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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The bullshit parts about Whole Foods were bullshit a decade ago.

The difference is that their quality has declined and others are catching up. The food bar was near restaurant quality in 2006, now it's slop at 3x the cost. You also have to be careful about date labels, my local store will relabel old inventory and add a few weeks to the sell by dare.

Also, Amazon impacts them harder because WF lost their monopoly on weird organic product.

It's the typical big company story. They grew too fast. I'm sure the supply chain is a shitshow.

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my local store will relabel old inventory and add a few weeks to the sell by dare

Can you elaborate on this?

I totally agree with your other point that others are catching up and I think they realized they don't need to have an entire organic store just certain key items(grass fed beef, good produce to make everyone happy.

Perfect example: they sampled jalapeño Brie with some fancy cracker and fig jam. I was shopping for a Christmas party and bought two of each. We used one for the party. It was dated with a 2/28/17 sell by date.

The little cheese wheel was wrapped in plastic. Unwrap it, as I did last week, and lo and behold, the date sticker under the plastic wrap says 12/21/16.

They play similar games with cut fruit and other stuff. I can get same or better stuff at Hannaford for 1/3 the cost.

> The bullshit parts about Whole Foods were bullshit a decade ago.

What you say is very interesting as I have often heard people tell me how much better the quality of their products was when they 'started'. As I have precisely only lived in the US for a decade, I'd be very curious to know how the evolution of quality for regular stores such as Safeway, or other supermarkets of similar standing where people with working class wages can fill a whole cart.

I sort of have the intuition that there must have been sort of a shift in the past 20 years, possibly when the GMOs were imposed to Americans, where Excellent food became Regular and Regular food became Substandard. Now I realize I might just be somewhere close to entirely wrong right there :P

WFM taught people to value quality and a food shopping experience. The quality has improved in absolute terms. However, in relative terms, other national chains started adding up-market stores and gourmet product selections in regular stores, dampening WFM's differentiation.

To challenge another of your assumptions, though WFM does well with households with >$100K, it also does well with other income brackets including "working class." [0] WFM targets specific customers in all demographics. WFM's prices aren't necessarily higher, and you can certainly overspend at a Safeway. Also, notice how Safeway has high affinity with WFM.

[0] http://infoscout.co/retailer/whole_foods

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