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Comment by kop316 | Hacker News Reader

Shopping at Whole Foods is a whole lot worse with Amazon owning it versus before. To get any of the deals, you have to link your purchase with an Amazon account. IIRC, they have a "blue" and "yellow" discount, where you can only get the "yellow" discount in addition if you are also a Prime member. The prices without either discount seemed exceed pre-Amazon Whole Foods.

The whole experience reeked of sucking up data about a person, and really made me never want to go back.

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The worst part about going through this process is to getting to checkout and realizing I only had 1 discounted item (out of 20) that saved me 30 cents.. The labor of connecting to in-store wifi and opening the app itself almost isn't worth the discount..

Agreed. And the rinky-dink QR scanners attached underneath the register display almost never pick up what I'm showing it. It's the most effort by far of any grocery rewards program I've ever used, for the least amount of discounts. I don't even bother with the Prime discounts anymore--if the cashier asks, I just say I'm not a member and not interested.

I do agree that it feels like some silly "gamification". Open the app and see what's on sale, then deal with the chaos of shoppers everywhere as you navigate the store looking for your list of items, as well as the impulse discounted items you just added.

Is it sucking up any more data than other grocery stores have been doing basically forever by requiring your membership card to get sale prices?

It was a lot easier to put in someone else's phone number than someone else's prime account.

Back in the day we used to hold "store card swapping parties" where you'd bring your store card, drop it in the pile, and then everyone randomly picks a new one. Do it about once a month.

Now of course the store cards are tied to apps that give you coupons on things you buy, so it's more in your interest not to mess with them.

Coupons were fun back in the day, if 20+ people were using the same store card phone number it was like winning the lottery: "You have a free sandwich!"

Much harder to do that with phone apps, alas.

I assumed they look at credit cards too, and swapping store cards wouldn't trick them unless you're paying cash. But maybe the number of people who do that is so small that stores haven't cared to catch it.

I don't necessarily think that is technically feasible. At least in the US, they have to be PCI compliant, and I think of that is they cannot store a credit card number. In addition, Chip and pin works differently than a credit card number, as the purchase is tokenized versus to an account number, making cross purchase correlation more difficult.

Merchants can store the account holder's name and the card's last 4 digits, which is pretty much all that is needed to correlate transactions.

This was back in college when we mostly paid cash.

That assumes you have to put in valid data for that. In that case, you are just "Customer #12345" versus a person they can correlate against.

If you have ever paid with a credit card, then the store likely knows exactly who “Customer #12345” is. Stores are tracking purchases this way whether there’s a loyalty account or not.

Discussion of this: https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/retailer-data-t...

So I just read through the article, it mentioned credit card companies knowing that, not the retail store.

I mentioned it in another comment, but the combination of PCI compliance and the use of chip+pin make it difficult for retailors to use credit cards to track an individual, but the credit card company can.

However, if the retailer then goes back and purchases the data from the credit card company, I agree, they will know who "Customer #12345" is with regards to the person.

I really haven't seen much difference. I'm the designated shopper in my family and I usually shop my local Whole Foods for a few items every week. Despite having my Prime bar code scanned from my phone, I have never once received a discount. The prices and quality are more or less unchanged.

I have noticed this too. The bar code scan is never useful, so in a way it's not actually intrusive - I've wound up never doing it.

The two things I really appreciated about Whole Foods were the faster checkouts and the fact that they didn't constantly bug you about a club card.

I don't really go out of my way to shop there any more...

where do you shop instead?

Sprouts

the quality of the food at the wholefoods in NYC has gone down since the purchase. sometimes i go to the one in Williamsburg and the entire produce section is cleaned out by like 5pm. the lines are longer now also. not sure how they fucked that up.

I contract at WF and AFAIK absolutely nothing has changed regarding inventory ordering. It's still the same people using the same systems.

I would not be surprised to find out that Amazon's interest in purchasing WF was to make it a platform for financial engineering on expirable products.

I think the sales are worse, too. I used to be able to scan the meat and produce sales, and create meals around those options. Today that's virtually impossible.

Recently Amazon realized how badly they fucked up cheese sales, and reverted back to the old system. Most people I know will only buy good cheese if it's >30% discounted. For a couple months, Amazon decided to scrap big sales in favor of 1-5% off ones. So far as I can tell, that test was a complete failure, and we're back to being able to have good cheese at good prices.

It's a far worse store. Lucky for Amazon, they have a few years before a competitor will emerge to bring back a legitimate luxury shopping experience back to my demographic. But Eataly or someone of that nature will shift their business model a little to fill the void eventually.

I really don't understand why anyone shops at Whole Foods. It's insanely overpriced compared to any other grocery store I've ever been in. The 3-4 times I've been there since the Amazon acquisition have resulted in $0 in savings. Nothing I have to buy is ever on sale or discounted via Prime.

I find Trader Joe's, New Seasons, and local coops to be much more affordable and better quality of varying degrees for each.

Whole Foods has more inertia than Trader Joe's, and also a much wider selection (TJ's tends to have a singular product for many items, where WF will have a selection). Don't know what New Seasons is. The local co-ops in my area are shit.

Not sure why anyone shops at Whole Foods in your area, but not every area is your area.

> TJ's tends to have a singular product for many items, where WF will have a selection

That's also a feature of TJ (and Costco, for that matter).

Very true. Not everyone's cup-of-tea though.

Are you sure about that? My local Trader Joe's has a half aisle of just chips, many flavors of frozen wontons, at least four different kinds of marinara sauce, 10+ kinds of salad dressing, bagels with every possible topping, and the list goes on. The selection seems pretty good to me.

Try going to a Walmart or big chain supermarket some time.

Depends a lot on what you purchase and where you live. For how my family eats, Whole Foods is regularly cheaper than the Ralph’s by about 10%, more now that we have the amazon card.

And for the privilege of providing Amazon with all that data about you in exchange for the best discount, you get to pay them $120/year.

And the store is packed full of people shopping for online delivery orders on their phone all the time.

is it really different from the data collection of other grocery store shopper cards though?

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