The Amazon-Ification of Whole Foods | Hacker News Reader

The Amazon-Ification of Whole Foods

theatlantic.com

109 pointsIntronExon115 comments

Whole Foods gave Amazon a high-end, nationwide, yet arguably "mainstream" grocery store to enter into the US grocery market. It's an aspirational brand, yet not so specialty to be ostentatious. It's a nationwide chain, unlike other top-rated grocery stores -- Wegmans and Publix come to mind. And it's a store that, through savvy and market timing, has located its sites in areas that are experiencing growth in upper-middle-class households: Amazon's preferred demographic.

They can likely cut Whole Foods' margins on many items and, through the magic of the warehouse club nature of Prime, offer further discounts to Prime members, incentivizing the choice of Amazon over their competitors. Not all people will we swayed, but some will.

This will shake up the grocery market in many metros, where margins are tight and incumbents are often saddled with tight margins, concerns about real estate, and preexisting debt. Some will spend more to retain customers with extra features like free at-store pickup or cheap delivery, but they won't be able to outmatch Amazon's warchest. The most vulnerable among their competition will fold, allowing customer bases to re-align.

There aren't enough of these stores to impact any major metro area. Aldi tends to have more storefronts and their impact hasn't been that great. What did smack the old school grocers was when Wal Mart got into the business years ago and to a point Target.

example, there less than ten Whole Foods stores in Metropolitan Atlanta. There are probably that many competing grocery chains in the same area, with sixty plus of each of the larger ones.

In Detroit, a "food desert", they could potentially take over the majority of the downtown/midtown upper middle class grocery market.

Amazon can't reduce margins without fundamentally changing the nature of Whole Foods. If they lower margins they will leave their current segment and enter a lower cost segment, with the corresponding changes in service, offerings and overall customer experience. They could do it by subsidizing lower margins in the short but not the long term.

At $100/yr, which includes video and app subscriptions, and shipping, Amazon can't offer too much in the way of discounts before the warehouse-club aspect is irrelevant and is just "competing on price"

When I was a kid, mom would do the grocery shipping once every 2 weeks. She'd load the five kids into the van and we'd trek over and fill 2 shopping carts with 10 boxes of breakfast cereal, 2 gallons of milk, 2 pounds of bacon, 8 pounds of hamburger, 24 cans of Campbell's soup...

Flash forward to 2018 and my wife is buying things online to the point that we're getting 4-6 items delivered per week. I'd guess that's not exceptional.

With 'free delivery' for under $35, I can see her increasing that to on average one delivery item per day.

Kind of like the milk man used to do.

What concerns me is that the amount of energy that goes into getting all that stuff into my home seems to have substantially increased, and, will continue to increase as more businesses incorporate low cost or free delivery.

So it makes me wonder where this ends. It seems we'll wind up with delivery trucks, perhaps autonomous electric vehicles, combing the suburbs throughout the day.

I keep contemplating the extremes: 149 items acquired in one trip the way my mom used to operate, vs.149 items delivered to my home one at a time over a 2 week period. What are the trade-offs?

I had the same thought process.

One point to note is that a delivery guy might deliver to multiple people in your neighbourhood, so his driving is amortised over those orders, whereas when you drive the shops you're making the whole journey for yourself.

If delivery was organised extremely efficiently, e.g. a single delivery service that delivers everything at the same time as the post, it's no doubt that it would be much more efficient than individuals going to the shops themselves. So we're on a spectrum where the extremes are "much better" and "much worse" than pre-internet, but it's not clear to me where we are on the spectrum; in particular, it would be interesting to know whether the net energy consumption has increased or dropped.

I'd expect the energy cost of deliveries to be about an order of magnitude less than doing the shopping yourself if you have to drive out of your way to do it. Goods being delivered make up a significant fraction of the weight of a delivery vehicle but a tiny fraction of your car when you're driving to the store, even if you are getting all that stuff.

> What concerns me is that the amount of energy that goes into getting all that stuff into my home seems to have substantially increased, and, will continue to increase as more businesses incorporate low cost or free delivery. > > I keep contemplating the extremes: 149 items acquired in one trip the way my mom used to operate, vs.149 items delivered to my home one at a time over a 2 week period. What are the trade-offs?

Energy-wise, you present a fallacy that all those deliveries serve just your home.

50 houses getting deliveries every day from the same truck for 2 weeks = 14 trips. Those 50 houses all going to the store once every 2 weeks = 50 trips. Not to mention all the land wasted for building parking around said store.

+delivery truck can serve the entire neighborhood, saving gas from everyone's cars

+frequent restocking means you can use a smaller, more energy efficient refrigerator

+frequent restocking potentially means fresher food

-supply is centralized, if a disaster occurs making the shipping center inaccessible you'll starve sooner

-government/big biz can more finely monitor and control your food supply

You're not considering the energy and waste of maintaining many retail outlets throughout the city.

If Amazon is smart, they will keep their brand out of Whole Foods, at least until they rehabilitate it some. Neither media or public sentiment towards Amazon is great right now for a variety of reasons, many of which have been posted on HN. Some people are getting disturbed that it seems like they can only get important goods from one company; indeed, this is basically the monopoly future that Amazon wants. Personally, I don't want to feel like I'm being stalked or "optimized" by Amazon at my local Whole Foods.

I don't think we've seen the end of non-Amazon retail yet. When almost every transaction is conducted through Skinnerian workflows developed by MBAs in Seattle and neural networks running in Virginia data centers, doing all your shopping at Walmart is an act of radical physicality.

As a consumer, amazon is a great brand.

I agree. It's only as a potential employer that they lose their luster.

They seem like a pretty good employer to me.

I have knowledge from a swe friend, i heard it was not great compared to google, but that was 4 years ago.

Disclaimer: google employee.

they are notorious for overworking their warehouse and delivery workers and i have heard very mixed experiences of working for amazon in a dev or biz role.

For now.

It is textbook monopoly management to resist squeezing the customer until you’re dependent on them.

Potentially. But there is always someone else to disrupt them. Amazon took the r&d cost, and showed what worked. They didnt reinvent the whole thing, they took prime membership from others (costco membership is similar, frequent flier programs are similar), packaged with a great customer service.

They raised my expectation from online commerce. An example, my wife buys clothing from a european brand. Their website is borderline useless, customer service cannot locate orders. At some point they "paid" us to buy something by not properly marking returned item.

Amazon is just there, it works for things i buy every single time.

Ha, the fallacy that deferring the correction (potentially indefinitely) makes the situation better?

What if nothing disrupts their entrenched market position? What if it happens in 5 generations or more? Will you want to tell your grandchildren you were waiting for the problem to resolve itself while they now suffer the consequences?

What if, even worse, the disruption will not be a positive change but further race to the bottom?

Make hay while the sun shines. At the moment, Amazon offers consumers a great deal. If and when that ceases to be the case, we can do something about it at that point.

Consumers, yes. But consumers are not everything to a business. How about, say, employees?

Employees should demand better conditions and stronger protections than they get in most US states. I'd encourage Amazon employees to unionise and fight for those things, and politicians to support that (my own country tends to do better on those fronts already).

"…many of which have been posted on HN"

It's easy to get into a bubble.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Amazon. Top 5 brands of 2017, according to

http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/2017/ra...

(And #8 is Facebook.)

> I don't think we've seen the end of non-Amazon retail yet.

Amazon is less than 3% of US retail. Walmart's retail business is three times the size of Amazon's retail business. And that's before we count the fact that half of Amazon's retail business, isn't Amazon at all.

Amazon is not going to actually dominate all of retail. Amazon is not going to become a retail monopoly. Amazon is not going to build a retail business dramatically larger than Walmart's retail business. The shrieks to the contrary are strictly emotionalism rather than fact-based, just as they were 12 or 15 years ago when Walmart was going to destroy everything in retail and monopolize everything. It's just as silly and absurd to pretend Amazon is going to do the same thing. What Amazon has is an early lead in online retail, because they were an aggressive first mover. Only ~10-12% of US retail has moved online. As that percentage dramatically increases in the next 20 years, Amazon's total share of online commerce will fall accordingly. They're not going to be doing $3 trillion in annual sales in 15 years. It'll be extremely impressive if they can manage to one day catch up to Walmart's retail size.

> Neither media or public sentiment towards Amazon is great right now

Public sentiment towards Amazon is extraordinarily high. They typically have the highest, or one of the highest rated brands and consumer experiences. Their customer service is routinely voted as among the best of any company.

What opinion pieces in the NY Times say about Amazon, are not at all representative of how the majority of people feel about Amazon. That's a classic echo chamber premise.

> And that's before we count the fact that half of Amazon's retail business, isn't Amazon at all.

What does that mean? Most of Walmart's business isn't Walmart either, it's their suppliers' business, and Walmart gets a cut. With FBA and drop-shippers, Amazon gets a cut.

Amazon has just recently started a push into brick-and-mortar-stores, and less recently got into local delivery.

> They're not going to be doing $3 trillion in annual sales in 15 years.

Actually, they will hit that in 9 years if they can sustain their current growth rate. It'll take 15 years at half their current growth rate.

Walmart is a better-loved brand than Amazon?

and Whole Foods, aka "Whole Paycheck"?

> "Neither media or public sentiment towards Amazon is great right now for a variety of reasons, many of which have been posted on HN."

And I'd thought it was downright fawning.

It's sort of funny. Amazon now does is doing the same thing Walmart did back in the day.

If you were a supplier for Walmart, you _had_ to adopt their business practices in order to stay competitive in the market. They would demand that so you could constantly lower prices.

Amazon is sort of the same in that if they enter a vertical shopping market, if you don't provide the same level of service, you're kind of sunk. And to get to that level of service, the insidious thing is that you either let them take care of logistics and pay them a cut, or you adopt their business practices which have been honed for years.

I don't think Amazon-Ification is necessarily a bad thing. Amazon runs a tight ship and companies would do well to learn.

They recently stopped roasting fresh coffee every day. Cost cutting coffee is so wrong...

Really? In all locations or just some of them? I'm kind of surprised I can't find anything about this change, though there are lots of older blog posts and reddit threads etc. about how they roast fresh beans daily.

WF coffee is overpriced for the quality. Coffee roasting is a skill, skill WF employees do not have and are unlikely to have in future.

Absolutely excellent coffee roasted by small bean producers that built small empires can be had at the same or sometimes cheaper prices than Whole Foods coffee.

Whole Foods Allegro roasting Asustin downtown is on par at $10-14/lb vs $20-25/lb for small roasters.

$10-$14/lb is La Colombe/Brooklyn Roast price, both of which blow WF out of the water.

It has to do with volume. The reason why small batch producers that know what they are doing are so much better is because they are small batch. It is impossible to source enough identical beans to get the identical result, which is why larger operations generate at best very decent but not anywhere close to excellent roasts. They know that they are inferior to small batch producers so they price themselves accordingly. WF is a large producer that prices itself at the level of small batch where its roasts are sharing the category with Dunkin and Trader Joes.

Coffee is like wine. If you need to produce a lot, you may get a boat loads of Merlot and blend it together producing a quite drinkable wine but you will lose to a bottle of St Emillion as yours would be too washed out.

> Coffee roasting is a skill, skill WF employees do not have and are unlikely to have in future

...

Well then

I agree as far as taste goes, but if it reduces food waste, then I think it's a good tradeoff.

Aroma doesn't show up on a balance sheet, but I'm sure people enjoyed it.

Reminds me of 'The Elves are leaving Middle Earth':

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Over the last couple of years I’ve been shopping at Whole Foods less as the quality of their produce has gone downhill. As one who cooks almost every night I like to personally select the produce I’ll be using. Delivery drivers on a tight timeline will never be able to meet the expectations of others like myself. I simply don’t see driving to the store as a problem, I see it as an enjoyable experience(and I have small kids). All of the free delivery in the world won’t keep me from driving to my local organic Co-op to choose the best vegetables, fruit and cuts of meat.

Point being that Amazon’s impact on the grocery business will likely be far short of transformational.

There's plenty of room to be transformational short of your extremely niche use-case.

“People who don’t mind going to the store” is not “extremely niche”.

I'd say they're in the same league as people who say they love flying on airplanes. Once the novelty wears off it's a pretty joyless, tiring experience.

So your experience is the correct one, and others just haven't gotten it yet?

I believe that's what everyone in this thread is saying.

Perhaps the better filter for those is “people who dont’t mind NOT going to the store”

Besides, somebody should eat the less pretty produce rather than having it go to waste.

"People who don't mind milking their own cow" is not "extremely niche."

TIL enjoying the process of selecting and cooking your own food is "extremely niche"

How does your personal opinion mean that Amazon is going to fail at this? Most people I know are loathed to grocery shop, and many are loathed to cook.

Add in all the people with no car, disabilities, multiple jobs, odd working hours, etc. etc.

I've shopped exclusively through Prime Now from Sprouts (similar to Whole Foods) for groceries for the past 7 months, and while I have had times of disappointment at the produce I get (green bananas vs yellow), it's improved my life in maybe not a huge way, but at least noticeably. My wife and I would always end up arguing at the store. I like to shop, browse and take my time, and I always seemed to buy things I shouldn't. Now I can take my time away from the store, I see what I'm buying and how much it will be, and have more (even if a little bit) free time that I'm not at the store. I like it a lot.

Hi! My new autonomous vehicle startup may be for you. Our fleet of temperature controlled vans bring the farmers market to you. When the van arrives our simple Take-What-You-Need system lets you choose and walk away, debiting your account for only the produce you select. If you're interested please let me know at thisisajoke@hahaha.com

The only grocery delivery available in my area is walmart, and this is basically why I haven't tried it - I'm picky about produce quality, expiration dates, etc., and I don't trust someone else to have that same attention to detail.

Would you find it surprising to know that you aren't the only type of consumer and, in fact, you are probably a serious minority?

The market doesn't just go with your opinion, man.

Amazon Prime Now... Is that the thing where delivery is "free" but where we are supposed to "tip" the driver ?

Yeah, I had the same feeling when we used it once. It isn't clear what the tip should be for, if they're just delivering something and delivery is covered. I did notice that the Amazon Prime Now delivery person walked up all the steps (25) to my front door and put it right there. Regular Amazon deliveries are always left in the driveway or partway up the stairs. I could see giving some tip for this added effort, and the convenience for the customer. But that's just my experience—for customers who get the same service/convenience from both types of delivery, this reasoning wouldn't apply.

I've ordered from Prime Now about 3 to 4 times per week for the past 7 months. It's incredibly helpful for me. Mostly because I don't have a car and prefer to shop from Sprouts (which is similar to Whole Foods) and I'm able to do so with Prime Now. I usually leave a tip to the delivery person because they carry all my heavy groceries up to my apartment, and they've told me it helps them a lot (which is unfortunate in that way, that I'm subsidizing their wage). I literally depend on Prime Now.

Your situation is ok, because you want to tip. I don't think it is ok to automatically fill out the tipping field.

Then seek out an equivalent service that pays their delivery folks more and doesn't require a tip. We have those here in Boston; Peapod's delivery drivers can be tipped and they've said that it's a major part of their income but Roche Bros.'s drivers have literally laughed and said "we don't accept tips, we actually get paid." (I had a $10 in hand--he turned it down. Peapod has a big huge field on the invoice and charges it to the card. Skinflints.)

Or accept that, yes, obligatory tipping is part of the culture, and while you may not like it (I sure don't) it is incumbent upon us to do right by the people whose services we are buying.

It's not immoral to not tip.

It's immoral not to treat people who are performing services for you fairly and well. If that means tipping, because their employer--who you chose to do business with--doesn't pay them a livable wage, then guess what? You tip. If, at the same time and in no way exclusive to the former, you would like to campaign for better worker rights and wage floors that make tipping unnecessary (or, hell, even illegal), then I will join you in that.

You might not like tipping. (Again: I don't.) The person you're rationalizing the stiffing of probably doesn't like having to work for tips. Capitalism kinda sucks and the person-to-person patching is something that more fortunate folks just plain get to do. Sorry.

So then what's worse--not using the service because you don't want to tip, or using the service and not tipping?

That becomes a tough one, doesn't it? I'd say that the use of it without tipping incurs a moral burden, as you're giving the employer money and not making it right with the person who (as is true of anyone in a tipped job) depends on you upholding your part of the social contract.

You aren't saving the world by tipping--but you're not making it a worse place, and that's not nothing. Similarly, by not using a service that does its employees dirty without making it right, you are pressuring them--if, admittedly, mildly--towards decent behavior. That assumes that you make it very clear why you're doing it, and you totally should, because communication is part of ethical consumerism. (For similar reasons, when Amazon, Uber, etc. recruiters reach out to me, I underline the way they treat their workforce as a major reason as to my disinterest. It's a data point, and only one, but it's what I can do.)

You are actually making the world a worse place too by tipping - not promoting a service with transparency and acceptable terms for all parties involved. This is a second order effect but much more important than first order. (Unless you presume workers cannot reasonably switch companies which means that everyone is already screwed and serious antimonopoly steps should be taken.)

If you were not informed, then there is no moral weight for not tipping either.

I find strange how you call him immoral for not tip while is the employer who do not pay them a liveable wage.

I don't know how to put it nicer than this: do you think that was not implied?

They are both immoral.

In a situation with 3 parties, there can be any number of immoral people from 0 to about 9 billion, so I don't know why you immediately assume that because the commenter is immoral that doesn't mean the company isn't also behaving immorally.

Specifically, the company is providing a service which depends on charity of the people receiving it to continue. Remember that charity is supposed to be voluntary. This fact is not documented anywhere. "Customary" is code word for non transparent and exploitative.

If the company wants to incentive good quality of service, they can do so explicitly with direct ratings instead of some unclear way of tips.

>It's immoral not to treat people who are performing services for you fairly and well. If that means tipping, because their employer--who you chose to do business with--doesn't pay them a livable wage,

It’s immoral to shop somewhere that doesn’t pay proper wages. Employees should not be dependent on your charity because a company decides to save on its tax and wage bill.

Don’t reward companies that do this. Don’t promote a race to the bottom.

Exactly. Otherwise you could make the same argument about everything - "it's not immoral to buy clothes produced by children in a sweatshop in vietnam, because those children rely on a source of income to survive!". It's exactly the same as saying that tipping is not immoral because service people depend on it.

I would think that an adult in the first world with a car has a lot more autonomy than a child in Vietnam though.

Or warn people that Amazon is adopting this poor practice, in a public, visible way, in order to put pressure on them to change?

You're not subsidizing their wage compared to paying higher prices for the service. You're helping them avoid paying taxes.

The purpose of the tip is to shift responsibility for fair wages from the employer to the customer.

Amazon leans on a custom that makes you feel guilty for not paying more than they quoted you.

It also hides some of the price until the end, which is an effective dark pattern.

Exactly my thinking. Couldn't put it better.

Just don't tip. Never ever tip with Amazon Prime. Don't tip with Uber either. Tiping using those systems is just allowing those companies to pay shit wages to their employees. When you go to checkout with amazon prime just change the tip to zero.

I used to use Instacart, but it was a hassle to manage the people doing the shopping. They would get bad produce. They would mistake zucchini for cucumber. They would make nonsensical replacements. Constant screw-ups. Sure if you're buying toilet paper or some other generic commodity then it's fine, but you can already do that with Amazon.

At the height of the Instacart craze in my city, I was at a grocery store (as a customer) when an instacart shopper walked up holding bok choy and frantically asked “Is this collard greens??”

I believe a robo-picker would not mistake the clearly coded cucumber for zucchini, nor would the well-trained AI allow non-ideal produce into the sorting bins. No need to worry.

A robo picker would pick up a cucumber and not notice it's rotten on one side though, unless we assume that the robots will scan the entire item and somehow figure out what is good and what is not using AI - but I think that would prove to be an extremely difficult problem and ultimately not worth the effort.

I believe it would though. It's already happening higher up the supply chain where conveyor belts of produce are graded using computer vision (and other techniques, I'm sure).

This is about moving these techniques further down the chain. A robot picker arm with a few cameras attached that can tell whether something is rotten is well within our grasp. (Awful pun intended!)

I was trying out Instacart a few days ago and thinking whether I should purchase their Express program. This is what I realized:

- You pay them $150 a year. - On every order, they add a 10% service fee that helps them keep the service running. This is optional, but you have to remove it every time. - The delivery guy expects his tip.

I am wondering if this is cost-effective this way or not.

I haven't used them in ages so I didn't believe this. It seemed too ludicrous. I logged in to check and actually laughed out loud when I saw it. How much trouble must this company be in?

We just tried Instacart on a free trial; the only substitution was very reasonable and all produce was excellent. It will be interesting to see if that experience was anomalous.

This is one place the UK seems to be massively ahead - all the major supermarkets here offer delivery, and it's nearly flawless in my experience.

WF 2 hour delivery makes InstaCart toast not just because it will be a 2 hour delivery, but because pickers will be WF employees who are trained to know what is what and because one would not be ripped off via Instacart markups.

The next blow will be to BlueApron/Plated/HelloFresh/etc of the world when WF starts doing meal kits in 2 hours.

Datapoint: Prime Now in Los Angeles has quite a few Whole Foods branded products already (just got some coconut milk this morning!), although it's not part of this launch.

Prime Now is really a fantastic service, but it seems like not many people really know about it; Amazon seems to never promote it on their site.

If Amazon buys IKEA, my life will be complete.

I've tried Prime now a few times (Bay Area) and its frequently out of stock of really standard items (ex a 1/2 gallon of whole milk, non-organic) or you'll add some celery to your cart and then by the time you order its out of stock. Prices don't seem to be particularly great either. I can order from wholefoods via instacart and it might be cheaper depending on the items you get. Last time I went to order they didn't have enough drivers and had no delivery slots available, I had to wait a day and then schedule it again for the following day...

I've had stellar experience with it in Los Angeles... perhaps it's their flagship at the moment.

If Amazon bought IKEA, the prices would probably go up because IKEA is benefiting from its bullshit nonprofit status.

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and...

Yeah, I noticed that too. I order very frequently from Sprouts through Prime Now and am very grateful for it.

> when a dad says to the smart speaker on his counter, “Alexa, I need brown rice and pork,” the product that arrives is an Amazon-branded box containing Amazon–Whole Foods–branded rice and pork.

I question whether the author here has ever cooked a meal, much less shopped for ingredients. There's no way this style of interaction can produce the desired result here.

The system could conceivably learn what a particular user means by "pork" (which cut, how much) and "brown rice" on the first iteration, and then default to that next time if no further specification is given.

This is surprisingly subtle as a user interaction. Imagine the first time the user asks for "pork", Alexa asks follow up questions - "what cut", "how much", etc. There is a whole taxonomy!

The next time, the user has learnt the flow and starts walking down the taxonomy path for pork by asking for "pork"- or so the user thinks! Alexa just immediately dispatches the same cut the user bought three weeks ago. User never trusts Alexa again.

> Alexa just immediately dispatches the same cut the user bought three weeks ago. User never trusts Alexa again.

Obviously Alexa wouldn't just order it right away. It could easily say:

> Alexa: "Would like like to order the same x cut from last time?"

[Yes/No]

> Alexa: "Okay great, the total will be x and the delivery estimate is 1hr, shall I submit this order?"

[Yes/No]

> Alexa: "The order has been submitted, I'll notify you when it's marked as out for delivery"

> "Would like like to order the same x cut from last time?"

No, I think I want the one from 3 times ago? Or was it 4?

replace 'x' with the name of the cut.

I can't speak for other people, but I can see this being a bad feature for me.

It'd be great for chicken where I usually get the same thing (~5lbs chicken thighs). For beef though it'd be an absolute nightmare. I vary between flank, eye of round, ribeye, rib roast (which granted is basically a really big ribeye) and chuck in different amounts depending on what I feel like cooking.

I also know myself well enough to know I'm going to have a forgetful moment in the kitchen, order "beef" when I'm focusing on something else, and accidentally end up with 5 lbs of flank when I wanted 1 lb of ribeye.

The notion that one can generally shop, let alone shop for groceries, via a voice interface is puzzling.

I'm ok with other family members adding things to a wishlist (called "shopping list" in the Alexa system), although I often have to ask for clarification -- when you said "white chocolate", did you know we already have some? oh, you want another type? which one specifically?

I generally find that 'eggs' and 'milk' might be on my shopping list 4 or 5 times by the time I actually go shopping, and 'onions' will somehow remain on the list until I have accumulated at least five pounds.

Just this week I asked Siri to remind me to water the plants when I got home from work–that night as I walked up my block my phone lit up with the message “What are the planets?”. Existential ponderings aside, I’m almost tempted to start ordering grocery delivery by voice just to see what kind of hilarious misunderstandings arise.

Maybe it was unrelated and your phone just achieved sentience.

My cat has been trying to vocalize what sounds like: "Alexa, please ship Walter to the Kat Fud factory."

Should I be concerned?

Steve Martin's "Cat Handcuffs" routine nailed this concept 40? years ago.

Actually, in this brave new world the home AI system - Alexa - asks the dad what dinner is going to be this evening. The dad says that he fancies risotto with some herb tasting sausages and maybe some side salad. Alexa does not magically do the cooking but will establish that ingredients will be needed. The contents of the fridge and general provision levels will be known, plus an existing house way of doing things, e.g. mixing brown rice in with the risotto rice and hand making the sausages from whatever pork is available.

Alexa will also be able to know what you like from what stays and what goes out to recycling. So that tin of prunes in the cupboard won't become a dozen tins for programming error reasons.

It will be a bit like living with someone that stays at home all day and has time to go out and do the shopping, you might do all the cooking as part of the relationship with a fair expectation that everything needed for agreed meal plans is purchased.

Alexa could also know how to optimise inventory, so if it makes sense to buy a 25 Kg bag of brown rice due to so much of it being eaten by such a large family with such a large house that have been customers at that address for such a long time, then so be it.

If the home cupboards and fridge are a 'cache' in this food network then the AI would also know of favourites and have things on hand. So there may be a variable selection of ice creams that could be on hand if the main course needed a dessert without one being specially requested. Favourite main meals could also be 'cached', this could be learned to suit the lifestyle, so if you do have a dozen people needing feeding at ad-hoc dinner parties or if you actually never have friends visit, the AI should get it.

> Alexa does not magically do the cooking

I've got news for you... http://www.moley.com/

And Alexa will happily sell every detail of your household consumption for the rest of you and your children's lives.

Nope, for the same reason Google doesn't. The data is worth more to Amazon if they keep it to themselves.

I live in the Virginia Beach metro, which alongside Austin, Dallas, and Cincinnati, is one of the four test locations announced for their new Whole Foods Prime delivery service. My theory is that the Virginia Beach location was chosen as their "stress test", as it's the one where this service is most likely to fail. If it can work there, it can probably work anywhere.

The metro has some positive attributes: high proportion and large number of military families who are mostly concentrated in the suburbs. But it also has many complicating factors:

- A difficult metro for logistics. It's essentially a routing cul-de-sac: not enough local demand to serve as a large distribution node, and it's ~100 miles from the Richmond metro that's typically used for this instead. Getting product in by rail is easier, but difficult to do just-in-time, and most rail freight traffic flows the other way: out.

- Low growth. Incomes in the metro grew slower than the US average [1]. Employment growth has been well below US average [2]. The region isn't quite stagnant, but recovery after the recession has been markedly slower than Northern Virginia, Raleigh-Durham, or the region's arch-rival Richmond. Most population growth that is occurring [3] in Virginia Beach's vicinity is in suburban areas beyond the single Whole Foods' delivery range [4].

- Grocery saturation. In the past year, German-style chains Aldi and Lidl have expanded, Publix has been rumored to be eyeing the area, and Wegmans has been confirmed to be coming [5]. This is in addition to local incumbents owned by Supervalu, Kroger, and Ahold Delhaize. Local press and commentators have been noting that the area seems to now be overprovisioned with grocery stores [6].

Meanwhile, Cincinnati is close to major trucking corridors and is adjacent to Amazon's old freight hub in Ohio and its new one at Cincinnati's Kentucky airport. Dallas and Austin are both major markets with high levels of growth.

[1] https://www.bea.gov/regional/bearfacts/pdf.cfm?fips=47260&ar... [2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/news-release/areaem... [3] https://pilotonline.com/news/local/article_8e17f21e-2180-5c1... [4] https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_db7fe221-4... [5] https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_610b32b7-6... [6] https://pilotonline.com/business/consumer/article_8b636301-f...

Austin is also the home of Whole Foods HQ. The HQ store downtown has often been their pilot site.

I've been living in Austin for the past two years, and shopping mostly at the Whole Foods world headquarters. I'm not sure what the big deal is about this place - overpriced for the quality, service is ho-hum, prepared foods are nothing special, etc.

Wegmans absolutely crushes it.

there is a wegmans in austin? So jealous.

Also there is a wegmans musical: http://www.telegram.com/article/20120502/TOWNNEWS/120509938/...

There certainly isn't a Wegmans in Austin that I know of. I don't think there is one within 1000 miles.

But you have Rudy's. Don't get greedy. ;)

Ten years ago the quality difference between Whole Foods and a Kroger/mid-tier-chain was something akin to the contrast between a US grocery store and a Soviet grocery store in the 1980’s. The big chains have closed the gap.

Would anybody who has shopped both Wegmans and California's Nugget chain care to contrast them?

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