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Amazon's Whole Foods Price Cuts Brought 25 Percent Jump In Shoppers (bloomberg.com) 94

Posted by BeauHD from the cause-and-effect dept.
According to Foursquare Labs, which compiled location information from shoppers' mobile devices during the first two days after Amazon completed its acquisition of Whole Foods and compared the data with the same period a week earlier, the electronic commerce company boosted customer traffic to Whole Foods by 25 percent. Bloomberg reports: Amazon acquired the upscale chain last month for $13.7 billion, a move that has brought turmoil to the supermarket industry and sent shares of grocery rivals tumbling. The same day it completed the acquisition, the e-commerce giant cut prices by as much as 43 percent on a range of items. Organic fuji apples were marked down to $1.99 a pound from $3.49 a pound, for instance. Organic avocados dropped to $1.99 each from $2.79. The traffic data is an optimistic sign that Amazon can succeed in the brick-and-mortar world. In some areas, the jump in customers was dramatic. At stores in Chicago, 35 percent more shoppers visited Whole Foods stores, Foursquare found. It's not surprising that curious shoppers visited the stores immediately after the takeover, particularly after a bevy of media coverage, according to Jennifer Bartashus, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. What's left to be seen is whether they will start consistently shopping more at Whole Foods stores.
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Amazon's Whole Foods Price Cuts Brought 25 Percent Jump In Shoppers More

Amazon's Whole Foods Price Cuts Brought 25 Percent Jump In Shoppers

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  • Stop writing backwards (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Organic fuji apples were marked down to $1.99 a pound from $3.49 a pound, for instance."

    No.

    Organic fuji apples were marked down from $3.49 to $1.99 a pound, for instance.

    FTFY

    • I'd have probably gone for:

      For instance, Organic fuji apples were marked down from $3.49 to $1.99 a pound.

      Point stands, the english was a tad awkward. Not entirely unlike using the term "x time less than" instead of specifying a fraction, when the latter was simple and concise.
    • Also, you should be submitting that to the article writer, not Slashdot...
  • I'm an occasional Prime Pantry shopper, and noticed a big push for Whole Food products at the brickless, mortarless, site...

    The success of such marketing would undoubtedly shrink expenses and allow lower pricing to achieve the same margins... at least until dominant market share is achieved.

  • Curious Shoppers? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by link-error ( 143838 ) on Tuesday September 12, 2017 @09:36AM (#55180237)

    How many of those people were just checking out what actually changed prices? Let me know those numbers again in a few months, then I'll be impressed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Joviex ( 976416 )

      How many of those people were just checking out what actually changed prices? Let me know those numbers again in a few months, then I'll be impressed.

      Exactly this. We litearally live between 3 whole foods here in LA. We stopped shopping at them about a year after trying them.

      The prices were obnoxious. Now, they want to make the prices "normal". Ok, what other attraction is there for me to go there then?

      The only thing they seemingly marked down is produce, which I can get at a local bodega, to support my local community, or even at a box store when I get all the other things I NEED, rather than the WholeFoods branded Yuppie shit.

      25% uptick is most

  • Kiva Systems (Score:5, Informative)

    by Idou ( 572394 ) on Tuesday September 12, 2017 @09:40AM (#55180251) Journal
    Now Amazon Robotics [wikipedia.org], was founded by former Webvan employees. Webvan failed because it could not get food to customers before it rotted. The plan was to build miles and miles of conveyor belts. The founders of Kiva Systems learned from those mistakes and built a better way.

    Amazon's move to buy Whole Foods means the technology is now mature enough to lay waste to established grocery market players. Think this is an exaggeration? Make sure you check out some Kiva robots in action before coming to that conclusion.
  • "curiosity" shoppers most likely. I'd prefer to wait a couple months to see if it lasts.
  • I went over to Whole Foods to check out not the prices (which haven't changed that much) but the Amazon Echo/Dot display. I heard a rumor that Amazon took their entire inventory offline to stock Whole Food stores with towering pyramids of Echos and Dots for shoppers to worship Alexa. Not at my local store. They had a small table tucked off to the side of the entrance. I then went over to the Amazon Bookstore and their Echo/Dot display was even smaller. So much for a flagship product.
  • It's clear that lower prices bring more shoppers, but then so does hyping a brand all over the media. Assuming that the 25% increase is correct (I didn't RTFA) attributing that exclusively to lower prices is probably unsupported by the evidence.
  • I recently read an article in which they picked five common household items and checked Whole Food's prices against five local stores; only one of the local grocery chains came to a higher total. So in other words there is no price war happening.

  • So Foursquare doesn't even try to hide the fact that they record their users' every move? This is a really disturbing precedent. Why would anyone allow them to do that? Is Foursquare paying them for this valuable marketing data? This is just insanity to me.

  • But the closest one is in CtPaTown. Unfortunately I live in SoDoSoPa. I would have to drive 30 miles to get to CtPaTown and it's just not worth it.

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