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Amazon Is Cutting Prices at Whole Foods Again (cnn.com) 122

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon is giving Whole Foods shoppers an early gift for the holidays. The grocer announced Wednesday it's slashing prices again, this time on several "holiday staples," including sweet potatoes, canned pumpkin and turkey. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you'll pay even less for turkey: Whole Foods slashed turkey prices to $1.99 per pound (compared to $2.49 for non-Prime members), or $2.99 per pound for an organic turkey ($3.49 for non-Prime members).
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Amazon Is Cutting Prices at Whole Foods Again More

Amazon Is Cutting Prices at Whole Foods Again

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  • Is this a story or an advertisement? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SmilingBoy ( 686281 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @03:11PM (#55556777)
    Is this a story or an advertisement?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by TWX ( 665546 )

      I believe the germane term is "press release".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's a story if you shop at whole foods. It's an advertisement if you don't.

    • Are you suggesting that "anonymous reader" is not an typical Slashdot reader excited to tell everyone about the latest news out of technology powerhouse Amazon? The thing you are missing is that "anonymous reader" is actually an Alexa bot.

    • It depends on how much importance you place on oversight. Amazon is a big business, and it seems to be using brick-and-mortar Whole Foods to push its Prime subscriptions. I'd say this is basically just a loyalty program, similar to Safeway and Wegmans giving you price discounts if you have their shopper's card; just the loyalty program happens to have a price tag (similar to Sam's Club memberships) and ties into their other services.

      It's an interesting approach. This will get the brick-and-mortar shop

      • If they know your B&M shopping habits, they can feed you more effective ads online. Just by knowing that you shop at Whole Foods is enough for them to tell that you don't care about price, and you may be willing to buy other overpriced stuff online.

      • It is a loyalty program for an unrelated service; just like they used to do with vending machines! If your delivery driver worked for a certain company, then you had to rent your vending machines from their Friends.

        It seems totally reckless to me; they have a near monopoly over certain types of online sales, if they're using that monopoly to put anti-competitive pressure on another industry they could end up losing their (otherwise legal) monopoly! Mark my words, if Amazon doesn't cut and run from this nons

    • It's an advertisement mis-tagged as security, business, money, IT, and story.

    • Advertisement.

    • Is this a story or an advertisement?

      Every time Whole Foods runs a sale. Grocery stores run weekly sales - usually targeted around things you need so you shop there... Whole Foods should be no difference. This isn't slashdot worthy - Whole Foods is a grocery store, not a tech company (Well, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of one - but who cares). If we are going to include Whole Foods stories, can we at least start covering the weekly prices from Safeway where I actually shop?

  • I can't say this is across the board, it may have to do with each individual market... But here is Seattle, the Whole Foods marked down a few things, but over all the prices stayed the same, or the reduction was such that I didn't notice. There's a difference between saying "Our prices are x% lower" and "We've reduced prices on x% of our products". In the store near me, it felt like any other store doing "loss leaders".

  • Cracks me up (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This may be one of the first things Amazon has done that I can get behind. The Whore Foods crowd were such an insufferable bunch of wind bags. I love that they are now on par with Wal-Mart.

  • Why is this advertisement a story on Slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Afty0r ( 263037 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @03:16PM (#55556821) Homepage
    Why does it not say "sponsored content" or similar?

    • Because they don't have a sense of what type of behavior will destroy their large investment in this property!

      They think if we come to complain, we'll always keep coming.

      I don't mind so much the idiot editors and lack of quality content, but the "fake news" certainly has a shelf life...

    • Because slashdot isn't paid for it. They're just stupid enough to approve stories submitted by the many professionals who get paid to submit stories to sites like this.

    • Because no less than half the people here are too stupid to not fall for it even though they know its an advertisement.

  • bought it. Their pipe dream is to turn it into a cashless, cashier-less store, putting cashiers out of jobs and extending the surveillance society. It may be Bezos' dream, but it's not mine. I'd rather support businesses that contribute to my city's economy, not destroy it. Also, the prices quotes are about average.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      McDonalds has already had successful trials of self-service kiosks. I don't think we're that far off seeing a third of the register jockeys we see today.

      Hell, if all the lanes that are normally closed were open to self-service I'd use that anyway.

      Rember bank tellers? Yeah.

      • McDonald's. What's that? Haven't been to one of them in years, and if they don't accept good, old-fashioned cash, one more reason not to go.

      • Yes I remember bank tellers and they remember me or at least they do at the bank I use just like my insurance agent does. There are somethings that just can't be replaced. The ATM is nice I can take cash out anytime but honestly I almost never use it because there just aren't any places I go that only accept cash at least not for the past 10-15 years.

        • I use cash at local businesses that I like:
          (a) reduces their costs of doing business- no bankster swipe fees
          (b) helps preserve anonymity/privacy and keeps businesses accepting cash. Voting with my wallet, literally.

      • I've used the McD kiosks on a college campus it was night and day better.

        1.) Press the picture of the food you want and swipe your card (because the cashiers can't do it correctly).
        2.) They bring the food to you.

      • The self-service kiosks are better than cashiers - because you don't rely on a minimum-wage employee to put your order in correctly. The preparation may still be sloppy, but at least you can clearly point out that you didn't order it that way. Also handy when traveling, because there's basically no limit to the number of languages supported.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pnutjam ( 523990 )
          Unless you have a toddler who won't stop pressing the loading area, which is usually a big scale. Or.. unless you accidentally scan the wrong loyalty card because it's flopping around on your keychain and you have to wait for an attendant because you have an "unkown item".
          • I was talking about the ones at McDonald's. Supermarket ones are generally not that great, really only worth it if you only have one or two items.

    • Re:I refuse to go to Whole Foods after Amazon... (Score:4, Funny)

      by MightyYar ( 622222 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @04:41PM (#55557457)

      I'd rather support businesses that contribute to my city's economy, not destroy it.

      Here, here! That's why I won't drive an electric car! Think of those poor service station workers. I also dial zero every time I want to place a call and have it manually routed.

      • I also dial zero every time I want to place a call and have it manually routed.

        I dare you to try it and see if it is really a thing.

        You might have to dial 3 numbers from a phone that supports third-party billing and agree to pay $2.50.

        • LOL, it would be worth trying - but I'm afraid dialing "0" on my phone has no effect since it is just an IP phone. I get "We could not complete your call, please try again," through Google Voice and "The number you have dialed is invalid or not in service," through CallCentric.

          • I'll give you the spoiler; if you try it from a landline they can usually only connect you using a "collect call." They can't just connect regular calls anymore. YMMV, depends on the company.

    • A lot people don't even know what a "health food store" is, and so they don't realize that there are already multiple locally-owned stores that sell the same products cheaper than Whole Paycheck. It wasn't the people new to the products who called it "Whole Paycheck" it was the people who were already buying organic somewhere else who went in to try and were shocked at how gullible yuppies are.

  • Shop-Rite turkey 1.49 this week (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @03:20PM (#55556855) Homepage
    Sorry, but why is this here? News would be record sales, or finally being bankrupt. As it is they still look overpriced.
  • let's hope the quality remains. That's often not the case.
    • Whole Foods isn't about quality, it's about cutsie-pie displays for the benefit of city hipsters who want to pretend they're at a farmer's market in Vermont.

    • The price cuts are there because Amazon has never been about turning a profit today. It's about growing until it has a percentage of everything.

  • Make Whole Foods a soup kitchen and give food away.

  • Slashdot defeats uBlock, yet again (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Only way to defeat adblockers anymore is to disguise an ad as a story.

    • Is it really a "defeat" if it causes the community to re-hash all the reasons they hate the thing being advertised, and why it is a waste of money to shop there? It might be that Amazon would do better to pay slashdot not to post the ads!

      • Yes, it still is a defeat. Amazingly, even hated ads work. Even ads that lead to re-hashing reasons its horrible work. Hell, even ads that lead to strong condemnation work.

        Ads are a hundreds of billions of dollar industry precisely because they work, even when (especially when?) smart people think they are cleverly above being influenced by them.

        • I recall reading recently that the online ads actually weren't working, and that companies were realizing they weren't getting much value.

          It is well known that hated ads on television and radio work. But is that because people don't know any better, or because the audience is captive? That is still being hashed out, and you can find research claiming to support both claims.

          Advertising generally is a hundreds of billions of dollars industry because advertising generally works. That tells us nothing at all ab

  • I wonder how many prime members are going to go buy one of these and not really think about how much they've been paying elsewhere. But hey, you can say you bought your Turkey at Whole Foods. Your guests will instantly pat you on the back and mention how that was one of the best turkeys..

    • Coming from a country, where "organic" food has been mainstream for many years, I find those prices unbelievably low. 3 dollar per lb of organic turkey? I guess the standards for "organicness" are rather low, as an organic turkey here (in Austria) costs about 3 times as much.

      • Or maybe food prices are simply higher in Austria, a small mountainous country with a lot of the arable rural land owned by rich foreigners who use it for vacationing?

        You certainly can't just import cheap food from your neighbors, as they all have really high taxes and the regulations are designed to keep food prices high so that farmers make more money.

  • ... people can sell their food-shopping privacy to Amazon for $0.50 off / pound for a turkey.

  • YAWN: Whole Foods is doing what everyone else does at this time of year!

    CORRECTION: Amazon is lower prices and beating the competition!

  • from the /. summary:

    Amazon is giving Whole Foods shoppers an early gift for the holidays.

    Malarkey. Discounts are a pricing strategy [wikipedia.org] to maximize profits. [wikipedia.org]

    "What is Discount Pricing Strategy" [chron.com]

  • "Again"... not (Score:5, Informative)

    by igotmybfg ( 525391 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @04:28PM (#55557353) Homepage
    My firm has continuously sampled a local Whole Foods (in Austin, TX) wall to wall, getting about 14.5k distinct UPCs each time. In comparing before and after the merger, we found no significant difference in average price per category (on a same-UPC basis), nor in the magnitude or absolute number of price changes over time. Bottom line: the idea that Amazon has caused Whole Foods to cut their prices is more marketing than reality.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by pots ( 5047349 )
      According to Gordon Haskett [washingtonpost.com], they actually have dropped prices. By about 1%.

      So. There you are.
      • From the article: > The firm tracked prices on 110 items over five weeks We tracked prices on all the items in the store, which is a 140x greater sample size than Gordon Haskett. Also, the article does not mention what the margin of error is on their sample.

      • Re:"Again"... not (Score:4, Informative)

        by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @05:30PM (#55557775)

        The firm tracked prices on 110 items over five weeks

        So on a basket of 110 prices they found a 1% decrease, but somebody else checked a basket of 14.5k prices and found no decrease at all. This is exactly as expected; when they build a loss-leader strategy, they try to put the discounts on the items people notice the most, and increase the prices of things that people don't think about very much, but tend to buy at the same time that they buy the loss leader. So a basket of only 110 items will always be a basket of "notable" items, and it will always show the price manipulation the way the store wants it to be seen.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )

          Even when it's not static loss leaders you typically make a sale on one item and full price on all the complementary items, like burgers and buns, hot dogs and ketchup, turkey and cranberry sauce and so on. Particularly in a high end shop where goods are never truly cheap you rarely have people sniping just the specials, that's more for supermarkets. And even that is often due to some market surplus, can we get a ton of eggs cheap? Egg sale. That way it's not actually that big a loss they're leading with, e

        • So a basket of only 110 items will always be a basket of "notable" items

          Whoa, they could be 110 random items (which probably would show an incrase,as "unnoticed items getting a hike" outnumber "noticed items getting a discount" in your system. Or it could be a literal basket of the 110 things they would buy, which would again notice higher priced items(assuming that they real were things "bought together).>[?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

        Which, considering the average profit margin https://yourbusiness.azcentral... [azcentral.com] of 1-6% on groceries, is a pretty big sacrifice.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      I'm curious if even Amazon has the ability to cut Whole Foods prices significantly without significantly cutting quality.

      I'm not a Whole Foods shopper, but it strikes me that a lot of the products in that store are from small scale producers. Amazon could tell them to cut their prices or get lost, but I'm guessing a lot would just choose not to sell at Whole Foods, and I don't think Amazon would be able to find a ton of replacement products.

      I also don't think that many of the organic-and-natural type produ

  • The Walmart in my area typically has Turkeys for $0.40/lb or less around Thanksgiving. The union grocery stores in typically have Turkeys for 50-cents or less around Thanksgiving.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Vreejack ( 68778 )

      Maybe they are not factory turkeys? Who sells heirloom/heritage/whatchamacallit turkeys if not Wholefoods?

  • How do I prove I'm a Prime Member?

  • As I'm sure all grocery chains do. You can look up on Google for Kroger lowering prices and see that what Jeff Bezos is doing is just typical for grocery chains making this a non-news story. It only gets the exposure it does because Bezos also owns The Washington Post and he gets free publicity.

    Frankly I see it as manipulative when it is literally just how grocery stores do normal business.

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