Amazon Offers Whole Foods Discounts To Prime Members (reuters.com) 147
Amazon-owned Whole Foods debuted a loyalty program on Wednesday that offers special discounts to Prime members, including 10 percent off hundreds of sale items and rotating weekly specials. "The new loyalty strategy will test whether Amazon's $13.7 billion deal for Whole Foods brings much-feared disruption and an intensified price war to the $800 billion U.S. grocery industry dominated by Walmart and Kroger," reports Reuters. From the report: Those perks are available now in Florida and will roll out to all other stores starting this summer. Amazon previously announced free two-hour delivery from Whole Foods stores for members of Prime, its subscription club with fast shipping and video streaming. The new perks could make Whole Foods cheaper than conventional grocers for about 8 million of its customers who already subscribe to Amazon Prime, according to Morgan Stanley analysts. Prime members scan an app or input their phone numbers at checkout to receive the discounts.
Local chain here... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Isn't all food organic
Not if you live in the US. It's a legal term. And the law is actually pretty good, though there have been problems with loopholes. For example, "organic" California grapes grown with fracking water, because the organic law doesn't specify water source. There are also serious questions about foreign-grown "organic" products. In some cases the US accepts whatever standard the foreign country uses. In other cases we have to trust regulating agents in those countries. But in general, organic produce grown in th
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Re:Local chain here... (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as unions suck, and they do, they're still better than not having them. They provide a counter to the power of corporations to abuse their workers.
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They provide a counter to the power of corporations to abuse their workers.
This is no longer true. In pretty much any modern union, the good stuff has been grandfathered/orphaned and new members pony up dues and support union strikes with little or no gain for themselves.
The only good union is the union you've been a member of since 20 years ago. Anything else is essentially a cast system with no upward mobility.
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Do you have evidence to back this up? I've no knowledge of US unions, so perhaps its true. I'm certainly intrigued enough to wonder why you are modded +4 interesting for your anecdotal assertions whilst those defending unions are unmodded.
Or to put it another way - why do the members not do something about it? Are unions in the US not democratic? Do you actually care about unions or are you just putting them down because you hate the concept?
Re:Local chain here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or to put it another way - why do the members not do something about it? Are unions in the US not democratic?
Are unions democratic? Well it doesn't matter much if newcomers are voted out of juicy clauses before they get hired. A good example is at GM or Ford where more and more jobs were redefined as "non-core" for new hires, in practice cutting their hourly wage in half for the same kind of work done by "core" workers. This was a decision voted for by union workers as a compromise to protect their existing wages and benefits. Another example is how newcomes were no longer eligible to be part of the job bank at Ford after a layoff, or at best had to accept any position offered anywhere or leave the company, while some people were already on the job bank with the right of refusing three or more position before being kicked out.
Give this unfair treatment, you would assume that people would choose to skip the union. But in many cases, either union membership is mandatory for all eligible employees (because of the work contract negotiated with the employer) or people who choose to not be part of the union have to pay a fat fee to "compensate" the union for their benevolent actions such as negotiating the collective agreement. In other words, total racket.
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> Workers in unionized companies make 2-3 times minimum wage
That's funny. I remember when grocery workers were unionized. They didn't make anywhere near double.
What you make as a low skilled person is more likely to be a reflection of how much effort you put into the job search and whether or not you looked past the large corporate franchise operation on the next corner.
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I'm curious, how exactly did you get this stupid? And I'm not joking or purposely trying to insult you (well, maybe a little), but what kind of bizarro-world information outlets are you frequenting to get information that is the exact upside-down of reality?
I think they may be putting something in all those red pills you take, a
Why take the pill to begin with? (Score:1)
I think they may be putting something in all those red pills you take
The difference between you and me, is I refused to take any pills - I don't need to alter anything because I already see clearly, apparently the rest of you have some significant distortion you cannot see beyond due to things you swallow all the time without question. The fact that you pretend to understand what is going on with unions when you have never had a union job in your life, or even a deep friendship with union workers, is prett
Re:Why take the pill to begin with? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only have I had more than one union job, but I come from a union family. Three generations of union members. My grandfather was in the union working for the railroad and my father was a union machinist. When I was an undergraduate, I worked on South Water Market loading and unloading trucks and had a union pin. Since unions got weaker (starting in the late 80s), workers' wages have been stagnant. During the union era, those wages had healthy growth.
Most of the post-WWII prosperity and middle-class growth in the US was thanks to the labor movement.
Re:Why take the pill to begin with? (Score:5, Funny)
Stopping child-labour and introducing the 40-hour week was the death knell of western society and impoverished the rich.
Apparently.
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Thankfully we've got salaried "management" employees working unlimited unpaid overtime, tech workers pulling 80 hour weeks, kids in unpaid internships, and of course a steady supply of prison labor. A bit more of these and we can bring down the 50% unemployment levels that unions caused for so many decades.
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Lol, I know, right. Soon we will reach ultimate the libertarian utopia and everyone one will be free to be unfathomably wealthy, or dirt poor.
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They're only "not relevant" because most Americans sympathize with the bosses more than the workers (and they're generally part of the workers).
Was it Steinbeck who wrote that poor Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, not members of the working class?
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Was it Steinbeck who wrote that poor Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, not members of the working class?
I don't know, I don't read Steinbeck because it's too boring, and if he wrote that his books suck even more than I assumed.
The real reason why Americans sympathize more with the bosses is because that's where the paycheck comes from. At the end of the day, camaraderie and bonding with coworkers is great, but it don't pay for no kentucky fried chicken or netflix subscriptions.
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The real reason why Americans sympathize more with the bosses is because that's where the paycheck comes from.
No, Americans expect that they will one day take their job and don't want to shit the bed. Everything about that expectation is wrong.
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To be American, is to be a temporarily embarrassed billionaire.
Unions have a lot of problems that union members should solve, but the world would be worse without them.
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I bet you didn't know that the labor movement is making a comeback.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new... [nydailynews.com]
Labor was coasting on old successes after WW2 (Score:5, Interesting)
... but I come from a union family. Three generations of union members ...
Me too, grandfather and father. Some of the following coming from a dinner table conversation when I asked my dad why he was on strike. I had visited the picket lines earlier in the day.
Most of the post-WWII prosperity and middle-class growth in the US was thanks to the labor movement.
Yes and no. The labor movements great advances had already occurred before WW2. Post-war labor was coasting on old glories, the important stuff was enshrined into law not labor contracts by then. Labor's important battles had been won. Post-war labor became a "racket" according to my 40+ year union member grandfather, working hard to perpetuate its own existence and doing little for the workers. My eventually 40+ year union member father concurred. Both speak highly of the unions in the decades before WW2, but after, a very different thing. The point about the important stuff being law, that union contracts were more about preserving union power and finances and not so much about the workers, that came from these union members.
Unions became weaker not merely due to politicians but because workers recognized that big labor had become a racket that did little for them, they lost worker respect, they lost influence with workers and as a result lost influence among politicians.
And today, left-wing politicians *talk* about unions, but when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is these left-wing politicians go non-union just like the CEOs. For example the California San Francisco bay area buying Chinese steel for bridge projects.
Post WW2 economic success was due to our main economic competitors being wrecked by the war, post-war spending of wartime savings, and the economic stimulus of rebuilding and feeding various devastated parts of the world. It was a time where nearly any idiot manager or CEO could make a buck, its an incredibly poor time to look at for business and economic examples. As you learn in econ 101, comparison require all other things to be equal. And 1950s America was a very unique atypical situation.
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Speak of stupidity...
Most of the post-WWII prosperity and middle-class growth in the US was thanks to the labor movement.
No it wasn't, it was because the rest of the world destroyed itself (especially Europe) while the US's infrastructure remained completely unscathed. This meant that the USA could scale up its manufacturing while the rest of the world bought practically everything from us. We WERE to the rest of the world what China is today. THAT is why the US saw big prosperity, not because you were giving a cut of your paycheck to the mafia. Similarly, the fact that the rest of the world has built up
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My dad's mortgage was about $79/mo. When was this and what percentage was that of his income?
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Most of the post-WWII prosperity and middle-class grwoth in the US was thanks to most of the rest of the industrialized world being reduced to rubble. The 1950s-1970s boom in the US was a consequence of having the only industrial base that was completely intact after the war. Once the rest of the world rebuilt, that type of growth was impossible to sustain and we started to see stagnating wages and economic problems.
The US has reinvented itself a few times since (the tech, financial and services economies)
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The problem with that thesis is that when Europe rebuilt, they did so with a robust labor mo
Labor not suppressed, killed by union leadership (Score:2)
The problem with that thesis is that when Europe rebuilt, they did so with a robust labor movement in place and have since overtaken the US in terms of economic mobility and the economic factors that made up what used to be called the "American Dream". We killed the golden goose in the US by suppressing the labor movement. Fortunately, it's coming back.
European success and US failure were not due to organized labor in the 1960s and beyond. It had far more to do with the cultural imperative of buying locally. For example far more Europeans would consider where something was made, give it some consideration in their purchasing decisions, while in the US we pretty much only considered price. Were you around in the 1970s, did you notice all the "Save a Job, Buy American" bumper stickers? How true that was, sadly it was ignored. The post-war suffering of Europ
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Sure it was.
I didn't say "US Labor" was suppressed. I said the labor movement was suppressed.
It's making a comeback, by the way.
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> and have since overtaken the US in terms of economic mobility
That's fucking hilarious.
In Europe you top out at a level of material prosperity that Americans would find unacceptable. You have ZERO possibility for building wealth in Europe. There is no "economic mobility" in Europe.
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I'm sorry, pal, but you're just wrong.
https://www.epi.org/publicatio... [epi.org]
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-c... [brookings.edu]
[Note: the raw data is available there if you would like to do your own analysis, uninformed though it may be.]
Re:Local chain here... (Score:4, Informative)
Correction: Is cheaper than Whole Foods USED to be.
Especially for Prime members.
Having been in Whole Foods before, I can tell you that taking 10% off “hundreds of sale items” is not bringing its prices anywhere near those at my local Winco Foods nor those of our local Fred Meyer - the two grocery stores we generally shop at.
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Having been in Whole Foods before, I can tell you that taking 10% off “hundreds of sale items” is not bringing its prices anywhere near those at my local Winco Foods nor those of our local Fred Meyer - the two grocery stores we generally shop at.
From my being in Whole Foods, it's all about location. They're downtown and between the CBD and nice suburbs. It's on the way home for lots of people for which 10% savings is not worth the extra 30 minutes it would take to drive to a different neighborhood on the way home to buy groceries at a non-Whole Foods. Sort of like how my local QFC is more expensive than the cheap grocery store in the poor neighborhood next to mine. Not worth my time to go there unless I need a lot of non-organic non-free range chic
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> You can't compare Whole Foods' organic
Sure you can. It's the same stuff. These are commodities. Whole Foods doesn't have a monopoly on any of this stuff.
You seem to be one of those morons that thinks it's a good idea to try and impress total strangers with how much money you waste.
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When I worked at a super market, the union sucked for about three years, but also made it a viable career vs the non union super markets that paid $0.50/hour more at first, and didn't have a $25 week due.
Aside from the due, which quickly was offset by better pay and benefits, there was no union abuse. While management at the non union place would stop giving you hours if you didn't come in on a day off within hour's notice.
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Why do you support slave labor? That's what unions are, forced dues for no return while people that don't even manage the store they work at live high of the little peoples' income. And you proudly state you support such a monstrous arrangement? Have you no shame sir.
Why do you lie? Just blatant bold faced lies. Is that what you truly think a union is about, if so, you are quite misinformed.
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We have the same thing in my sleep little West Coast town. There's a store, and I don't know how they do it, but they have incredibly low prices on organic food, produce, fruit and meat. Most of it is locally-sourced and there's even a very good wine and coffee selection. They don't have everything all the time, so if you see a good deal on something, you
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is cheaper than Whole Foods, has just as much organic produce, and has union workers that aren't treated as disposable tissues to wipe Bezos' butt with.
Ya, but do other customers and the cashiers look at you condescendingly when you don't bring your own reusable shopping totes and ask for paper bags?
I thought not.
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How does that help the customer? (Score:3)
is cheaper than Whole Foods
Not exactly a high bar to set. Whole Foods sells to wealthy folks (not price sensitive) in well to do locations and prices accordingly.
has just as much organic produce
You do realize Whole Foods sells more than just organic produce, right? And is the produce they sell of equal quality? My guess is probably not even if it is acceptable.
and has union workers that aren't treated as disposible tissues to wipe Bezos' butt with.
I have nothing against unions. My father was a lifelong union member and that one fact alone helped paid for most of my education. I support the unions as a mechanism to fight management abuse and waste. But the simple fact is that many unions have long ago abandoned workers rights as their primary goal and have turned into an extortion racket that only serve to drive up prices for me as the customer with no improvement in customer service or productivity. If management is actually treating the workers badly then unions are a great answer. Problem is that if a union is successful they lose focus and gradually drive up prices and make the company less competitive because they don't know how to cooperate with management.
So explain to me what your union is doing that makes me care as a customer. I see no evidence that Whole Foods workers are treated worse than workers at other grocery store chains and you certainly haven't provided any. How to they improve prices, customer service, product selection, or in any way improve my experience as a customer?
I'd rather support them than a destructive/disruptive company like Amazon...
And I'd rather have a company that actually gives a shit about serving MY needs. Amazon is forcing a whole bunch of companies to step their game up to keep my business. Say what you want about Amazon, they do customer service very well and they provide a lot of value and are constantly improving and adding services. Companies that do not adopt a similar attitude deserve to go out of business.
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Taking the long view, keeping > 1 business in business makes sure that Amazon won't drive competitors out of business and raise prices in future. Too many ecaaaahhhhhhnamists take the short view.
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Amazon has to manage to get competitive before they can be a threat to anyone. The media lays on the hype like they are trying to make this happen. It's like the last presidential election.
Amazon Fresh selection sucks. Whole Foods prices suck even with all of these discounts.
There are no less than 4 chains that sell groceries around here that leave Whole Amazon in the dust. If I want to drive a little there are speciality or upscale grocers that make it absolutely no contest.
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I don't really understand the "cult of the Whole Foods" market that has been affecting a whole bunch of American grocery shoppers for a long time. I have visited Whole Foods stores maybe three or four times in my life, and every time I did, my jaws dropped looking at the prices there. And the items I was looking at were not some kind of organic, free-range, farmer raised products. Those were ordinary imported cheeses, bottled juices, or beers, the stuff that everyone else sells. Moreover, wherever I lived,
$119 in the hole to start (Score:1)
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Yeah...and the free shipping thing. I've never seen free shipping cost so much.
More specifically, bad free shipping. I always assumed Prime delivery was great, and that it was just the free non-Prime delivery that was awful for the specific purpose of getting people to upgrade to Prime. But I've used the trial and basically it was the same awful shipping with fancy black tape on the boxes.
I don't consider that my money is hard-earned (I'm in consulting) and yet I'll never spend any of it on Amazon Prime.
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Interesting, I find that 70% of what I buy comes in two days, 10% in one day, and 20% in 4 days with prime.
With not prime it was 100% in four days, and $35 minimum order to get free shipping.
5% discount (Score:2)
If you get their credit card, you get 5% back on all your Amazon and Whole Foods purchases. If you assume you would otherwise get 1% back on other typical rewards cards, that's still 4% more. You need to spend $60/week to come out ahead. Anyone who shops at Whole Foods on a regular basis already does that, so Prime saves money.
Even if you had a 2% rewards card, you would need to spend $80/week. Prime still saves money.
And that's just for the grocery shopping alone, ignoring the various other benefits.
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no, cisco makes ios, numbskull.
no, Blackberry makes ios (or at least the kernel).
It would be great (Score:2)
if Prime video services worked on my non Fire android box.
(and Prime didn't increase in price 10-20% every year)
Or if a Whole Foods existed closer than 500 miles from where I lived.
Or if there weren't 2 organic farm stores less than 1/2 mile from my house with prices less than 1/4 the local stores prices.
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Amazon isn't in control of that. Hollywood is. They insist that streaming video services be encrypted in one of two ways.
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Amazon isn't in control of that. Hollywood is.
So Hollywood is forcing Amazon streaming to be a piece of shit on non-Amazon devices, but somehow lets Netflix provide high quality streaming even on my grandmother's bloatware ridden Dell Platitude bought at best buy more than a decade ago?
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Amazon chooses not to cast to Chromecast not because of Hollywood, but because of corporate struggle.
It's annoying, because I need to do a sloppy screen cast to watch Amazon prime shows on my TV, but it's not Hollywood's fault. I can't cast the Amazon funded shows either.
Fraud for traffic? (Score:5, Interesting)
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No problem - I know the phone numbers of quite a few Prime members. No need to give them my own...
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Why is Amazon doing this more fraudulent than other stores taking phone numbers to verify their loyalty account rather than expecting customers to memorize an obscure membership number?
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walmart has 10x+ more stores (Score:3, Insightful)
and in nearly every market, big and small.
grocery is the lion's share of walmart's business. they ring up a half trillion annually in revenues. over 55% of sales is grocery. walmart sells more *grocery* than amazon does in total sales of *everything*. walmart knows grocery. they know grocery shoppers. they have leverage with manufacturers that would make even bezos wet between the legs.
not a fan of walmart (or amazon, for that matter)... but this is one area amazon cannot compete in, not yet and not for a long time, not even with whole foods. they aren't going to open thousands of 100,000 square foot stores coast-to-coast. they aren't going to ship 100s of billions worth of grocery orders, including perishables (including frozen, refrigerated, produce and deli), every year, either.
about the only thing that might, possibly, put a dent in walmart's stranglehold of the american grocery market would be a partnership between something like costco, target, and a kroger and/or a national grocery wholesaler like supervalu that has their own stores *and* distributes to other chains and independents located in a lot of the same markets (of all sizes) that walmart operates in. even that would be a long-shot.. walmart isn't going to give up any market position willingly.
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If Walmart was in competition with Whole Foods, you'd have a great point.
The real value for Amazon is that they now have a store presence for their online grocery org (Amazon Fresh), gain increased product lines by assuming Whole Food's vendor list, as well as Whole Food's internal line of products, and they can now turn each Whole Foods location into a fulfillment center, thus further expanding the reach of Amazon Fresh.
I'm sure the Walton family is terrified over Amazon. I doubt that Bezos loses
I am a Primate (Score:2)
WF vs "conventional", huh? (Score:2)
The new perks could make Whole Foods cheaper than conventional grocers
Is there a difference? The produce section of WF has little signs "conventionally grown in Mexico" on most of the veggies. There is a very, very small section of organic food.
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You fuckwits don't realize what you are doing to yourselves and to independent stores.
I'm not an Amazon fan, but I hate independent stores more with their shitty business hours and the usual absence of ways to go back and check previous orders so I don't buy the same season of GoT for mother's days two years in a row.
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Local grocery stores: one is 24 hr, one is open till 11pm-12am.
Game of Thrones? You *buy* DVD's in 2018? What with streaming services, Torrents, and DVD burning?
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Welcome to capitalism...
If we choose to support small stores who charge higher prices, we the customers suffer in the short term.
If we don't support them, we suffer in the long term.
Capitalism encourages short term thinking, if you're harming yourself in the short term in the hopes of a long term gain you may not be around in the long term.
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Amazon will, like a parasitic vine, choke the life out of most if not all alternatives, and once that is done, do you think Amazon will continue to give you reasonable prices ? If you do think that is going to happen, you are more naive than most young children.
You're naive if you think that not shopping at Amazon is going to make a difference.
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You're naive if you think that not shopping at Amazon is going to make a difference.
It might slow down progress slightly. It would be nice if we could get faster at being compassionate instead of having to forestall the future, though.
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It might slow down progress slightly.
What you're seeing now *is* already slowed down slightly.
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That's a wonderful attitude to have. You probably don't vote, either, do you?
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You probably don't vote, either, do you?
Depends. Often I do not, simply because I can't find any candidate that I like. The attitude is called 'realism', by the way. I'd rather focus my limited energy on things were I can actually make a change.
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Business.
Either Amazon, or Whole Foods, are losing money on this. Maybe it's market-capture. Maybe it's just bringing the profit margin ever-lower.
But if you want to compete you can only do two things: Do the same, or ignore it and let them suffer losses that you're not willing to suffer.
If you're only paying for Prime what you save every time you go into Whole Foods, they are making a loss of 11 times that, even if you only go once a month.
In the same way that Prime Video (despite "giving away" movies t