Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

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Where real estate is expensive the only grocery stores that can stay afloat are fat margin chains that cater to upscale customers. The poor people are then forced to shop at CVS or wherever, sure it's more expensive than Walmart or a proper grocery store but it's still cheaper than whole paycheck.

WF (or Trader Joes for that matter) simply doesn't sell value priced versions of a lot of items. CVS will sell it at a ripoff. It probably comes out close to a wash put poor people are poor, not stupid. If the numbers worked out in favor of WF they would be shopping there. Also, nobody(TM) does their entire shopping at CVS. People will drag their asses elsewhere on a regular basis to buy certain items that are cheap. Many convenience stores, bodegas, etc. will sell a couple staples or classes of items dirt cheap in order to attract business. You buy your regular items where they are cheap (e.g. $1.50/gal brand name milk from the bodega that buys about to expire milk from a restaurant supplier for pennies and passes on the savings to create foot traffic) and buy everything else at CVS.

This is a massive misconception and nicely illustrates how much people are influenced by branding and merchandising. Whole foods 365 brand is actually cheaper than many grocery store generics. The data is available online if you want to explore this further.

Assuming this is true: If you visit WF, your entire shopping needs won’t be met by the available 365-branded foods, which means you’ll either have to shop at multiple stores (extremely difficult if you are poor) or buy the remaining products at severely marked up prices, negating any savings the 365-brands products might have offered. In particular, produce, meats and other fresh products are absurdly marked up in WF.

can you give some examples of products you can't find at WF? I only ask because WF is the closest grocery to me and I don't have a problem getting everything I need. Granted, fresh fruit and vegetables don't have the 365 brand, but I'm assuming you don't mean that? I think the 365 brand is more about staples like milk, eggs, juice? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though, I'm sure I'm biased.

The only things that come to mind are some household items. Grease cleaners, motor oil, actual OTC drugs (cough, aspirin, etc.), actual full size brooms, pest control and few other things.

Those items really don't seem like grocery items to me, I think you might be confusing grocery and supermarket?

In my experience, every time I've been to Whole Foods they don't have basic produce, condiments and sauces, etc that I would expect to have at a normal grocery store. Common vegetables are just missing from the store for no apparent reason. And their selection of anything Asian is awful, much worse than even Safeway. It might be a regional thing (I live in a city) but where I live Whole Foods is expensive, bizzarely limited in selection, and caters to a very specific lifestyle and diet - I get the impression it caters to people for whom cooking for themselves is a special occasion and not a daily thing.

Which common vegetables? Can you be specific? At my local WF, not only do I feel their vegetable section to be complete, but the quality is much higher than other regional/national chains.

>I get the impression it caters to people for whom cooking for themselves is a special occasion and not a daily thing.

I'm really confused, you think WF caters to people who don't cook for themselves, but you feel like it's missing condiments and sauces? That's weird, people who cook for themselves probably aren't looking to smother their food with ketchup.

> extremely difficult if you’re poor

I mean, I live in an area where there’s a Whole Foods within two blocks’ walking distance of two other grocery stores (one mid-market, one down-market.)

I think this isn’t actually that uncommon; people don’t see Whole Foods as actually satisfying the demand for “a grocery store” in an area (as it doesn’t carry many of the things people expect a larger grocery store to carry—it may have decent produce, deli, bakery, etc. sections, but its grocery section is rather lacking in anything other than up-market “bougie” brands) so if there’s an existing other grocery store, and then a Whole Foods also gets built, that doesn’t much decrease the traffic to the other grocery store to the point that it would close down.

The only problem is property developers marketing a new neighbourhood that only has a Whole Foods as being “close to a grocery store”, and people believing them and moving there. That Whole Foods was probably already there before the neighbourhood was, serving as an outlet to travel to for the larger region that that the new neighbourhood is located in; but the other parts of the region were being served by grocery stores located closer to them, and this new neighbourhood actually doesn’t have one of those.

> but its grocery section is rather lacking

What do you regard as the grocery section?

I go to the grocery store weekly and all I buy, pretty much, are bread, dairy, and produce.

Do you mean stuff like breakfast cereal and peanut butter?

Is the 365-brand selection smaller than what you get at CVS, though?

No. Not even close.

https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/about-our-products/product-...

> your entire shopping needs won’t be met by the available 365-branded foods

Absolutely false. That is the entire stated purpose of the 365 brand. What 365 does not cover is produce and meat. Meat is definitely more expensive at Whole Foods as they do not use it as a loss leader like other stores. I also sometimes wonder if one of the founders being vegan had something to do with that. Produce at WF is definitely about merchandising. The lower priced produced is very well hidden.

> shop at multiple stores (extremely difficult if you are poor)

Poor people don't have legs? I was poor for most of my life. I rode a bicycle to the grocery store. And the 365 brand stuff is mostly non-perishables. You can shop for non-perishables every couple of weeks.

Admit it. You just do not like the brand and identity the Whole Foods represents. It has nothing to do with the actual products or prices.

"Just walk/bike to multiple stores if you're poor, lol!"

No. In so many ways, no. If the trade off is to save a few dollars by running around for multiple hours per week to go to multiple stores (uses gas! or takes a long time!), or just going to the nearest cheap store to get everything they need, they're going to Walmart.

It has nothing to do with brand and identity and everything to do with not wasting precious time and money.

We call WF "whole paycheck", it's a store for rich people who have too much money. I save over half of my grocery bill shopping elsewhere.

In general, their produce is much better, especially with things like berries.

Better than what? In my area within just a few miles I can get to 5 different produce markets that offer world-class quality produce at rock bottom pricing. Organic or not, anything you want to eat.

Chain grocery stories like Safeway...

So, I used to work for whole foods in school. Management made a big deal about how if you used you employee discount and bought 365 brand stuff it was almost the same cost as shopping brand name at giant. As I recall about 5$ a month more. Admittedly this was 20 years ago but it still seems true when I go to whole foods once a year or so.

This seemed like an extraordinary claim to me, so I tracked down an analysis by Consumer Checkbook for the Boston area. The basket of goods they examined cost over 20% more at Whole Foods than at e.g. Stop and Shop, and over 50% more than at Market Basket.

https://www.checkbook.org/boston-area/supermarkets/articles/...

For the chains I am familiar with those results line up exactly with my preexisting impression of those stores as far as cost goes.

Walmart has staples dirt cheap but a much more limited selection. Market Basket has "proper grocery store selection" and can match Walmart in prices except for the things that really lend themselves to discounts for buying in bulk (like those big boxes of eggs) which they simply don't sell. Hannaford and Price Chopper make up the part of the curve leading to the mid range which is occupied by Stop and Shop, Shaws/Star, etc. and then at the top of the price distribution is all the stores I try to avoid at all costs.

They mention large variation of prices between stores of the same chain. I strongly suspect that this correlates with how wealthy the community the store is located in is (which leads to increased cost to run the store). Where I live Aldi is the high priced upscale store. Where my parents live Stop and Shop is the high priced upscale store and Shaws/Star Market is generally cheaper.

The fact that Walmart ranked poorly does not surprise me. There are no good Walmarts in the Boston area. Walmart doesn't throw a lot of grocery effort into stores with lots of local competition. The one near me is really good. The one in Quincy is laughably bad. Tewksbury is good but I'm not sure if they consider that "the Boston area".

CVS is not cheaper than WF on staple items.

Not really true. Poor people shop at places like Aldi's and other discount grocers.

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