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Amazon’s Grocery Push Keeps Stumbling After Whole Foods Purchase
- kop316 8y agoShopping at Whole Foods is a whole lot worse with Amazon owning it versus before. To get any of the deals, you have to link your purchase with an Amazon account. IIRC, they have a "blue" and "yellow" discount, where you can only get the "yellow" discount in addition if you are also a Prime member. The prices without either discount seemed exceed pre-Amazon Whole Foods. The whole experience reeked of sucking up data about a person, and really made me never want to go back.
- misiti3780 8y agothe quality of the food at the wholefoods in NYC has gone down since the purchase. sometimes i go to the one in Williamsburg and the entire produce section is cleaned out by like 5pm. the lines are longer now also. not sure how they fucked that up.
- rhizome 8y agoI would not be surprised to find out that Amazon's interest in purchasing WF was to make it a platform for financial engineering on expirable products.
- pault 8y agoI contract at WF and AFAIK absolutely nothing has changed regarding inventory ordering. It's still the same people using the same systems.
- 2sk21 8y agoI really haven't seen much difference. I'm the designated shopper in my family and I usually shop my local Whole Foods for a few items every week. Despite having my Prime bar code scanned from my phone, I have never once received a discount. The prices and quality are more or less unchanged.
- Uhhrrr 8y agoI have noticed this too. The bar code scan is never useful, so in a way it's not actually intrusive - I've wound up never doing it.
- lackbeard 8y agoThe two things I really appreciated about Whole Foods were the faster checkouts and the fact that they didn't constantly bug you about a club card. I don't really go out of my way to shop there any more...
- staplers 8y agoThe worst part about going through this process is to getting to checkout and realizing I only had 1 discounted item (out of 20) that saved me 30 cents.. The labor of connecting to in-store wifi and opening the app itself almost isn't worth the discount..
- admn2 8y agoI do agree that it feels like some silly "gamification". Open the app and see what's on sale, then deal with the chaos of shoppers everywhere as you navigate the store looking for your list of items, as well as the impulse discounted items you just added.
- tvanantwerp 8y agoAgreed. And the rinky-dink QR scanners attached underneath the register display almost never pick up what I'm showing it. It's the most effort by far of any grocery rewards program I've ever used, for the least amount of discounts. I don't even bother with the Prime discounts anymore--if the cashier asks, I just say I'm not a member and not interested.
- wlesieutre 8y agoIs it sucking up any more data than other grocery stores have been doing basically forever by requiring your membership card to get sale prices?
- jedberg 8y agoIt was a lot easier to put in someone else's phone number than someone else's prime account. Back in the day we used to hold "store card swapping parties" where you'd bring your store card, drop it in the pile, and then everyone randomly picks a new one. Do it about once a month. Now of course the store cards are tied to apps that give you coupons on things you buy, so it's more in your interest not to mess with them.
- wlesieutre 8y agoI assumed they look at credit cards too, and swapping store cards wouldn't trick them unless you're paying cash. But maybe the number of people who do that is so small that stores haven't cared to catch it.
- jedberg 8y agoThis was back in college when we mostly paid cash.
- kop316 8y agoI don't necessarily think that is technically feasible. At least in the US, they have to be PCI compliant, and I think of that is they cannot store a credit card number. In addition, Chip and pin works differently than a credit card number, as the purchase is tokenized versus to an account number, making cross purchase correlation more difficult.
- traek 8y agoMerchants can store the account holder's name and the card's last 4 digits, which is pretty much all that is needed to correlate transactions.
- s0rce 8y agoAnd the store is packed full of people shopping for online delivery orders on their phone all the time.
- kolbe 8y agoI think the sales are worse, too. I used to be able to scan the meat and produce sales, and create meals around those options. Today that's virtually impossible. Recently Amazon realized how badly they fucked up cheese sales, and reverted back to the old system. Most people I know will only buy good cheese if it's >30% discounted. For a couple months, Amazon decided to scrap big sales in favor of 1-5% off ones. So far as I can tell, that test was a complete failure, and we're back to being able to have good cheese at good prices. It's a far worse store. Lucky for Amazon, they have a few years before a competitor will emerge to bring back a legitimate luxury shopping experience back to my demographic. But Eataly or someone of that nature will shift their business model a little to fill the void eventually.
- gdulli 8y agoAnd for the privilege of providing Amazon with all that data about you in exchange for the best discount, you get to pay them $120/year.
- ryanSrich 8y agoI really don't understand why anyone shops at Whole Foods. It's insanely overpriced compared to any other grocery store I've ever been in. The 3-4 times I've been there since the Amazon acquisition have resulted in $0 in savings. Nothing I have to buy is ever on sale or discounted via Prime. I find Trader Joe's, New Seasons, and local coops to be much more affordable and better quality of varying degrees for each.
- fastball 8y agoWhole Foods has more inertia than Trader Joe's, and also a much wider selection (TJ's tends to have a singular product for many items, where WF will have a selection). Don't know what New Seasons is. The local co-ops in my area are shit. Not sure why anyone shops at Whole Foods in your area, but not every area is your area.
- philwelch 8y ago> TJ's tends to have a singular product for many items, where WF will have a selection That's also a feature of TJ (and Costco, for that matter).
- fastball 8y agoVery true. Not everyone's cup-of-tea though.
- nradov 8y agoAre you sure about that? My local Trader Joe's has a half aisle of just chips, many flavors of frozen wontons, at least four different kinds of marinara sauce, 10+ kinds of salad dressing, bagels with every possible topping, and the list goes on. The selection seems pretty good to me.
- nitrogen 8y agoTry going to a Walmart or big chain supermarket some time.
- xianb 8y agois it really different from the data collection of other grocery store shopper cards though?
- twblalock 8y agoHere are two big reasons I won't use grocery delivery: 1. I can't see the produce/meat/seafood and pick the pieces I want. They aren't all the same, so this matters. 2. I can't get beer or wine delivered, and if I need to go to the grocery store to buy it, I might as well buy all my other groceries while I'm there. #1 is probably not solvable. #2 is solvable but the US has 50 different state liquor law regimes, so it's a bit of a challenge. So I'm not really surprised that Amazon isn't doing that much better than the others. Amazon is good at delivering things, but groceries aren't good things to deliver compared to the other stuff Amazon sells. Whole Foods in particular caters to shoppers who care about the quality of their meat and produce and want to examine it before they buy.
- titusjohnson 8y agoRegarding #2, within a single state you'll have different rules per county. Alcohol delivery is laden with landmines.
- chomp 8y ago#1 - Even grocery store pickup fails in this regard. I've had employees pick really sad looking vegetables (I am a proponent of "sell the odd looking veggies", but spare me your wilted celery that you haven't been able to sell in a week) #2 - I can get beer/wine/liquor delivered where I live (Texas) but honestly I can't say that I've ever been in such a crunch where I need to get it delivered. And besides, I do enjoy asking my local Specs' employee recommendations on new beer/wine that I haven't tried that I just can't get with any delivery service.
- jinfiesto 8y agoWith regard to number 1, I've found that some places that do grocery delivery in house (like Raley's,) apparently keep separate stock for delivery (discovered by asking) and it's often in better shape than what's on the floor. I think this is because there's some sort of 100% satisfaction policy to incentivize adoption. This has borne out in my practical experience as I've almost always been more than pleased with the produce delivered by in-house grocery delivery services. The only thing I don't love is that the online interface isn't always synced accurately with what's in stock, so often I get calls having to hash out substitutions before they can deliver. WRT alcohol, I personally usually shop for that stuff at a specialty store like Ben's or Total Wine. I realize other people have different shopping habits, but I would have to make a special trip for groceries separate from my alcohol trip, and I appreciate that delivery helps me save a trip.
- ilamont 8y agoIs the problem too many services targeting people who want organic produce, imported crackers, and meat/fish that's 2x Krogers?
- sharemywin 8y agoTo us clicklist is a good balance between price and convenience. And if you have kids you save money because they aren't adding things to the cart when your not looking. Not to mention begging for toys etc. we also use shipt when there's no time(or its too cold) to go to the store.
- Jgrubb 8y agoMy one datapoint - I decided to stock up on beans and ordered a couple dozen cans of the organic Whole Foods house brand. Almost every single one of them arrived dented to hell, and then I noticed that the reviews almost unanimously state the same thing. Apparently this is how they've chosen to get rid of cans that they can't stock on shelves, yet they still charge the full price anyway. Fool me once, shame on you...
- madrox 8y agoMy fiancee loves to cook, and since we live in SF without a car, she has spent a lot of time trying out various grocery delivery services. Every single one has problems, from cost to quality to delivery reliability. In our experience, Instacart+Whole Foods is the most unreliable. Prime is ok, but the quality isn't always there. We've also tried specialty delivery services for meat, but those get expensive. We ultimately have been pretty satisfied with Good Eggs + Thrive Market and haven't set foot in a grocery store in months. All this is to say I think grocery delivery is the holy grail of supply chain challenges. There is little tolerance for inefficiency at any step between farm and table. It's easy to spot when you're out of tolerance, but difficult to control for. I think we're still in the early days of this space. It reminds me of the early 2000s when cord cutting was possible, but not common. However, once it really takes off it'll change everything.
- gtsteve 8y agoI think this might be because food is quite different to the other products you buy from Amazon - you typically buy ingredients and you typically do this once or more a week. Amazon makes a mistake every so often with a delivery but with this sort of throughput you have a bigger window for things to go wrong. I stopped using Amazon Fresh after a string of deliveries where entire bags were just missing. Not out of stock, just not in the order. Of course, they refunded me but when buying ingredients to cook something complicated it can totally change your plans. Their selection would change frequently. Sometimes basic things would be out of stock for weeks, sometimes items would just disappear, even items from common brands. This is effectively the normal Amazon experience (good with occasional errors) but when applied to food it's somehow considerably worse. I now use a competitor's service; all they do is online grocery deliveries. It's very hard to be all things to all men; sometimes specialisation is a good thing.
- whoisjuan 8y agoWow, that's an ambitious title for such a poor article. Four paragraphs citing a UBS analysts report. And on top of that, the author has the nerve to close the article with a disclaimer that says he wrote the article with the assistance of another person.
- gdulli 8y agoJournalism is collaborative more often than you likely think.
- sunshinelackof 8y agoWhole foods has pivoted from your local health foods store--at a national scale to a national superstore--at a higher quality. Grocery and especially natural groceries are turbulent. Their customers generally check enough boxes to end up in the enthusiast/early-adopter category. Even if the Amazon purchase didn't turn them off, targeting the more casual "trader joes" class makes more sense. My personal concerns with grocery delivery and automation in general is that the automation of my boring daily tasks might not free up more leisure time, but more time to spend working.
- wilg 8y agoThis is pretty easy to explain: 1. Whole Foods sucks. They have poor quality items (especially produce), are often out of stock of common things, they don't have name brand items, and the prices aren't great. 2. Amazon's delivery service sucks. The website and app are terrible compared to Instacart, and only deliver from Whole Foods or Amazon. (I am not in love with Instacart either, its almost impossible to get a grocery delivery same-day if you decide to put in an order after 4pm in SF. Sometimes you'll fill up your cart because it says "2 hour delivery" and by the time you're done it says "Tomorrow Morning".)
- freyir 8y agoI haven't been to Whole Foods much in the last few years, but their produce used to be at least as good as other supermarkets, and usually better. What are you comparing it to? Have you noticed the quality go down over time, or have you always had issues with the produce? I agree though, their prices aren't great, and their store brand/off-brand items are often sub par.
- tracker1 8y agoI find sprouts is often at least as good or better for significantly less. Fry's (Kroger) is better but less selection and lower price. I tend to go to A.J.'s or Whole Foods when I want more exotic items fresh... and only then.
- gecko 8y agoI haven't been to Whole Foods much in the last few years, but their produce used to be at least as good as other supermarkets, and usually better. What are you comparing it to? Have you noticed the quality go down over time, or have you always had issues with the produce? Whole Food's produce quality has tanked since the Amazon acquisition. I'm with you: I used to think that their produce was usually better than the competition. While that might've been changing before Amazon acquired them as well, the produce is now awful: I sometimes literally find better-quality produce in the vending machine in my coworking space, and I can virtually always find better produce (at a cheaper price!) at Kroger, Fresh Market, and even sometimes Trader Joe's or Target.
- intopieces 8y agoAmazon’s grovery deliveries use far too much plastic for my taste. Every onion, green pepper, etc is wrapped in its own thing, and then the bag has some keep-cool-foam that I’m sure doesn’t recycle.
- BeetleB 8y agoI've tried 2 grocery pickup services. One was a positive experience, but their prices are a bit high, and they charge $5 for the service on top of it. If I do most of my groceries from them, it'll affect my wallet too much. The other was Walmart. Groceries are cheap, but I never got an order without a problem. Usually, they did not have an item (as in the store never carried it) - why can't the web site tell me that this particular store never has this item? Now there's a fairly well priced grocery store I shop at. I'd happily pay them $5 each time for this service, but they don't offer it.
- linuxftw 8y agoPeople here complaining about the grocery delivery, it's been fantastic for us. We don't use it for meat or produce, but we do buy a lot of specialty products specifically from Whole Foods that other (closer) retailers don't have. Things like vegan cheese, specific gluten free items, etc. We buy most of our meat and produce from another local grocery store, and now we just order the odds and ends from whole foods. This saves us a bunch of time so we don't have to make two stops.
- eli 8y agoIt's surprising that they aren't better at competing with Instacart even though they own the whole store.
- tvanantwerp 8y agoI haven't used Amazon / Whole Foods' grocery delivery (always lived within walking distance), but I have tried other services like Peapod by Giant and Instacart. On the whole, it's been a terrible experience. Lots of orders botched. I once ordered two pounds of shrimp and received...two shrimp. I've had shoppers who can't tell green onions from leeks or zucchini from cucumber. For my last office birthday party (we do it for everyone) we ordered a cheesecake from Instacart, and it arrived moldy. So I'm not at all surprised that people, after having tried grocery delivery, are backing off. As to Amazon and Whole Foods' retail experience, I feel like quality has declined, shortages are more frequent, and using the app's QR code for deals is painful, frustrating, and insufficiently rewarding to bother with it.
- FakeComments 8y agoI sometimes think retail locations seriously misunderstand their business. It’s only partly to sell things, because their main business is actually smoothing out supply chains. As a customer, I want my supply of things I need or want to not be coupled to other people’s buying timings or supplier timings. Stores switching to just in time stocking routinely fail at this, because variance is non-zero. This in turn destroys my ability to just go there and buy something, and hence the value the store provided. I have the same problems at most grocery stores, these days, where routinely things I want are transiently out of stock.
- Klonoar 8y agoWhile I typically agree... unless there's an image of the packaging on that cheesecake that indicates someone should've caught it, I'd put far more blame on the store for having a bad item in stock. There's also some stores where when an order goes in, an IC shopper just picks up the bag and doesn't do the shopping themselves.
- CreepGin 8y agoI've used Amazon Fresh on and off for about 2 years in the Boston area (totaling maybe around 15 orders). My experience has been pleasant. Never gotten a cracked egg or spilled milk. I did get a subpar water melon and pineapple. But I was really pushing my luck there ordering these two.
- Einstalbert 8y agoI use this service weekly and have had next to no issues for several months now. The quality is as good as my local grocer, although I still prefer to visit there for fresh meat or bakery items; the stuff you get online in terms of "fresh" isn't bad but it is much more expensive, I've found. I've never been to a physical Whole Foods so I can't say if their quality has gone down as a result of this. My local grocer has a delivery service but I am too entrenched in Amazon to try it out.
- fukbezos 8y agoGroceries are a tough business. Kroger is already at the top of their game.
- spamizbad 8y agoI dunno, I shop at Mariano's, which was owned by Roundy's. Kroger bought them up and it has really messed up the store's supply chain. Lots of shuffling of items and produce quality has suffered. Big step down. I used to feel like Marianos was Whole Foods done right, with lower prices. Now I'm not so sure.
- danial 8y agoI discovered how different the Whole Foods experience is nationwide when visiting them in Memphis and San Diego. I wonder if some of the negative WF comments are a reflection of that. My experience (and personal opinion) is that Seattle tends to have a far superior experience. I feel that after the Amazon acquisition, the produce, selection and prices seem to have changed only a little, it's the rest of the experience that tends to win me over: brand new stores, espresso bar, hot lunch/breakfast and salad bars. As for the delivery service, I have had a love-hate relationship with Amazon Fresh as well as Prime Now WF delivery in the past. Having analyzed the situation a little I realize that my satisfaction with their service is a reflection of my state of mind. Outside of some blatant delivery issues such as the leaving my groceries on a busy arterial in the vicinity of my home (yes, actually happened), I have been unhappy when there wasn't an immediate need for the groceries. This is when I tend to notice issues such as price discrepancies, or poorly substituted items, etc. I have been much happier when there is a burning need, such as being exceptionally busy and not having time to make a grocery run that week. That's when the smaller issues tend to go unnoticed. I am glad to have their delivery service available. Once a month or so I find things to be quite chaotic, and find it quite easy to launch an app on my phone and get groceries a few hours later. Instacart is similarly convenient, but none of the other stores I have tried (Safeway, Costco, etc.) come even close. They all suck sometimes, but the WF/Amazon experience seems to sucks less. Somewhat related, if you have friends going through a major life event such as having a baby, receiving the gift of free grocery delivery will make them very happy.
- burtonator 8y agoWhole Foods employees HATE Amazon... The deli guy literally was talking about how horrible it was there...
- fpgaminer 8y agoWe've used Amazon Fresh in the past. They gave us a few free months, so figured why not. Long story short, we stopped using it even with them throwing month after month of free service at us. Obviously, produce was hit and miss. Mostly miss. The dumbest thing was they consistently packed produce in with cans. Selection was terrible, and continued to get worse over time (including after the Whole Foods acquisition, which was weird). Minimum order kept going up. Which was a double sucker punch with the reduced selection. Hard to fill the cart went they have hardly anything and keep raising the minimum. And at some point they started sneaking in a default tip. They'd just tack on a tip without prompting you. You could change it ... if you noticed it was there (in small font mixed in with your checkout list). And no app support. Fresh is probably one of Amazon's most poorly executed services.
- obioneis 8y agoTry using Walmart's Online Groceries - You can have it delivered to your house or pick it up in the store.
- ra1n85 8y agoOrdered several times from Amazon Fresh. The delivery failure rate and prices are high, the selection is terrible, and the quality of the food is shaky at best. I had a delivery person call me and need street by street instructions on how to reach my place. I spent 20 minutes guiding them in the little bit of Spanish I remember from high school.
- gumby 8y agoAlthough there could be a problem, this article is weird. It cites expansion in Prime Now, which is a crappy source of groceries. Amazon deserves a lot of the blame, though, as they have such confusing branding: Amazon Fresh (only works on web and phone); Amazon Prime Now (phone app), Amazon Prime Pantry (hard to use), plus the amazon dash wand which confusingly may place objects into your Fresh cart, or on a shopping list you can find in the regular Amazon app, or in a list only available with the Alexa app. I don't know what's going on with this supposedly customer-focused company. In any case: I ditched my cars last year so mostly need delivery. The cheapest of the walking distance grocery stores is Whole Foods, and since I had so many problems with Instacart I've pretty much adopted Amazon Fresh. It actually works OK as long as you don't mind waiting until the next day (same day slots are rarely available in Palo Alto). But I get veggies and meat delivered with different services; Amazon's prices aren't that great.
- philwelch 8y ago> Amazon deserves a lot of the blame, though, as they have such confusing branding: Amazon Fresh (only works on web and phone); Amazon Prime Now (phone app), Amazon Prime Pantry (hard to use), plus the amazon dash wand which confusingly may place objects into your Fresh cart, or on a shopping list you can find in the regular Amazon app, or in a list only available with the Alexa app. I don't know what's going on with this supposedly customer-focused company. Same thing that happens to every large company: the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. Prime Now and Fresh are separate fiefdoms. Prime Pantry is a vassal of the traditional retail fiefdom. (The traditional retail fiefdom also has a "Subscribe and Save" feature, which you can discover by shopping for something like cat food.) In Amazon's case, it might not even be a bad idea not to have a single, overarching, top-down strategy. Nobody has solved this business yet, and it's faster to try multiple things concurrently than consecutively.
- philwelch 8y agoI don't think anybody has figured out grocery delivery, but I think a lot of the obvious hazards are at least mapped by now. The first and most obvious thing, which Amazon is at least superficially best-equipped to handle, is the fact that existing grocery stores make for really shitty fulfillment centers. Grocery delivery services that literally send someone to the grocery store for you end up with probably even worse results than you would get just by hiring a part-time personal assistant and telling them to get you groceries. If you did that, at least you'd cut out the middleman, and the person would have better incentives to not fuck up your order in particular. You can lay out a fulfillment center so that products can be picked and orders assembled efficiently and unambiguously. This doesn't match how a grocery store is laid out. A grocery store wants the shopper to be able to predict where to find a product, or at least a product category. Every single product is stocked directly next to every other product it possibly be confused for, usually all smushed up together or even hidden behind each other. Also, random members of the public walk through the shelves and throw them into chaos. Even the flow of going through the grocery store is designed for marketing return rather than efficiency. The bigger part is probably that groceries are already a pretty terrible business. Whole foods in general--produce, meat, even stuff like eggs--are often already loss-leaders, even if you're selling them in person to a customer who can inspect the product. Grocery stores use these to lure customers and then sell them much more profitable packaged goods, and it works out because competition for retail space is fierce and demand for low-margin groceries can be a competitive advantage. Remove that constraint and the grocery business no longer makes sense because you can cherry-pick the best parts of the business and build a focused delivery business. Packaged pantry goods: Amazon. Refrigerated or frozen packaged foods on demand: GoPuff. Even if you want to deliver fresh whole foods, you can just restrict the number of unique ingredients, hire a chef to turn the Cartesian product of those ingredients into a list of decent recipes, sell packaged recipes, and that's HelloFresh. Bit by bit, other business models are going to eat away at everything that isn't a loss-leader, and you're not left with any viable business in delivering whatever is left. Even the cash-rich-time-poor segment is better served by some variant of the HelloFresh model, assuming they're too time-poor to shop for groceries but not too time-poor to cook (which is kind of a weird assumption, although perhaps a pre-prepared "just throw into a crock pot" meal delivery service would be viable).
- village-idiot 8y agoNow we only get groceries delivered when we’re just too sick to make it to the store. The amount of waste plastic generated by this service is just beyond the pale.