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Comment by s3r3nity | Hacker News Reader

My concern with this is that this will only accelerate the probability that Amazon Go merges with Whole Foods to have a cashier-free experience.

>Shoppers, however, have saved millions as a result of the shake-up.

This is why you're going to have a tough time getting sympathy from the public, and why I think (for better or worse) Amazon will win the PR battle. The average person now has access to healthier grocery / purchasing options as Whole Foods pricing has come down. If prices go up, they'll just switch to Walmart or some other cheaper option - leading to WF losses, and even more layoffs.

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In Texas, anyway (where WF started), other grocery chains have been passing them by. A big part of why WF sold to Amazon is that they are getting squeezed between co-ops and chains like HEB's "Central Market" stores, which have lots of organic produce at better prices and with better public image. Trader Joe's is another chain that has been encroaching on their space. I think WF was pushing the envelope on healthier and/or more socially responsible produce and other foodstuffs 20 years ago, but that ship has long since sailed. Amazon got them past their "best by" date.

As a small side note, Central Market is also pushing into the online shopping model and using open source software to do it. A friend here in Dallas worked on their WooCommerce integration.

WooCommerce vs the largest e-commerce platform in the world? I've been to the Amazon Go store and took a close look at the camera arrays, these toy retailers are whistling past the graveyard.

Perhaps, but a decade ago people said that HEB/Central Market were doomed because WalMart was moving into groceries, and at that time WalMart was considered the unstoppable retail behemoth. If I were placing bets on who will do better in groceries ecommerce, I would bet on the company that has its entire focus on that, especially when they have a history of beating back big competitors who come from other retail sectors.

Sprouts is squeezing Whole Foods in the west.

> The average person now has access to healthier grocery / purchasing options

Because every other grocery store is selling poison? The average person doesn't even have a WF near them to shop at.

Your comment made me search for the nearest one. According to Google Maps, the nearest Whole Foods Market is over 10 hours away. I guess I'll shop Half Foods Market like I always do.

>10 hours away

Time isn't a very good measure of distance

Unless you live in Japan, because they all walk the same speed.

Seriously, ask how far something is in Tokyo and see the response is in time

I find it amusing that technically, time is the best and only measure of distance, since the meter is defined as the distance traveled by light in 1/299792458 of a second.

i mean, if you're talking about how convenient is to shop there it kind of is? Doesn't matter if I'm technically close to a place if I gotta take a long detour to actually arrive.

I guess if you live somewhere where everyone has a car it makes more sense. I forgot I was on an American website for a moment.

In Utah, because everything is pretty much off the I-15, we often measure distance in time, too, as that the speed limit is ~75 most of the way.

It's the best measure of distance in determining how far away a destination is.

Let's say you ask me where a store is, and I tell you it's only 500m away. "Great!", you think, "That's an easy walk!" No, it's not, because it's on the other side of a river, and there isn't a crossing particularly close. You'd much rather go to the store that's 1000m away because it's not across a river.

Now you're probably going to say, OK, so let's restrict it to actually allowable paths ... but again, something a few kilometers away that doesn't have good road connections (and the ones that do are full of traffic) is actually much farther away in every way that matters than something that's 10km away but is a straight shot on an empty highway. Urban environments are complicated, and distance doesn't tell you as much as travel time does.

I normally just say "it's a twenty minute walk" or "it's a five minute drive"

> The average person now has access to healthier grocery / purchasing options

WF's food is not any healthier than the food you find in other stores.

There are no added hormones in WF meat. There are no hydrogenated oils in any of their products.

There are no phthalates in any of their beauty/wash products.

Obviously you can define health however yo want, and you can scan the shelves of other stores for these same things. Maybe you can find a couple phthalate-free shampoos in Target, read a bunch of articles and memorize the good brands and hope they don't change. Or you could shop at WF.

No added hormones is normal in most countries, but apparently in the USA you need to go out of your way to not do that.

The US also has radically cheaper groceries than virtually any other developed country.

Partly this is due to lower transport costs.

Nonsense. A quick Google search[0] shows that the following countries all have cheaper groceries than the US: Spain, Germany, Netherlands.

[0] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Cost-of-livin...

When I think of a national brand in the US that everyone would assume the worst of, that is available at ordinary non-WF supermarkets, I think of Tyson, and yet their chicken is prominently labeled "no antibiotics ever" and "no added hormones or steroids".

I think this may be a case of "gluten free sugar".

Added hormones in chicken are illegal in the USA

(and as far as I know only chicken)

I remember a great quote from a WF shopper talking about their prices. They said how great it was to see lower prices on the produce, meats, etc. but that if you ever found her shopping the health & beauty section it meant she won the lottery.

Got a good chuckle out of that because I’ve also never dared shop those aisles at WF either!

Or EarthFare, or Sprouts, or Trader Joes, or a bunch of other grocery stores that do what WF does. Whole Foods is just an expensive grocery store to me these days. It's uniqueness of being an "organic grocery store" has long faded.

Trader Joe's doesn't sell exclusively organic. With their product placement they do an admirable job of putting organic and standard products next to each other and letting the customer decide between the two based on price, without a lot of deception based on item count or weight or whatever.

I disagree. in my experiences (anecdotal, I know), WF was a lot earlier to larger varieties of organic produce and organic products. It is true that many stores have caught up, but WF still has a larger selection of organic/fair trade certified/high quality meats than most other stores. Their animal welfare rating system alone is pretty pioneering (if it is to be believed). They have also partnered with more local growers and farmers than most other national chains.

Organic does not mean healthier.

organic celery is healthier than regular celery. So in some cases yes.

Amazon will do that the minute the math works out anyway. Encouraging workers to put up with worse and worse conditions out of fear of automation is just a race to the bottom that inevitably ends with automation anyway.

This is exactly it. Fast food companies have spent the past decade trying to scare everyone to death whenever the thought of raising the minimum wage comes up. We'll be forced to build self-checkout lanes and self-serve order kiosks if you raise it! You don't want that, do you?

The scare tactics worked in much of the country; the federal minimum wage hasn't budged since 2009 and most states are at the same level. What did we get in exchange for that act of kindness towards the service sector? More self-checkout lanes and kiosks.

Fast food chains are actually building automation. A lot of McDonalds have self ordering kiosks. Startups are working on automated cooking. Pretty soon fast food locations will have no workers.

> Amazon will win the PR battle

Which is how corporations win the war. Know why you couldn't afford whole foods before? Because too many people are selfish and shortsighted and would rather save 1 dollar than ensure anyone else makes an extra 2 bucks an hour. Corporations, lobbyists, and government policy have been decimating unions for decades and the results are very apparent when you look at any graph of actual wages. Executives skyrocket, workers are flat at best.

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