between flank, eye of round, ribeye, rib roast (which granted is basically a really big ribeye) and chuck in different amounts depending on what I feel like cooking. I also know myself well enough to know I'm going to have a forgetful moment in the kitchen, order "beef" when I'm focusing on something else, and accidentally end up with 5 lbs of flank when I wanted 1 lb of ribeye.
- mkempe 9y ago
  The notion that one can generally shop, let alone shop for groceries, via a voice interface is puzzling. I'm ok with other family members adding things to a wishlist (called "shopping list" in the Alexa system), although I often have to ask for clarification -- when you said "white chocolate", did you know we already have some? oh, you want another type? which one specifically?
  - gervase 9y ago
    I generally find that 'eggs' and 'milk' might be on my shopping list 4 or 5 times by the time I actually go shopping, and 'onions' will somehow remain on the list until I have accumulated at least five pounds.
- macNchz 9y ago
  Just this week I asked Siri to remind me to water the plants when I got home from work–that night as I walked up my block my phone lit up with the message “What are the planets?”. Existential ponderings aside, I’m almost tempted to start ordering grocery delivery by voice just to see what kind of hilarious misunderstandings arise.
  - titanomachy 9y ago
    Maybe it was unrelated and your phone just achieved sentience.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  My cat has been trying to vocalize what sounds like: "Alexa, please ship Walter to the Kat Fud factory." Should I be concerned?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - DrScump 9y ago
    Steve Martin's "Cat Handcuffs" routine nailed this concept 40? years ago.
- Theodores 9y ago
  Actually, in this brave new world the home AI system - Alexa - asks the dad what dinner is going to be this evening. The dad says that he fancies risotto with some herb tasting sausages and maybe some side salad. Alexa does not magically do the cooking but will establish that ingredients will be needed. The contents of the fridge and general provision levels will be known, plus an existing house way of doing things, e.g. mixing brown rice in with the risotto rice and hand making the sausages from whatever pork is available. Alexa will also be able to know what you like from what stays and what goes out to recycling. So that tin of prunes in the cupboard won't become a dozen tins for programming error reasons. It will be a bit like living with someone that stays at home all day and has time to go out and do the shopping, you might do all the cooking as part of the relationship with a fair expectation that everything needed for agreed meal plans is purchased. Alexa could also know how to optimise inventory, so if it makes sense to buy a 25 Kg bag of brown rice due to so much of it being eaten by such a large family with such a large house that have been customers at that address for such a long time, then so be it. If the home cupboards and fridge are a 'cache' in this food network then the AI would also know of favourites and have things on hand. So there may be a variable selection of ice creams that could be on hand if the main course needed a dessert without one being specially requested. Favourite main meals could also be 'cached', this could be learned to suit the lifestyle, so if you do have a dozen people needing feeding at ad-hoc dinner parties or if you actually never have friends visit, the AI should get it.
  - airstrike 9y ago
    > Alexa does not magically do the cooking I've got news for you... http://www.moley.com/ http://www.moley.com/
  - DrScump 9y ago
    And Alexa will happily sell every detail of your household consumption for the rest of you and your children's lives.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Nope, for the same reason Google doesn't. The data is worth more to Amazon if they keep it to themselves.
trevyn 9y ago
Datapoint: Prime Now in Los Angeles has quite a few Whole Foods branded products already (just got some coconut milk this morning!), although it's not part of this launch. Prime Now is really a fantastic service, but it seems like not many people really know about it; Amazon seems to never promote it on their site. If Amazon buys IKEA, my life will be complete.
- smt88 9y ago
  If Amazon bought IKEA, the prices would probably go up because IKEA is benefiting from its bullshit nonprofit status. https://www.fastcodesign.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and-yes-thats-every-bit-as-fishy-as-it-sounds https://www.fastcodesign.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and...
- s0rce 9y ago
  I've tried Prime now a few times (Bay Area) and its frequently out of stock of really standard items (ex a 1/2 gallon of whole milk, non-organic) or you'll add some celery to your cart and then by the time you order its out of stock. Prices don't seem to be particularly great either. I can order from wholefoods via instacart and it might be cheaper depending on the items you get. Last time I went to order they didn't have enough drivers and had no delivery slots available, I had to wait a day and then schedule it again for the following day...
  - spraak 9y ago
    I've had stellar experience with it in Los Angeles... perhaps it's their flagship at the moment.
- spraak 9y ago
  Yeah, I noticed that too. I order very frequently from Sprouts through Prime Now and am very grateful for it.
niftich 9y ago
Whole Foods gave Amazon a high-end, nationwide, yet arguably "mainstream" grocery store to enter into the US grocery market. It's an aspirational brand, yet not so specialty to be ostentatious. It's a nationwide chain, unlike other top-rated grocery stores -- Wegmans and Publix come to mind. And it's a store that, through savvy and market timing, has located its sites in areas that are experiencing growth in upper-middle-class households: Amazon's preferred demographic. They can likely cut Whole Foods' margins on many items and, through the magic of the warehouse club nature of Prime, offer further discounts to Prime members, incentivizing the choice of Amazon over their competitors. Not all people will we swayed, but some will. This will shake up the grocery market in many metros, where margins are tight and incumbents are often saddled with tight margins, concerns about real estate, and preexisting debt. Some will spend more to retain customers with extra features like free at-store pickup or cheap delivery, but they won't be able to outmatch Amazon's warchest. The most vulnerable among their competition will fold, allowing customer bases to re-align.
- Shivetya 9y ago
  There aren't enough of these stores to impact any major metro area. Aldi tends to have more storefronts and their impact hasn't been that great. What did smack the old school grocers was when Wal Mart got into the business years ago and to a point Target. example, there less than ten Whole Foods stores in Metropolitan Atlanta. There are probably that many competing grocery chains in the same area, with sixty plus of each of the larger ones.
  - Whiteskin_Kanye 9y ago
    In Detroit, a "food desert", they could potentially take over the majority of the downtown/midtown upper middle class grocery market.
- e_b 9y ago
  Amazon can't reduce margins without fundamentally changing the nature of Whole Foods. If they lower margins they will leave their current segment and enter a lower cost segment, with the corresponding changes in service, offerings and overall customer experience. They could do it by subsidizing lower margins in the short but not the long term.
Dowwie 9y ago
They recently stopped roasting fresh coffee every day. Cost cutting coffee is so wrong...
- smt88 9y ago
  I agree as far as taste goes, but if it reduces food waste, then I think it's a good tradeoff.
- rrdharan 9y ago
  Really? In all locations or just some of them? I'm kind of surprised I can't find anything about this change, though there are lots of older blog posts and reddit threads etc. about how they roast fresh beans daily.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    WF coffee is overpriced for the quality. Coffee roasting is a skill, skill WF employees do not have and are unlikely to have in future. Absolutely excellent coffee roasted by small bean producers that built small empires can be had at the same or sometimes cheaper prices than Whole Foods coffee.
    - josephjrobison 9y ago
      Whole Foods Allegro roasting Asustin downtown is on par at $10-14/lb vs $20-25/lb for small roasters.
      - notyourday 9y ago
        $10-$14/lb is La Colombe/Brooklyn Roast price, both of which blow WF out of the water. It has to do with volume. The reason why small batch producers that know what they are doing are so much better is because they are small batch. It is impossible to source enough identical beans to get the identical result, which is why larger operations generate at best very decent but not anywhere close to excellent roasts. They know that they are inferior to small batch producers so they price themselves accordingly. WF is a large producer that prices itself at the level of small batch where its roasts are sharing the category with Dunkin and Trader Joes. Coffee is like wine. If you need to produce a lot, you may get a boat loads of Merlot and blend it together producing a quite drinkable wine but you will lose to a bottle of St Emillion as yours would be too washed out.
niftich 9y ago
I live in the Virginia Beach metro, which alongside Austin, Dallas, and Cincinnati, is one of the four test locations announced for their new Whole Foods Prime delivery service. My theory is that the Virginia Beach location was chosen as their "stress test", as it's the one where this service is most likely to fail. If it can work there, it can probably work anywhere. The metro has some positive attributes: high proportion and large number of military families who are mostly concentrated in the suburbs. But it also has many complicating factors: - A difficult metro for logistics. It's essentially a routing cul-de-sac: not enough local demand to serve as a large distribution node, and it's ~100 miles from the Richmond metro that's typically used for this instead. Getting product in by rail is easier, but difficult to do just-in-time, and most rail freight traffic flows the other way: out. - Low growth. Incomes in the metro grew slower than the US average [1]. Employment growth has been well below US average [2]. The region isn't quite stagnant, but recovery after the recession has been markedly slower than Northern Virginia, Raleigh-Durham, or the region's arch-rival Richmond. Most population growth that is occurring [3] in Virginia Beach's vicinity is in suburban areas beyond the single Whole Foods' delivery range [4]. - Grocery saturation. In the past year, German-style chains Aldi and Lidl have expanded, Publix has been rumored to be eyeing the area, and Wegmans has been confirmed to be coming [5]. This is in addition to local incumbents owned by Supervalu, Kroger, and Ahold Delhaize. Local press and commentators have been noting that the area seems to now be overprovisioned with grocery stores [6]. Meanwhile, Cincinnati is close to major trucking corridors and is adjacent to Amazon's old freight hub in Ohio and its new one at Cincinnati's Kentucky airport. Dallas and Austin are both major markets with high levels of growth. [1] https://www.bea.gov/regional/bearfacts/pdf.cfm?fips=47260&areatype=MSA&geotype=4 https://www.bea.gov/regional/bearfacts/pdf.cfm?fips=47260&ar... [2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/news-release/areaemployment_virginiabeach.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/news-release/areaem... [3] https://pilotonline.com/news/local/article_8e17f21e-2180-5c14-beae-80ce3a8b97c9.html https://pilotonline.com/news/local/article_8e17f21e-2180-5c1... [4] https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_db7fe221-4b4b-5b63-8255-f722c8e434df.html https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_db7fe221-4... [5] https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_610b32b7-6cf7-5050-9b07-26516cd75120.html https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_610b32b7-6... [6] https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_8b636301-ffd0-5750-9793-15d63fda8f0b.html https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_8b636301-f...
amzn_wf_throw2 9y ago
If Amazon is smart, they will keep their brand out of Whole Foods, at least until they rehabilitate it some. Neither media or public sentiment towards Amazon is great right now for a variety of reasons, many of which have been posted on HN. Some people are getting disturbed that it seems like they can only get important goods from one company; indeed, this is basically the monopoly future that Amazon wants. Personally, I don't want to feel like I'm being stalked or "optimized" by Amazon at my local Whole Foods. I don't think we've seen the end of non-Amazon retail yet. When almost every transaction is conducted through Skinnerian workflows developed by MBAs in Seattle and neural networks running in Virginia data centers, doing all your shopping at Walmart is an act of radical physicality.
- tehlike 9y ago
  As a consumer, amazon is a great brand.
  - fnbr 9y ago
    I agree. It's only as a potential employer that they lose their luster.
    - prepend 9y ago
      They seem like a pretty good employer to me.
      - tehlike 9y ago
        I have knowledge from a swe friend, i heard it was not great compared to google, but that was 4 years ago. Disclaimer: google employee.
      - sincerely 9y ago
        they are notorious for overworking their warehouse and delivery workers and i have heard very mixed experiences of working for amazon in a dev or biz role.
  - 9y ago
FlyingSideKick 9y ago
Over the last couple of years I’ve been shopping at Whole Foods less as the quality of their produce has gone downhill. As one who cooks almost every night I like to personally select the produce I’ll be using. Delivery drivers on a tight timeline will never be able to meet the expectations of others like myself. I simply don’t see driving to the store as a problem, I see it as an enjoyable experience(and I have small kids). All of the free delivery in the world won’t keep me from driving to my local organic Co-op to choose the best vegetables, fruit and cuts of meat. Point being that Amazon’s impact on the grocery business will likely be far short of transformational.
- smt88 9y ago
  How does your personal opinion mean that Amazon is going to fail at this? Most people I know are loathed to grocery shop, and many are loathed to cook. Add in all the people with no car, disabilities, multiple jobs, odd working hours, etc. etc.
- spraak 9y ago
  I've shopped exclusively through Prime Now from Sprouts (similar to Whole Foods) for groceries for the past 7 months, and while I have had times of disappointment at the produce I get (green bananas vs yellow), it's improved my life in maybe not a huge way, but at least noticeably. My wife and I would always end up arguing at the store. I like to shop, browse and take my time, and I always seemed to buy things I shouldn't. Now I can take my time away from the store, I see what I'm buying and how much it will be, and have more (even if a little bit) free time that I'm not at the store. I like it a lot.
- gowld 9y ago
  There's plenty of room to be transformational short of your extremely niche use-case.
  - acheron 9y ago
    “People who don’t mind going to the store” is not “extremely niche”.
narrator 9y ago
I used to use Instacart, but it was a hassle to manage the people doing the shopping. They would get bad produce. They would mistake zucchini for cucumber. They would make nonsensical replacements. Constant screw-ups. Sure if you're buying toilet paper or some other generic commodity then it's fine, but you can already do that with Amazon.
- THE_PUN_STOPS 9y ago
  At the height of the Instacart craze in my city, I was at a grocery store (as a customer) when an instacart shopper walked up holding bok choy and frantically asked “Is this collard greens??”
- hbosch 9y ago
  I believe a robo-picker would not mistake the clearly coded cucumber for zucchini, nor would the well-trained AI allow non-ideal produce into the sorting bins. No need to worry.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    A robo picker would pick up a cucumber and not notice it's rotten on one side though, unless we assume that the robots will scan the entire item and somehow figure out what is good and what is not using AI - but I think that would prove to be an extremely difficult problem and ultimately not worth the effort.
    - alexhawdon 9y ago
      I believe it would though. It's already happening higher up the supply chain where conveyor belts of produce are graded using computer vision (and other techniques, I'm sure). This is about moving these techniques further down the chain. A robot picker arm with a few cameras attached that can tell whether something is rotten is well within our grasp. (Awful pun intended!)
      - throwawayhzm 9y ago
brandonmenc 9y ago
I've been living in Austin for the past two years, and shopping mostly at the Whole Foods world headquarters. I'm not sure what the big deal is about this place - overpriced for the quality, service is ho-hum, prepared foods are nothing special, etc. Wegmans absolutely crushes it.
- tmh79 9y ago
  there is a wegmans in austin? So jealous. Also there is a wegmans musical: http://www.telegram.com/article/20120502/TOWNNEWS/120509938/0/business http://www.telegram.com/article/20120502/TOWNNEWS/120509938/...
  - adrianmonk 9y ago
    There certainly isn't a Wegmans in Austin that I know of. I don't think there is one within 1000 miles.
    - DrScump 9y ago
      But you have Rudy's. Don't get greedy. ;)
- throwaway9980 9y ago
  Ten years ago the quality difference between Whole Foods and a Kroger/mid-tier-chain was something akin to the contrast between a US grocery store and a Soviet grocery store in the 1980’s. The big chains have closed the gap.
- DrScump 9y ago
  Would anybody who has shopped both Wegmans and California's Nugget chain care to contrast them?
ironjunkie 9y ago
Amazon Prime Now... Is that the thing where delivery is "free" but where we are supposed to "tip" the driver ?
- spraak 9y ago
  I've ordered from Prime Now about 3 to 4 times per week for the past 7 months. It's incredibly helpful for me. Mostly because I don't have a car and prefer to shop from Sprouts (which is similar to Whole Foods) and I'm able to do so with Prime Now. I usually leave a tip to the delivery person because they carry all my heavy groceries up to my apartment, and they've told me it helps them a lot (which is unfortunate in that way, that I'm subsidizing their wage). I literally depend on Prime Now.
  - chrisper 9y ago
    Your situation is ok, because you want to tip. I don't think it is ok to automatically fill out the tipping field.
    - eropple 9y ago
      Then seek out an equivalent service that pays their delivery folks more and doesn't require a tip. We have those here in Boston; Peapod's delivery drivers can be tipped and they've said that it's a major part of their income but Roche Bros.'s drivers have literally laughed and said "we don't accept tips, we actually get paid." (I had a $10 in hand--he turned it down. Peapod has a big huge field on the invoice and charges it to the card. Skinflints.) Or accept that, yes, obligatory tipping is part of the culture, and while you may not like it (I sure don't) it is incumbent upon us to do right by the people whose services we are buying.
      - hnaccy 9y ago
        It's not immoral to not tip.
        9y ago
jimmywanger 9y ago
It's sort of funny. Amazon now does is doing the same thing Walmart did back in the day. If you were a supplier for Walmart, you _had_ to adopt their business practices in order to stay competitive in the market. They would demand that so you could constantly lower prices. Amazon is sort of the same in that if they enter a vertical shopping market, if you don't provide the same level of service, you're kind of sunk. And to get to that level of service, the insidious thing is that you either let them take care of logistics and pay them a cut, or you adopt their business practices which have been honed for years. I don't think Amazon-Ification is necessarily a bad thing. Amazon runs a tight ship and companies would do well to learn.
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
When I was a kid, mom would do the grocery shipping once every 2 weeks. She'd load the five kids into the van and we'd trek over and fill 2 shopping carts with 10 boxes of breakfast cereal, 2 gallons of milk, 2 pounds of bacon, 8 pounds of hamburger, 24 cans of Campbell's soup... Flash forward to 2018 and my wife is buying things online to the point that we're getting 4-6 items delivered per week. I'd guess that's not exceptional. With 'free delivery' for under $35, I can see her increasing that to on average one delivery item per day. Kind of like the milk man used to do. What concerns me is that the amount of energy that goes into getting all that stuff into my home seems to have substantially increased, and, will continue to increase as more businesses incorporate low cost or free delivery. So it makes me wonder where this ends. It seems we'll wind up with delivery trucks, perhaps autonomous electric vehicles, combing the suburbs throughout the day. I keep contemplating the extremes: 149 items acquired in one trip the way my mom used to operate, vs.149 items delivered to my home one at a time over a 2 week period. What are the trade-offs?
- randomsearch 9y ago
  I had the same thought process. One point to note is that a delivery guy might deliver to multiple people in your neighbourhood, so his driving is amortised over those orders, whereas when you drive the shops you're making the whole journey for yourself. If delivery was organised extremely efficiently, e.g. a single delivery service that delivers everything at the same time as the post, it's no doubt that it would be much more efficient than individuals going to the shops themselves. So we're on a spectrum where the extremes are "much better" and "much worse" than pre-internet, but it's not clear to me where we are on the spectrum; in particular, it would be interesting to know whether the net energy consumption has increased or dropped.
- Symmetry 9y ago
  I'd expect the energy cost of deliveries to be about an order of magnitude less than doing the shopping yourself if you have to drive out of your way to do it. Goods being delivered make up a significant fraction of the weight of a delivery vehicle but a tiny fraction of your car when you're driving to the store, even if you are getting all that stuff.
- 9y ago

109 points by IntronExon 9y ago

> when a dad says to the smart speaker on his counter, “Alexa, I need brown rice and pork,” the product that arrives is an Amazon-branded box containing Amazon–Whole Foods–branded rice and pork. I question whether the author here has ever cooked a meal, much less shopped for ingredients. There's no way this style of interaction can produce the desired result here.

m1n1 9y ago
The system could conceivably learn what a particular user means by "pork" (which cut, how much) and "brown rice" on the first iteration, and then default to that next time if no further specification is given.
- snaily 9y ago
  This is surprisingly subtle as a user interaction. Imagine the first time the user asks for "pork", Alexa asks follow up questions - "what cut", "how much", etc. There is a whole taxonomy! The next time, the user has learnt the flow and starts walking down the taxonomy path for pork by asking for "pork"- or so the user thinks! Alexa just immediately dispatches the same cut the user bought three weeks ago. User never trusts Alexa again.
  - dmix 9y ago
    > Alexa just immediately dispatches the same cut the user bought three weeks ago. User never trusts Alexa again. Obviously Alexa wouldn't just order it right away. It could easily say: > Alexa: "Would like like to order the same x cut from last time?" [Yes/No] > Alexa: "Okay great, the total will be x and the delivery estimate is 1hr, shall I submit this order?" [Yes/No] > Alexa: "The order has been submitted, I'll notify you when it's marked as out for delivery"
    - gowld 9y ago
      > "Would like like to order the same x cut from last time?" No, I think I want the one from 3 times ago? Or was it 4?
      - airstrike 9y ago
        replace 'x' with the name of the cut.
- Dan_Nguyen 9y ago
  I can't speak for other people, but I can see this being a bad feature for me. It'd be great for chicken where I usually get the same thing (~5lbs chicken thighs). For beef though it'd be an absolute nightmare. I vary between flank, eye of round, ribeye, rib roast (which granted is basically a really big ribeye) and chuck in different amounts depending on what I feel like cooking. I also know myself well enough to know I'm going to have a forgetful moment in the kitchen, order "beef" when I'm focusing on something else, and accidentally end up with 5 lbs of flank when I wanted 1 lb of ribeye.
mkempe 9y ago
The notion that one can generally shop, let alone shop for groceries, via a voice interface is puzzling. I'm ok with other family members adding things to a wishlist (called "shopping list" in the Alexa system), although I often have to ask for clarification -- when you said "white chocolate", did you know we already have some? oh, you want another type? which one specifically?
- gervase 9y ago
  I generally find that 'eggs' and 'milk' might be on my shopping list 4 or 5 times by the time I actually go shopping, and 'onions' will somehow remain on the list until I have accumulated at least five pounds.
macNchz 9y ago
Just this week I asked Siri to remind me to water the plants when I got home from work–that night as I walked up my block my phone lit up with the message “What are the planets?”. Existential ponderings aside, I’m almost tempted to start ordering grocery delivery by voice just to see what kind of hilarious misunderstandings arise.
- titanomachy 9y ago
  Maybe it was unrelated and your phone just achieved sentience.
WalterBright 9y ago
My cat has been trying to vocalize what sounds like: "Alexa, please ship Walter to the Kat Fud factory." Should I be concerned?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- DrScump 9y ago
  Steve Martin's "Cat Handcuffs" routine nailed this concept 40? years ago.
Theodores 9y ago
Actually, in this brave new world the home AI system - Alexa - asks the dad what dinner is going to be this evening. The dad says that he fancies risotto with some herb tasting sausages and maybe some side salad. Alexa does not magically do the cooking but will establish that ingredients will be needed. The contents of the fridge and general provision levels will be known, plus an existing house way of doing things, e.g. mixing brown rice in with the risotto rice and hand making the sausages from whatever pork is available. Alexa will also be able to know what you like from what stays and what goes out to recycling. So that tin of prunes in the cupboard won't become a dozen tins for programming error reasons. It will be a bit like living with someone that stays at home all day and has time to go out and do the shopping, you might do all the cooking as part of the relationship with a fair expectation that everything needed for agreed meal plans is purchased. Alexa could also know how to optimise inventory, so if it makes sense to buy a 25 Kg bag of brown rice due to so much of it being eaten by such a large family with such a large house that have been customers at that address for such a long time, then so be it. If the home cupboards and fridge are a 'cache' in this food network then the AI would also know of favourites and have things on hand. So there may be a variable selection of ice creams that could be on hand if the main course needed a dessert without one being specially requested. Favourite main meals could also be 'cached', this could be learned to suit the lifestyle, so if you do have a dozen people needing feeding at ad-hoc dinner parties or if you actually never have friends visit, the AI should get it.
- airstrike 9y ago
  > Alexa does not magically do the cooking I've got news for you... http://www.moley.com/ http://www.moley.com/
- DrScump 9y ago
  And Alexa will happily sell every detail of your household consumption for the rest of you and your children's lives.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Nope, for the same reason Google doesn't. The data is worth more to Amazon if they keep it to themselves.

trevyn 9y ago

Datapoint: Prime Now in Los Angeles has quite a few Whole Foods branded products already (just got some coconut milk this morning!), although it's not part of this launch. Prime Now is really a fantastic service, but it seems like not many people really know about it; Amazon seems to never promote it on their site. If Amazon buys IKEA, my life will be complete.

smt88 9y ago
If Amazon bought IKEA, the prices would probably go up because IKEA is benefiting from its bullshit nonprofit status. https://www.fastcodesign.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and-yes-thats-every-bit-as-fishy-as-it-sounds https://www.fastcodesign.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and...
s0rce 9y ago
I've tried Prime now a few times (Bay Area) and its frequently out of stock of really standard items (ex a 1/2 gallon of whole milk, non-organic) or you'll add some celery to your cart and then by the time you order its out of stock. Prices don't seem to be particularly great either. I can order from wholefoods via instacart and it might be cheaper depending on the items you get. Last time I went to order they didn't have enough drivers and had no delivery slots available, I had to wait a day and then schedule it again for the following day...
- spraak 9y ago
  I've had stellar experience with it in Los Angeles... perhaps it's their flagship at the moment.
spraak 9y ago
Yeah, I noticed that too. I order very frequently from Sprouts through Prime Now and am very grateful for it.

niftich 9y ago

Whole Foods gave Amazon a high-end, nationwide, yet arguably "mainstream" grocery store to enter into the US grocery market. It's an aspirational brand, yet not so specialty to be ostentatious. It's a nationwide chain, unlike other top-rated grocery stores -- Wegmans and Publix come to mind. And it's a store that, through savvy and market timing, has located its sites in areas that are experiencing growth in upper-middle-class households: Amazon's preferred demographic. They can likely cut Whole Foods' margins on many items and, through the magic of the warehouse club nature of Prime, offer further discounts to Prime members, incentivizing the choice of Amazon over their competitors. Not all people will we swayed, but some will. This will shake up the grocery market in many metros, where margins are tight and incumbents are often saddled with tight margins, concerns about real estate, and preexisting debt. Some will spend more to retain customers with extra features like free at-store pickup or cheap delivery, but they won't be able to outmatch Amazon's warchest. The most vulnerable among their competition will fold, allowing customer bases to re-align.

Shivetya 9y ago
There aren't enough of these stores to impact any major metro area. Aldi tends to have more storefronts and their impact hasn't been that great. What did smack the old school grocers was when Wal Mart got into the business years ago and to a point Target. example, there less than ten Whole Foods stores in Metropolitan Atlanta. There are probably that many competing grocery chains in the same area, with sixty plus of each of the larger ones.
- Whiteskin_Kanye 9y ago
  In Detroit, a "food desert", they could potentially take over the majority of the downtown/midtown upper middle class grocery market.
e_b 9y ago
Amazon can't reduce margins without fundamentally changing the nature of Whole Foods. If they lower margins they will leave their current segment and enter a lower cost segment, with the corresponding changes in service, offerings and overall customer experience. They could do it by subsidizing lower margins in the short but not the long term.

Dowwie 9y ago

They recently stopped roasting fresh coffee every day. Cost cutting coffee is so wrong...

smt88 9y ago
I agree as far as taste goes, but if it reduces food waste, then I think it's a good tradeoff.
rrdharan 9y ago
Really? In all locations or just some of them? I'm kind of surprised I can't find anything about this change, though there are lots of older blog posts and reddit threads etc. about how they roast fresh beans daily.
- notyourday 9y ago
  WF coffee is overpriced for the quality. Coffee roasting is a skill, skill WF employees do not have and are unlikely to have in future. Absolutely excellent coffee roasted by small bean producers that built small empires can be had at the same or sometimes cheaper prices than Whole Foods coffee.
  - josephjrobison 9y ago
    Whole Foods Allegro roasting Asustin downtown is on par at $10-14/lb vs $20-25/lb for small roasters.
    - notyourday 9y ago
      $10-$14/lb is La Colombe/Brooklyn Roast price, both of which blow WF out of the water. It has to do with volume. The reason why small batch producers that know what they are doing are so much better is because they are small batch. It is impossible to source enough identical beans to get the identical result, which is why larger operations generate at best very decent but not anywhere close to excellent roasts. They know that they are inferior to small batch producers so they price themselves accordingly. WF is a large producer that prices itself at the level of small batch where its roasts are sharing the category with Dunkin and Trader Joes. Coffee is like wine. If you need to produce a lot, you may get a boat loads of Merlot and blend it together producing a quite drinkable wine but you will lose to a bottle of St Emillion as yours would be too washed out.

niftich 9y ago

I live in the Virginia Beach metro, which alongside Austin, Dallas, and Cincinnati, is one of the four test locations announced for their new Whole Foods Prime delivery service. My theory is that the Virginia Beach location was chosen as their "stress test", as it's the one where this service is most likely to fail. If it can work there, it can probably work anywhere. The metro has some positive attributes: high proportion and large number of military families who are mostly concentrated in the suburbs. But it also has many complicating factors: - A difficult metro for logistics. It's essentially a routing cul-de-sac: not enough local demand to serve as a large distribution node, and it's ~100 miles from the Richmond metro that's typically used for this instead. Getting product in by rail is easier, but difficult to do just-in-time, and most rail freight traffic flows the other way: out. - Low growth. Incomes in the metro grew slower than the US average [1]. Employment growth has been well below US average [2]. The region isn't quite stagnant, but recovery after the recession has been markedly slower than Northern Virginia, Raleigh-Durham, or the region's arch-rival Richmond. Most population growth that is occurring [3] in Virginia Beach's vicinity is in suburban areas beyond the single Whole Foods' delivery range [4]. - Grocery saturation. In the past year, German-style chains Aldi and Lidl have expanded, Publix has been rumored to be eyeing the area, and Wegmans has been confirmed to be coming [5]. This is in addition to local incumbents owned by Supervalu, Kroger, and Ahold Delhaize. Local press and commentators have been noting that the area seems to now be overprovisioned with grocery stores [6]. Meanwhile, Cincinnati is close to major trucking corridors and is adjacent to Amazon's old freight hub in Ohio and its new one at Cincinnati's Kentucky airport. Dallas and Austin are both major markets with high levels of growth. [1] https://www.bea.gov/regional/bearfacts/pdf.cfm?fips=47260&areatype=MSA&geotype=4 https://www.bea.gov/regional/bearfacts/pdf.cfm?fips=47260&ar... [2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/news-release/areaemployment_virginiabeach.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/news-release/areaem... [3] https://pilotonline.com/news/local/article_8e17f21e-2180-5c14-beae-80ce3a8b97c9.html https://pilotonline.com/news/local/article_8e17f21e-2180-5c1... [4] https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_db7fe221-4b4b-5b63-8255-f722c8e434df.html https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_db7fe221-4... [5] https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_610b32b7-6cf7-5050-9b07-26516cd75120.html https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_610b32b7-6... [6] https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_8b636301-ffd0-5750-9793-15d63fda8f0b.html https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_8b636301-f...

amzn_wf_throw2 9y ago

If Amazon is smart, they will keep their brand out of Whole Foods, at least until they rehabilitate it some. Neither media or public sentiment towards Amazon is great right now for a variety of reasons, many of which have been posted on HN. Some people are getting disturbed that it seems like they can only get important goods from one company; indeed, this is basically the monopoly future that Amazon wants. Personally, I don't want to feel like I'm being stalked or "optimized" by Amazon at my local Whole Foods. I don't think we've seen the end of non-Amazon retail yet. When almost every transaction is conducted through Skinnerian workflows developed by MBAs in Seattle and neural networks running in Virginia data centers, doing all your shopping at Walmart is an act of radical physicality.

tehlike 9y ago
As a consumer, amazon is a great brand.
- fnbr 9y ago
  I agree. It's only as a potential employer that they lose their luster.
  - prepend 9y ago
    They seem like a pretty good employer to me.
    - tehlike 9y ago
      I have knowledge from a swe friend, i heard it was not great compared to google, but that was 4 years ago. Disclaimer: google employee.
    - sincerely 9y ago
      they are notorious for overworking their warehouse and delivery workers and i have heard very mixed experiences of working for amazon in a dev or biz role.
- 9y ago

FlyingSideKick 9y ago

Over the last couple of years I’ve been shopping at Whole Foods less as the quality of their produce has gone downhill. As one who cooks almost every night I like to personally select the produce I’ll be using. Delivery drivers on a tight timeline will never be able to meet the expectations of others like myself. I simply don’t see driving to the store as a problem, I see it as an enjoyable experience(and I have small kids). All of the free delivery in the world won’t keep me from driving to my local organic Co-op to choose the best vegetables, fruit and cuts of meat. Point being that Amazon’s impact on the grocery business will likely be far short of transformational.

smt88 9y ago
How does your personal opinion mean that Amazon is going to fail at this? Most people I know are loathed to grocery shop, and many are loathed to cook. Add in all the people with no car, disabilities, multiple jobs, odd working hours, etc. etc.
spraak 9y ago
I've shopped exclusively through Prime Now from Sprouts (similar to Whole Foods) for groceries for the past 7 months, and while I have had times of disappointment at the produce I get (green bananas vs yellow), it's improved my life in maybe not a huge way, but at least noticeably. My wife and I would always end up arguing at the store. I like to shop, browse and take my time, and I always seemed to buy things I shouldn't. Now I can take my time away from the store, I see what I'm buying and how much it will be, and have more (even if a little bit) free time that I'm not at the store. I like it a lot.
gowld 9y ago
There's plenty of room to be transformational short of your extremely niche use-case.
- acheron 9y ago
  “People who don’t mind going to the store” is not “extremely niche”.

narrator 9y ago

I used to use Instacart, but it was a hassle to manage the people doing the shopping. They would get bad produce. They would mistake zucchini for cucumber. They would make nonsensical replacements. Constant screw-ups. Sure if you're buying toilet paper or some other generic commodity then it's fine, but you can already do that with Amazon.

THE_PUN_STOPS 9y ago
At the height of the Instacart craze in my city, I was at a grocery store (as a customer) when an instacart shopper walked up holding bok choy and frantically asked “Is this collard greens??”
hbosch 9y ago
I believe a robo-picker would not mistake the clearly coded cucumber for zucchini, nor would the well-trained AI allow non-ideal produce into the sorting bins. No need to worry.
- gambiting 9y ago
  A robo picker would pick up a cucumber and not notice it's rotten on one side though, unless we assume that the robots will scan the entire item and somehow figure out what is good and what is not using AI - but I think that would prove to be an extremely difficult problem and ultimately not worth the effort.
  - alexhawdon 9y ago
    I believe it would though. It's already happening higher up the supply chain where conveyor belts of produce are graded using computer vision (and other techniques, I'm sure). This is about moving these techniques further down the chain. A robot picker arm with a few cameras attached that can tell whether something is rotten is well within our grasp. (Awful pun intended!)
    - throwawayhzm 9y ago

brandonmenc 9y ago

I've been living in Austin for the past two years, and shopping mostly at the Whole Foods world headquarters. I'm not sure what the big deal is about this place - overpriced for the quality, service is ho-hum, prepared foods are nothing special, etc. Wegmans absolutely crushes it.

tmh79 9y ago
there is a wegmans in austin? So jealous. Also there is a wegmans musical: http://www.telegram.com/article/20120502/TOWNNEWS/120509938/0/business http://www.telegram.com/article/20120502/TOWNNEWS/120509938/...
- adrianmonk 9y ago
  There certainly isn't a Wegmans in Austin that I know of. I don't think there is one within 1000 miles.
  - DrScump 9y ago
    But you have Rudy's. Don't get greedy. ;)
throwaway9980 9y ago
Ten years ago the quality difference between Whole Foods and a Kroger/mid-tier-chain was something akin to the contrast between a US grocery store and a Soviet grocery store in the 1980’s. The big chains have closed the gap.
DrScump 9y ago
Would anybody who has shopped both Wegmans and California's Nugget chain care to contrast them?

ironjunkie 9y ago

Amazon Prime Now... Is that the thing where delivery is "free" but where we are supposed to "tip" the driver ?

spraak 9y ago
I've ordered from Prime Now about 3 to 4 times per week for the past 7 months. It's incredibly helpful for me. Mostly because I don't have a car and prefer to shop from Sprouts (which is similar to Whole Foods) and I'm able to do so with Prime Now. I usually leave a tip to the delivery person because they carry all my heavy groceries up to my apartment, and they've told me it helps them a lot (which is unfortunate in that way, that I'm subsidizing their wage). I literally depend on Prime Now.
- chrisper 9y ago
  Your situation is ok, because you want to tip. I don't think it is ok to automatically fill out the tipping field.
  - eropple 9y ago
    Then seek out an equivalent service that pays their delivery folks more and doesn't require a tip. We have those here in Boston; Peapod's delivery drivers can be tipped and they've said that it's a major part of their income but Roche Bros.'s drivers have literally laughed and said "we don't accept tips, we actually get paid." (I had a $10 in hand--he turned it down. Peapod has a big huge field on the invoice and charges it to the card. Skinflints.) Or accept that, yes, obligatory tipping is part of the culture, and while you may not like it (I sure don't) it is incumbent upon us to do right by the people whose services we are buying.
    - hnaccy 9y ago
      It's not immoral to not tip.
      - 9y ago

jimmywanger 9y ago

It's sort of funny. Amazon now does is doing the same thing Walmart did back in the day. If you were a supplier for Walmart, you _had_ to adopt their business practices in order to stay competitive in the market. They would demand that so you could constantly lower prices. Amazon is sort of the same in that if they enter a vertical shopping market, if you don't provide the same level of service, you're kind of sunk. And to get to that level of service, the insidious thing is that you either let them take care of logistics and pay them a cut, or you adopt their business practices which have been honed for years. I don't think Amazon-Ification is necessarily a bad thing. Amazon runs a tight ship and companies would do well to learn.

11thEarlOfMar 9y ago

When I was a kid, mom would do the grocery shipping once every 2 weeks. She'd load the five kids into the van and we'd trek over and fill 2 shopping carts with 10 boxes of breakfast cereal, 2 gallons of milk, 2 pounds of bacon, 8 pounds of hamburger, 24 cans of Campbell's soup... Flash forward to 2018 and my wife is buying things online to the point that we're getting 4-6 items delivered per week. I'd guess that's not exceptional. With 'free delivery' for under $35, I can see her increasing that to on average one delivery item per day. Kind of like the milk man used to do. What concerns me is that the amount of energy that goes into getting all that stuff into my home seems to have substantially increased, and, will continue to increase as more businesses incorporate low cost or free delivery. So it makes me wonder where this ends. It seems we'll wind up with delivery trucks, perhaps autonomous electric vehicles, combing the suburbs throughout the day. I keep contemplating the extremes: 149 items acquired in one trip the way my mom used to operate, vs.149 items delivered to my home one at a time over a 2 week period. What are the trade-offs?

randomsearch 9y ago
I had the same thought process. One point to note is that a delivery guy might deliver to multiple people in your neighbourhood, so his driving is amortised over those orders, whereas when you drive the shops you're making the whole journey for yourself. If delivery was organised extremely efficiently, e.g. a single delivery service that delivers everything at the same time as the post, it's no doubt that it would be much more efficient than individuals going to the shops themselves. So we're on a spectrum where the extremes are "much better" and "much worse" than pre-internet, but it's not clear to me where we are on the spectrum; in particular, it would be interesting to know whether the net energy consumption has increased or dropped.
Symmetry 9y ago
I'd expect the energy cost of deliveries to be about an order of magnitude less than doing the shopping yourself if you have to drive out of your way to do it. Goods being delivered make up a significant fraction of the weight of a delivery vehicle but a tiny fraction of your car when you're driving to the store, even if you are getting all that stuff.
9y ago