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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

* Whole Foods produce is bad. We get better produce at our local major grocery chain, and much better at the Mexican grocery.

* Whole Foods bet big on prepared food; about 1/4 of our local Whole Foods is essentially a food court.

* Whole Foods has a sort of Trader Joe's phenomenon where the place is gradually filling up with house brand stuff. But unlike TJ's, WF's house brands aren't relabeled good outside brands; they're mostly pretty bad, and WF tends to carry them to the exclusion of any other product, so I can get 5 different kinds of chicken stock at a big chain grocer and just WF's house brand at WF.

Things Whole Foods in Chicagoland is better at than other grocers:

* Meat.

* Seasonal vegetables; no other grocer is going to carry ramps this May.

* Cheese.

* A decent house-brand olive oil.

I think that's it.

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Time for some local nits:

* Jewel's produce is fine, but as you note it's hard to find much of anything outside of the typical fruits and veggies. It's also highly dependent on the individual store.

* Mariano's is god-awful produce wise, so can't imagine that's what you're talking about. Which Mexican produce store?

* Coincidentally, I did this check very recently and can guarantee you that WF stocks 4-5 different brands of chicken stock.

But why does that matter? Ultimately, my research revealed the best price/quality sweet spot for stock was Kirkland (shocker!). Which only proves the point: single item (the TJ's approach) might be all the market really demands. Now admittedly, if the 365 brand isn't quality, that's a problem.

Things you are right about:

* WF way over-invested in prepared foods, probably because the markup is so damn high. Problem is, as another poster noted, the quality used to be consistently pretty high, but is now closer to slop.

* Your list of what WF excels at...with one huge omission: bulk raw ingredients.

But again, same question. Going by the rule that the outside of the store (fresh foods) is where you want to eat most of your food from anyway — if WF is consistently better at the majority of what we should be buying, what's the issue?

We've more or less switched from WF produce to Pete's, a local commodity grocery chain, and it puts WF to shame. I'm sure similar things are true in other markets.

I think maybe the issue is that grocery stores don't make nearly as much on produce as they do on prepared foods or even on house-brand packaged foods, and it's pretty plain to see that Whole Foods optimized itself over the last 10 years for revenue maximization. Competition is an issue, but so is wedging yourself into a local maxima.

Another thought is that grocery stores might be like drug stores in the sense that they are in significant part a commercial real estate bet; the store is really just a mechanism for extracting value from specific parcels of land. One other major difference between WF and "big box" chains is that WF tends to be smaller; it can't extract dollars from square feet by stocking them with Frito Lay and Coca Cola products the way Krogers can.

I've had better luck with Mariano's than Jewel for produce, but as you say, that may be highly dependent on the individual store.

> Whole Foods bet big on prepared food; about 1/4 of our local Whole Foods is essentially a food court.

I think this is also what led everyone to feel/think that WF is 100% more expensive than anywhere else. After trying the food court awhile back, and paying what was essentially $20 for a tiny box of food, it took me years to try WF again.

It seems that all the "high-quality" stores in my area do the food court as well. Sometimes it's nice, and I get a salad for lunch there a few times a year, but it's always somewhat overpriced. I think there is a subpopulation of wealthy people who never cook, that these grocers are chasing. It's understandable that if WF were the only store in the area serving those customers, it would do well. Now that lots of stores have a food court, it's probably not as lucrative for them.

Its a golden corral except your plate costs 2-3x as much and you don't get seconds.

It's expensive for what it is, but it's surprisingly difficult to find healthy prepared food. Most take-out places don't really have healthy options except for salads, and even when vegetables are available they're slathered with fat and salt. On nights when I don't want to cook or don't have time, there aren't many other options for healthy food other than Whole Foods.

> it's surprisingly difficult to find healthy prepared food

This. Whole Foods is a godsend when traveling, I can just nip in, grab something healthy that's already prepared and I'm good to go.

The poke bowl is around $10 I think and it's awesome.

You don't mention where you are... where I'm at (central Phoenix), I feel that sprouts does better at most produce, and the higher end Fry's do better at most of the rest. Basha's and Costco beats most in terms of meat imho, but I'll go to the handful of local butchers sometimes, it just depends on what I'm looking for.

Why do you trust the whole foods brand? Do you think the libertarian CEO goes to china to verify the ingredients are actually grown organically? Do you think the bush administration holdover in charge of the organic label goes to china to verify things are grown organically? I don't trust china, john mackey, or the FDA to guarantee genuine organic.

I don't trust "the Whole Foods brand", but I do shop at farmers markets and with local butchers, and the "local" produce at my Whole Foods often comes from farms whose names I recognize. I don't think it's all a scam to get evil Chinese produce into our fridges.

(Again: we've mostly switched to commodity grocery stores for produce, because Whole Food's produce sucks.)

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