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Alaskan halibut provides a glimpse of Amazon’s strategy with Whole Foods
- dpflan 7y agoSeems like use the discounts to attract customers and convince them to join Amazon Prime. The Prime promotions and connection are everywhere in WF, and cashiers are always asking, even when the card-reader has a sticker(s) on it.
- TheAdamist 7y agoFor an occasional shopper at WF who is just trying to pay and leave the store, whether or not you have prime the correct answer is "no" to get them to shut up so you can pay and leave.
- felixgallo 7y agoScanning your app at the scanners is pretty quick and painless, like any other rewards card, and for me at least seems to be worth it more often than not. (disclaimer: I work for amazon, although not WF/retail)
- codq 7y agoI'm uninterested in having the 'Whole Foods App' on my phone. I'm similarly uninterested in having the 'Amazon App' on my phone. I offer my phone number to verify my Prime membership. Works fine.
- silversconfused 7y ago"No and no thank you" certainly does speed up the checkout process.
- reaperducer 7y agoI've used "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I don't speak English" spoken in perfect English. If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em.
- chrisseaton 7y agoWhy go out of your way to confuse a low-paid worker just trying to do their job?
- benj111 7y agoWhat does their pay have to do with it? Low paid people are adults too, and capable of interpreting peoples sarcasm.
- chrisseaton 7y agoTheir pay has to do with it because they're not being paid enough to compensate them for having to additionally deal with people's snide and cynical answers to a simple question which they could answer politely and more straightforwardly.
- reaperducer 7y agoI don't reserve it for low-paid workers. I say that to anyone who wants to talk to me with whom I do not wish to speak. I actually came up with it back when "day trading" was a big thing and self-styled financial geniuses would approach me at Starbucks to pitch their services.
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- blacksmith_tb 7y agoI was in line behind someone fumbling around trying to get the app set up and logged in, and I was going to say that in spite of having set it up myself, it rarely saved me more than a couple of percent on my total. I didn't, and due to some combination of stacking discounts I saved ~15% that day. But it's been 2-3% ever since...
- WillPostForFood 7y agoIf you already have prime, you are saying "no" to free money. It is like charity to Amazon.
- edmundsauto 7y agoIt's also a form of SEO. Get people to open the Amazon app more often, and (on iOS at least) Siri starts to prioritize it in search / quick launcher.
- mattferderer 7y agoWhat is the difference between what they're doing & every other grocery store? I'm not sure I understand the difference after skimming through the article except that they have a reputation for more expensive, organic foods.
- tptacek 7y agoDurable, nationwide discounts on low-margin, premium products aren't a norm in the grocery industry. It would be similarly noteworthy if Kroger started selling dry-aged prime ribeyes at $8/#. (Less so if Costco did it, but Costco isn't a normal grocer).
- EpicEng 7y agoTwo minutes of searching tells me differently. Grocery stores have used loss leaders for decades to get people in the store. Why do you say the opposite?
- ip26 7y agoLoss leaders aren't new, but usually they are either temporary, local, or on low-value products (think oranges, chips or soda instead of salmon)- or all three.
- reaperducer 7y agoFor the entire time I lived in Cincinnati, one of the local hypermarket chains sold gallons of milk for 99¢ as a loss leader. Lots of different kinds of stores do it. It's not special because it's Amazon Foods.
- jorams 7y agoI thought the article was pretty clear that the loss leader price was only active for one week? That's very temporary.
- 7y ago
- batbomb 7y ago.... in which the Seattle Times discovers that grocery stores use items at or below cost to lure in buyers to purchase other things at the store. 12 packs of coke were often sold at a loss at grocery stores. I'm not sure what they cost now, but cost use to be in the $3.50 range in 2007. Costco was usually about a bit more than the cost but they were selling 24 can flats, so probably still turning a profit. In 2007 it wasn't uncommon to do 4/$10 deals and even 5/$10 deals occasionally around the super bowl. 3/$10 was the average sale if they wanted to try to boost sales. Other examples include family packs of NY Strip/Ribeye.
- 6cd6beb 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader Certainly not a new thing.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago5/$10 is probably not “below cost” for the product. But maybe it’s Costco subsidizing part of Coke’s profit.
- whoisjuan 7y agoThis is basically what dollar stores do. You have to lose profit on some items to get traffic and regain that profit in different items. Traffic is exponentially better than being profitable in every item since you can expose the customer base to other products and start deploying other fidelization channels. You won't get that if you have the same outlier buyers giving you profit on a few expensive items.
- username223 7y ago> "Do they take the profit from their non-retail efforts, which today is primarily cloud computing, and then reinvest those profits to take share in grocery?" Forte said. Yes. Even better, they can push people to sign up for Prime by jacking up prices for non-Prime members. When faced with these "loyalty" programs elsewhere, I just type in a fake phone number, or an old land line that has probably been reassigned. I suspect you can't do that at Amazon stores.
- Aloha 7y agoI'm more interested in the fact that someone is fishing for halibut in a 103 year old wooden schooner in 2019. The rest of this article is in my opinion, not news.
- jack-facts 7y agoThis is actually more common than you'd think. There are plenty of older wooden boats still fishing both in the lower 48 and up north. The old halibut schooners are some of the most prized boats out there.
- bayareanative 7y agoAlaskan black cod is da bomb. Way, way better than any other fish. And more sustainable than halibut and most other commercial fish, at present.
- aj7 7y agoThis article had virtually no content. An inexperienced reporter was fed a ton of filler, and wound up acting as an Amazon cheerleader. So Whole Foods used halibut as a loss leader. So what?