I get the impression from long-time Whole Foods shoppers that the quality of the store has definitely gone down since the acquisition. There's a new one not too terribly far from where I live so we decided to check it out and came away deeply unimpressed.
- Maybe 7 different kinds of fruit and vegetables. And I'm stretching this. Most in two varieties, organic and not. There was virtually no selection of fresh produce and what was there wasn't highly impressive in its freshness. The homeopathy section of the store was larger and better stocked.
- All of the meats were vacuum sealed and prepackaged. No fresh fish or butcher. And I don't mean "butchered in the shop and plastic wrapped". I mean packaged at like a factory god knows where. Some of the meat was past the sell-by date.
- An extraordinarily large section of milk and milk-alike products. I remember years ago (the last time I shopped at a WF) there being different kinds of milk from different mammals (goat, etc.), but not like 4 different kinds of cow milk and then a dozen different varieties of vegetable-based "milks".
- The hot food bar was flavorless and in some cases bad...also very expensive.
- A quarter of the store was turned over to some kind of bar.
- A definite feel from the employees of not wanting to be there.
I thought it might just be this store, so I went to another one near my work for lunch and the same problems. The organic wine selection is fantastic I guess.
Keep in mind that this store is not far from a couple Wegmans (absolutely fantastic top-tier grocers who's organic produce section alone is the size of the entire WF's produce section) and in the middle of a ring of large ethnic and South/East Asian grocery chains (read:they all have local fresh fish markets where you can get fresh fish filleted on demand right next to a giant wall of fresh butchered and wrapped meats and animal parts from an entire menagerie of fauna).
The local regular old grocery I can walk to was a better experience tbh. It felt very much like a very expensive Aldi in terms of selection and quality.
Understand, I am in no way defending amazon, i hope it all burns, but in the interest of fairness I must say that six months is too short a time to evaluate whether Amazon can run grocery stores well.
I worked in a piggly wiggly in Alabama during high school, and maybe three years later I was the produce manager, that whole side of the store was my responsibility.
20yo me was not ready for how much shit there is. Keep in mind, this is in alabama, not exactly an overregulated state, and definitely some of the regs were imposed by PW corporate. Anyways there were irrigation cleanings, audits, temperature sheets on the hour, display audits and secret shoppers, knowledge integrity audits where secret shoppers ask you about fruitveg factoids and you're supposed to know and love and worship that info, there's all the inventory sheets, fifo+backstock alleviation, backroom cleaning, etc. There's more I've forgotten probably.
My point being, there is a lot of variables in those stores. Some from the state, some from corp, and on top of all that the business itself is an organism. It changes and adapts with the seasons. I had a whole separate routine for stocking watermelons, I even rearranged the displays in the store per the PW rules. All sorts of shit like that takes time to learn and marinate in people's heads.
The grocery store that some ninety year old geezer has had open for fifty years will have a completely different logistics profile, because he got tired of dealing with the these problems forty years ago and fixed them. He has a tremendous advantage in that regard over a large corp doing groceries in unstable stores.
It's upsetting that even things like groceries are becoming millenialized. I shouldn't need a prime membership to get good groceries, the whole point of grocery stores is for them all to compete to get EVERYBODY good grocery prices.
It's too late for Amazon to put WF back. They will most likely find ways to make them little profit factories where oblivious young people shop there semireligiously, ignoring all the benefits of small biz groceries.
If the victim weren’t a giant, ruthless megacorp, I’d probably be outraged instead of amused.
The context here is that WF used to use their back rooms to hold excess inventory, but transitioned to a just in time delivery model. This had two primary effects:
For a few quarters, their numbers looked better than they should, since they were juiced by selling down a bunch of inventory that had been stranded in the supply chain.
The second effect hit after the acquisition: The JIT supply chain they setup was an unreliable disaster, so the availability of goods at the stores plummeted after the buffer of backroom stock was depleted.
I shop at Whole Foods every week in Santa Cruz and haven’t noticed anything you’re describing. We still have a good selection of fruit/vegetables and meat/bread/cheese sourced from local farms.
- Maybe 7 different kinds of fruit and vegetables. And I'm stretching this. Most in two varieties, organic and not. There was virtually no selection of fresh produce and what was there wasn't highly impressive in its freshness. The homeopathy section of the store was larger and better stocked.
- All of the meats were vacuum sealed and prepackaged. No fresh fish or butcher. And I don't mean "butchered in the shop and plastic wrapped". I mean packaged at like a factory god knows where. Some of the meat was past the sell-by date.
- An extraordinarily large section of milk and milk-alike products. I remember years ago (the last time I shopped at a WF) there being different kinds of milk from different mammals (goat, etc.), but not like 4 different kinds of cow milk and then a dozen different varieties of vegetable-based "milks".
- The hot food bar was flavorless and in some cases bad...also very expensive.
- A quarter of the store was turned over to some kind of bar.
- A definite feel from the employees of not wanting to be there.
I thought it might just be this store, so I went to another one near my work for lunch and the same problems. The organic wine selection is fantastic I guess.
Keep in mind that this store is not far from a couple Wegmans (absolutely fantastic top-tier grocers who's organic produce section alone is the size of the entire WF's produce section) and in the middle of a ring of large ethnic and South/East Asian grocery chains (read:they all have local fresh fish markets where you can get fresh fish filleted on demand right next to a giant wall of fresh butchered and wrapped meats and animal parts from an entire menagerie of fauna).
The local regular old grocery I can walk to was a better experience tbh. It felt very much like a very expensive Aldi in terms of selection and quality.