I think there has long been a resentment of them.

20 years ago I did some technical work for a natural foods broker. They knew the wholesale price for all sorts of organic and alternative foodstuffs. They were just astounded by Whole Foods markups as compared with other vendors. If I recall rightly, the Whole Foods marketing also rubbed them the wrong way; it had strong class-based elements, taking the natural foods industry from a "power to the people" feel to a "this is fancy and high class" feel.

In a business sense, they've clearly done well by it. They're at the intersection of rising inequality and rising concern over what we eat. But that limits them too; trying for "mass-market luxury" is a precarious position. You end up resented by the true luxury fans as cheapening something they care about. And other companies, ones not constrained by luxury, can go after the mass-market end of things. Plus they still have the essential contradiction between commercial exploitation and the natural do-goodery of the organic foods types.

So the hate seems pretty plausible to me. Their old shtick is working less well; the grocery market is really different 20 years on. They'll need to find a new shtick, but I don't think that will be an easy transition.

> Disruptive innovation, a term of art coined by Clayton Christensen, describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.

In my view, Whole Foods is losing out because while they stuck to Organic with a capital "O", they forgot about the rest of the things people want. Clearly everyone is different, but a regular grocery store has the luxury of catering to most of those ( low cost, wide variety, close by, _and_ organic). Whole Foods only can offer one of those (currently).

So companies like HEB, which have some very nice grocery stores, can easily shift their product mix to fit the neighborhood they serve. That's a huge advantage, and I don't know how WF can fight them and succeed.

This as opposed to Fresh Market, which was purely upmarket/upper class.

Thanks, that's basically the best expression of some of the things I've always felt about them without managing to put words on it. They basically have a classic strategy of Luxury, without selling high-end stuff like Harrods/Hediard, the tier they happen to be dominant on is something I would awkwardly label good and healthy. I've always found profoundly immoral the idea that access to this kind of food should be reserved to wealthy people, that it implies a certain cultural baggage, and that it can be used to signal social status.

In my neighborhood, I've realized that whole foods on Saturday morning as become a sort of meeting point for the local socialites, which are often perfect caricatures. It's fascinating to witness two acquaintances bump into each other, and almost directly perform a review of the content of their cart, it's almost like if their heilroom tomatoes had replaced their rolexes. Actually, it's funny because I realize I often do something not just remotely similar, when the guy in front of me has a huge cart entirely filled with stuff I know will be expensive: I cant help but to think "wow, he must be packed", then the unavoidable voyeurism related to damage assessment. If it ends up being a 4 digit number and the guy apple pays quickly with zero emotion on his face, it can be intense.

Your analysis of how the competition will exploit the weakness of their strange position is spot on.

I guess, Apple seems to do okay.

Laptops are a declining market, and they have circa 10% of it. Phones sales are only growing slowly, and they have a declining share of that market. iPad sales are dropping precipitously. iPods will eventually stop being a product at all. Competition is advancing; their once-innovative products now have pretty close matches, even as the price gap widens.

To maintain their position, I think they're going to need to find a new product category, one where they can leap out ahead as they did with all those other products. The watch was a fine accessory, but not a major category. They've never done particularly well in the TV space. There's no other immediately obvious market for them to jump into.

Can they do that? We'll see, but the last time they succeeded was with the tablet computer, and that was with Jobs at the helm. So I'd call their future... precarious.

I believe it is misleading though. The company's only goal is profit and this is very evident when you hear their libertarian CEO speak. He's a sociopath preying on the good will of middle class liberals. Combine that with the exploitation of cheap prison labour as a perfect example of the company's principles in execution and it just leaves a bad taste with those seasonal organic vegetables.

Edit: If you really want to get tasty, fresh, sustainable, local, and organic food then join or start a local food co-operative. This gets everyone a fair price for high quality products along with paying people fairly for their produce and work. It's also completely democratic so all practices are decided upon by the members and not just by some megalomanic CEO or greedy shareholders.

You can want to make as much profit as possible while ALSO doing the right thing ethically.

No. You've confused means with purpose.

A company with investors has to make enough profit to give the investors a fair return. And any company needs enough profit to reinvest in growth. But profit alone isn't a sustaining motivation. One entrepreneur I know sold his first company back in the 90s for >$100m. As he was working on his next venture, he said, "Profit isn't the point. Profit is permission to continue."

The purpose of a company is generally to create value for a given audience in particular ways, often ones that have a broader impact.

For example, the purpose of the New York Times is to inform readers about the things that matter to them and to the world. They do that because they see journalism as necessary to a healthy society, a healthy world.

If you approach the same audience and tools with a goal of pure profit, you end up with things like supermarket tabloids, viral clickbait, and Macedonian fake news farms. Those have a much higher ROI than real journalism; they're going to be much more profitable. By your theory, they're better companies. But they aren't.

Easy to say profit doesn't matter once you've cleared $100mm.

And since you missed it, let me be clear: he didn't say profit doesn't matter. He said profit wasn't the point. His previous business was quite profitable, but that's not why he did it.

To expand a bit, I see business success as balancing the needs of four groups, whose needs are naturally in tension:

(1) Employees, who want the best pay, work conditions, job satisfaction, etc. (2) Investors, who want the best financial return (3) Suppliers, who want to be paid on time and want repeat business (4) Customers, who want great products at the minimum price possible

I'm American. One thing I've noticed reading economic histories of the US, such as Reich's Supercapitalism, is how shareholder/profit-oriented US business became, around say, the late 1970s/early 1980s. This was the heyday of leveraged buyouts, and I can't help but think that, in terms of operating quality of US companies, there was indeed much trash to be taken out. Business was too cozy; customers and investors were getting a raw deal. You hear all these Mad Men-esque stories of sexual harassment, two-Martini lunches, expense accounts, and I can't help but think, man, the customers and investors must have gotten a pretty raw deal that employees could get away with that stuff (working so little, being distracted, wasting capital, making shoddy products).

I also think Japanese and German capitalism are more employee/manager-oriented than the US for various reasons.

In the end I think it depends on which group (of the four above) are culturally privileged. We hold investors in pretty high regard in the US vs. employees; it's very "capitalist". I have no idea whether it's right, but I think it's a useful insight. In the end I think it comes down to culture, and that US culture is pretty capitalist compared to say, France.

It didn't dawn on me that investors are only one constituency. For owner-operators, investors and managers are the same person, so of course, businesses would be operated (managed) for benefit of their investors; they're the same people.

But you're right, investors are only one group, you need to keep them happy, and that's done with profit. It's not a very important insight when investors = operators (most small businesses), but as the two groups diverge, such as when entrepreneurs use a lot of outside funding, I think "permission to continue" is a good way of looking at it.

If you give me two $10 bills in exchange for a single $20 bill, it's clear that the value of what you gave me was $20, but unless you are counterfeiting or laundering money, I presume your profit was $0.

Conversely, if you save the seeds from tomatoes, grow them in your yard, and sell me $20 of tomatoes, same $20 of value, and presumably close to $20 in profit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_stuffing

Everything is monetized, and profit drives everything, we are a capitalist society. A business will not operate on charity very long...

A company with investors has to make enough profit to give the investors their expected return that they were promised, within the bounds of the forward looking statements, etc., that the company put forth to receive the investment.

There's no "fair" anywhere in there - nor should there be.

"But profit alone isn't a sustaining motivation."

That's true for me and it might be true for you but it isn't true for everyone, nor should it be. We should expect that there are many people and organizations for whom profit alone is a sustaining motivation - and we should take steps that we are not fragile to such actors.

This is basically a moral claim. I think it's a sad sort of morality. That's irrelevant to that point, which is a practical one. Businesses generally have to give investors a return they feel is fair, or they stop getting investors. Investors are primates, and so have a sense of fairness. [1] The notion of a fair rate of return is also related to the market rate, and companies that fail to provide market-rate returns don't do well, no matter how precisely correct their forward-looking statements.

As to profit being a sustaining motivation, feel free to give examples, but I find your raw assertions unpersuasive. I believe that it's necessarily true for organization in the long run, in that profit-seeking is a short-term motivation, one that essentially conflicts with the long-term work needed for sustainable companies.

> we should take steps that we are not fragile to such actors.

Sure, but that's true whether or not their exploitative behavior is in some sense sustainable. Indeed, we need to be most careful of the unsustainable ones; they're the most dangerous.

[1] See, e.g., https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_mora...

Toyota, for example, is explicit about it. If you talk with employees at Apple, Intel, or Google, you can easily see that they're not just doing whatever random thing that is profitable; all three companies have a deep sense of purpose. They know their chosen audiences and are dedicated to creating value.

> Companies exist to derive profit for their investors, primarily by increasing the value of their common stock and by dividends.

There are several ways you could mean this, but I think all of them are wrong.

Companies exist societally because we have decided that we want to encourage certain sorts of positive-sum economic activity. If they didn't, we wouldn't allow them. What you write off as an externality is, systemically, the entire point.

Individual companies exist because one or more people have lined up around an idea and pursued it with great dedication. I have not met a single entrepreneur whose chosen purpose is "produce a good return for the LPs of some investment fund".

Those companies attract employees partly because they can make a living. But also because the company's audience and work are something they can get behind. Nobody lasts long doing a job where they hate the company's mission.

From the customer's perspective, the question of purpose is even clearer. It's to give them things they want in exchange for reasonable amounts of money.

In theory you might be right about the investor's sense of purpose: maybe they see companies as pure profit-making machines. But even there, the investors I've met don't act that way. They get really excited about who a company's audience is and how they are choosing to serve them.

And I'm hardly alone in disagreeing with the "maximize shareholder value" school of thought. If you care to search for "world's dumbest idea" you'll find plenty of discussion slamming it. Including from business luminaries like Jack Welch and Mark Benioff: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/02/05/salesfor...

Entertainingly, even the Whole Foods CEO disagrees with your theory. He wrote: "But we have not achieved our tremendous increase in shareholder value by making shareholder value the primary purpose of our business. [...] the most successful businesses put the customer first, ahead of the investors. In the profit-centered business, customer happiness is merely a means to an end: maximizing profits. In the customer-centered business, customer happiness is an end in itself, and will be pursued with greater interest, passion, and empathy than the profit-centered business is capable of."

There are plenty examples where companies will profit even though they are "going too far." Just think of all the profit made from war while the majority of people disagree with the war.

Your ethics of "doing the right thing" while making as much profit as possible are also subjective if you consider the definition of profit that I proposed above. I know I'm saying all this in a forum based around startups but I think it's worth pointing out.

That is a perspective, yes. It's also ridiculous zero-sum thinking contradicted by both theory and reality. The iPhone has resulted in hundreds of millions of happy customers, and tens of thousands of high paying jobs. But apparently all of those people are "exploited" because Apple makes a profit.

Sure, it probably would have been unlikely but this is because non-profits are usually less thrilled about hiring de-facto slave labour in China or elsewhere on the supply chain in order to produce an iPhone at a price where large profits can be made.

No one cares if Whole Foods makes piles of cash. Just don't pee on my leg and tell me its raining.

Hypocrisy isn't great, but practically everyone has been guilty of it in one way or another. So it's an easy charge to make that gets everyone worked up.

I don't know if we should tolerate hypocrisy, but I'd be in favor of talking about it less in favor of more direct and productive arguments.

Don't tolerate hypocrisy for hypocrisy's sake, but recognize when it's pragmatic to tolerate it to either move things in the correct direction or simply to limit how far they slide in the wrong direction.

My preferred concrete example, simply because of how staggeringly effective tolerating hypocrisy was at getting a resoundingly unpopular law to become the law of the land is American Prohibition. During the lead-up to prohibition in the United States one of the most successful lobbyists was a man named Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League. He would work with or endorse any candidate that supported a dry agenda, and he'd work to replace those that didn't with those that did. This included candidates who were, themselves, barely-functional alcoholics. They would drink while meeting with him (he himself was truly a teetotaler as far as we know) while discussing the very legislation that would make acquiring alcohol illegal. He took it all in stride as long as they voted the right way. Despite the perceived success of the wets in attaching a 7-year limit on time-to-ratification for the 18th amendment, it passed the required number of state houses in less than two years.

For a more modern example I direct you to Republican's willingness to re-elect "family values" candidates who support and push through anti-LGBTQ legislation but who have themselves been caught in flagrante delicto. I find such laws reprehensible, but I cannot deny the effectiveness of the right in passing them, in part due to a willingness to tolerate effective but hypocritical legislators.

In terms of where I believe a failure to tolerate hypocrisy has resulted in net loses for progressive causes, I'd point to politicians with strongly progressive voting histories are pilloried and their political careers are summarily executed because they turn out to be corrupt, sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. If their voting history and the legacy they're leaving behind is a progressive one (and stays that way), who cares if they're only pursuing it because they know it will get them re-elected? Unless you can find a candidate who will produce a better net effect, stick with the flawed bigot.

Concretely, take Hillary Clinton after the primaries[0]. I saw it argued that she was a hypocrite for taking millions in speaking fees from big banks while talking about protecting the little guy. She may well be a hypocrite (and her banking voting history isn't great), but the platform she was running on and much of the rest of her voting history are solidly progressive. The number of votes lost due to perceived hypocrisy probably wouldn't have swayed that contest, but more broadly I see it in the same category of being idealistic to a fault.

But I do agree that there is a case to be made to work those people, if their views align with yours, even though they are personally hypocrites. On the other hand, maybe not the most trustworthy allies.

It's almost inconceivable to me that someone(s) can be both anti-abortion and pro-execution without some deeper, darker, cynical motivator.

Huh. Again, thank you.

I don't think there is a conflict with either position because they are vastly different scenarios, and neither side is basing their argument on an absolute position on the value of all life in all circumstances. A good example would be: Someone who opposes kidnapping, but supports imprisoning criminals. Those positions are not in conflict, even though prison is just legal kidnapping.

> You can want to make as much profit as possible while ALSO doing the right thing ethically.

OP even said that their ONLY goal was profit. Of course as a company in a society like ours you have to make profit. It's when that becomes a priority that obscures all others that people find it distasteful.

One of a companies goals may be profit, but it may not be it's only goal.

When companies engage intelligently, they an create 'win win' scenarios. When they don't they can create zero-sum - or worse - can profit by actually destroying net value.

There's a certain feel of hyperreality in those stores, their hiring guidelines must be a great read. I'm fascinated by how cashiers always appear to me as the same prototype of fabricated cool-and-polite-and-supernice robots. A few smiles, a little bit of small talk, sometimes a bit more chat on random things "oh I love that stuff! it's sooooo good!". I feel like WF is trying to tell me that those guys are not working here, they are just super cool and they are helping the distribution of organic food which is good for my health and important for the well being of the world. Oh and WF must be an NGO actually.

A few times a year, they do some fundraising at the cash register. It typically happens in the ultimate phase of the credit card translation (before the single/double inside/outside question). Cool cashier usually loudly asks "Whether I would like to donate some money to awesome charity helping orphaned children with cancer". The technique is pure genius both in terms of timing and leverage of peer pressure. The two options available are looking like a monster to the people in line behind, or directly financing the advertisement of whole foods as an ethical leader.

> The two options available are looking like a monster to the people in line behind

Sure or maybe you are paranoid.

You mean you don't preschedule your charity donations each year/month and refuse to acknowledge momentary charity appeals?

What a strange way to live, feeling pressured by the Whole Foods cashier!

I vote with my dollars, as much as possible. Fortunately, I have many local choices (farmers markets, local mini chains, coops).

When traveling, I've been pleasantly surprised by Sprouts. It's like Trader Joe's doing Whole Foods. (I haven't checked on their politics, labor practices.)

Speaking from experience, there's definitely slacktivism in cooperatives too.

I've seen several of them basically turn into UNFI/KeHE outlet stores selling the same big brands that are marketing themselves as "conscious" alternatives rather than smaller local vendors (because they can't make the same deals).

Not all coops are created equal and not all of them are looking out for their customers, local vendors, or employees. Yeah, there are good ones out there run by people who care about the products and customers, but don't think that just because it has "coop" in the title that it's one of them.

Maybe it was that the board and management had largely remain unchanged for years or that there was investment larger than normal ownership which may have incentivized board decisions towards returns and expansion.

Regardless, there are multiple types from farmer coops, consumer coops, to employee/worker coops out there. and even within those divisions they're all handled in very different ways with different goals. If you're with one of the good ones, that's awesome, help them all you can. But be careful assuming that they all operate similarly.

However during the winter I go to Natural Grocers, or Sprouts because the price is always cheaper (here at least it is much cheaper then Whole Foods).

Whole Foods nails the shopping experience for those who care about intangibles. It's always clean. It's always well stocked. They have very educated cashiers who can move lines quickly and make autonomous decisions when an item doesn't ring up. They can give $100 cash back so I don't need to hit the ATM ever. They don't have those horrendously buggy self checkouts.

If you can trade money for time and convenience, WF is a great experience. After getting used to it, other stores are frustrating to me.

I can see it if the choices are WF or a crappy Giant or Safeway....

The WF near me is actually a much slower checkout experience because they have less cashiers open (often ~2) and no Uscans, so I either wait in line longer or avoid it. At WF, I've waited in line for 10+ minutes before getting to the register but that's never happened at Kroger.

I recently discovered the above, and after paying attention there are many items that are less expensive at WF. The whole fresh fruits and vegetables are the same price or cheaper than other local chains, and are also very high quality. The only place that beats them on price is Walmart, but quality is hit and miss (normally miss).

I have found beer and wine to be $1-$2 cheaper at WF than local chains. Not everything of course, but I tend to keep the same wine and beer around the house so I notice pricing. Good cheese can also be had for less money at WF. The WF brand whole bean coffee is also cheaper than anything else I have found locally.

If frugality is the goal I have found that for most packaged stuff Walmart is the way to go. Then WF for fruits and veggies, and finally Harris Teeter (local chain in the south) for meats (never ending special boneless/skinless chicken breasts are always $1.99/lb).

I believe a big factor was demand. People in Michigan loved their fruits and veggies. Same in northern Indiana when I went there.

Then I moved to Texas... nothing. The quality of veggies at the store was poor -- often rotting. Even at the flagship Whole Foods in Dallas. Granted, that was going on 20 years ago. People didn't eat vegetables.

Then I moved to Wisconsin. You'd think, but no. Conditions for growing veggies should be just fine in WI, but there's no demand. I've met lots of people who have never eaten a green vegetable.

We have Saturday "farmers markets." These are common in affluent towns. Each "farmer" has a little booth, and prices are astronomical. There's a little bluegrass band, and lots of the booths are selling... prepared foods, such as muffins. A plus side is that folks have recommended talking to the meat vendors. They will agree to supply you with a quantity of meat, anything you want, and it will be good stuff.

Buying meat from these types of markets really is the best of both worlds for producers: they can sell their product with a short shelf life, and the consumers are more than willing to hit the price point between cost-to-produce and cost-to-get-to-market if they were to sell through a middle man.

"It's no accident that certain sorts of food movements, like "eat local" and "eat simple," tend to start and thrive on the West Coast. If you're living next door to California's abundant, incredible produce, then it's easy to say that everyone ought to be chowing down on fresh local fruits and vegetables, rather than some processed or imported version. In the rest of the country, however, fresh local produce is available only in a narrow annual window -- and if you don't have the income to shop at a farmer's market, or nearby land where you can shop at farm stands or grow your own, it functionally isn't available at all."

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-05-01/cooking-s...

And CSAs (Community-supported agriculture) are becoming more popular.

I was partly responding to the have a month in the post I replied to. It's typical that they run more of the season than that.

Seafood on the other hand is easy to get local and fresh.

However, the lawsuit they faced with 'vegetable infused water' without the vegetables was a pretty serious black mark against them that people didn't forget.

Could you elaborate on this? What's the argument for non-homogenized milk being healthier?

Per Wikipedia: "The fat in milk normally separates from the water and collects at the top. Homogenization breaks the fat into smaller sizes so it no longer separates, allowing the sale of non-separating milk at any fat specification."

I just don't understand how smaller fat particles are less healthy than large ones at the top (apart from perhaps the liquid milk being fattier, in which case you can simply buy milk with less fat).

It's really a long and involved answer but I am going to try my best to keep it simple.

Raw milk that has fat(lipids), protein, amino acids and sugars(glucose) amongst other good stuff. Milk is essentially a suspension..that is fat suspended in the fluid. When you homogenize milk, it is passed through a fine nozzle so that it's no longer a suspension. It is all one homogenous uniform mixture..with everything mixed and melded together.

What happens is that the lipids in the original raw state is encased within a thin membrane called milk fat globule membrane..that's why the cream is 'suspended' and separate from the liquid milk itself. This membrane/cell wall of the lipid is now shattered during the homogenization process.

That membrane is there for a reason. Mammalian milk is the complete food for the offsprings..from an evolutionary pov, it has to contain everything to sustain the infant. Lactation is a highly expensive action for the mammalian mother..why would she give up so much resources and energy to design lipids and protein and other stuff so perfectly packaged in the medium that is suspension based raw milk delivery system?

The fat globule membrane could be there for the right order in which to digest or process the nutrients for the most optimal and complete food source for the baby. Modern machinations have altered the structure of milk protein/fats/sugars that full fat(aka regular) milk is considered unhealthy. Milk can cause indigestion..milk fats causes heart disease..the sugars are considered carbs. But it is really the perfect and complete food which has the exact delivery system that costs the mother so much to provide her offspring. Of course, the mother in this case is the cow from whose offsprings we steal the milk but the evolutionary argument for the structure of raw milk and the weirdness/uselessness/wastefulness of trying to alter its perfect structure remains..

On a slightly related note..goat milk for example has higher protein but it doesn't contain the milk fat globule membrane..and it isn't necessary to homogenize it..it comes naturally homogenized. Some have lesser intolerances with goats milk than with cows milk..so I am going to guess that it has something to do with casein. Donkeys milk..yaks milk..buffalo milk..camels milk..sheeps milk. They are all acceptable to drink in diff parts of the world. I grew up on buffalos milk which is richer and creamier. Big topic..I hope I haven't digressed too much! Gah!

personally: i feel that the milk fat globule membrane slows down digestion. and the lipids take longer before they are introduced into the digestion process. this could have some positive effects. not dissimilar to eating a spoonful of sugar and having a spoonful of sugar with fruit baked as a tart. the science of it is so complicated that i cant even remember how it works but i am sure you can google it. it has something to do with bile acids and bile salts and which part of the stomach the lipids get absorbed. i just recall from way long ago.

it makes more sense to me because studies show that homogenised milk increases digestablity of milk. perhaps its not meant to be digested quickly. perhaps there is a genetic component to it wherein not everyone is meant to be dairy consumers.

having said that..what stuck to me was the evolutionary design of milk itself. there was something very poetic about it. all body secretions are actually elegant story tellers if you think about it. it tells a story about the person from whom it comes..its like a snapshot..be it blood or mucus or semen or milk or plasma or even that booger you dig from your nose.

mammalian milk has a very specific function. they are carriers. its costly for the person who is producing it. as per design, it is the most perfect structure. the milk we consume doesnt come from our species. it comes from the cow which is definitely much much different than us..they have four stomachs, for starters.

we should start with whether cows milk is even suitable for us. having started with an imperfect product that is ill fitted for human consumption, messing it up further makes no sense. having said that, studies show that human milk has MFG(milk fat globules) too.

so..to me..logically, i would want the milk fat globule membrane intact in any other mammalian milk product too. i wouldnt go as far as drinking bovine raw milk unless i knew where it came from...but i honestly dont see anything beneficial about homogenisation. on the other hand, we dont really know if there are ill effects to it. i would stick to what's natural given the lack of definitive studies.

[...]Human milk contains many components that protect the newborn against infection at a time when the infant's own defense mechanisms are poorly developed. Fat is one of the major nutrients in human milk. The fat is contained within milk fat globules composed of a core of triglyceride and a membrane consisting of phospholipids, cholesterol, proteins, and glycoproteins. Both the membrane and the core components can provide protection against microorganisms. The major protective membrane glycoproteins, mucin, and lactadherin are resistant to conditions in the newborn's stomach and maintain their structure and function even at low pH and in the presence of the proteolytic enzyme pepsin. The core triglycerides upon hydrolysis by digestive lipases (especially gastric lipase, which is well developed in the newborn) produce free fatty acids and monoglycerides, amphiphylic substances able to lyse enveloped viruses, bacteria, and protozoa. Therefore, in addition to its nutritional value, the fat in human milk has a major protective function.[...]

I love Trader Joe's but I shop there for the store brand items and a few specials. At every location I've been to (CA, CT, MA, DC, FL) the vegetable selection is far more limited than Whole Foods and generally lower quality. That doesn't mean that one is better or worse than the other, only that they're different businesses with different models. TJ's loves to stock things they can get a deal on, which is great but limited.

This is true of the local supermarkets: yes, they stock a lot of organic options now. No, they're not better quality and they're usually more expensive because it's a premium niche category for them but a core product for WF. If you look at the loss leader specials, yes, they're often cheaper but some things in your cart are also more expensive.

I think this goes back to people relying on anecdotes instead of data and the psychological weight of a few high-end items skewing perception of the entire store. People see some super high-end olive oil, say “oh my god, can you believe how much that costs?!”, and forget the more affordable option on the same shelf or that the store they're comparing it to didn't even stock the equivalent grade of product.

This depends on a lot on the "consumption basket". The small percentage comment is definitely not true for some categories of products. Concretely, consider cheese. Genuine imported Parmigiano-Reggiano can be had outside Whole Foods for < $14 a pound, with extremes like Costco selling it for $12 I believe. Whole Foods charges $20 for this, a ~ 50% higher price. Similar remarks apply to other high grade cheeses.

More generally, although Whole Foods keeps the pricing of their store brand products competitive (e.g the 365 value stuff), they certainly do mark up many high quality items significantly.

I can offer a more personal perspective: I currently live in the Bay Area but spend a fair amount of time in Manhattan, as well. When shopping in California, I essentially never go to Whole Foods because the produce prices are ridiculous in comparison to the high quality local grocers near my home. In Manhattan, however, I nearly exclusively shop at Whole Foods because the produce is reliably good, the 365 products are affordable, and the prices are fairly competitive (if not better than) many other options. Of course, there are less expensive stores that I could go to in New York, but they generally don't offer the convenience or quality.

That is clearly not the case in the Bay Area. Whole Foods is the most expensive place you can shop around here.

I have two stores within biking distance (15-20 min or less) and perhaps four in driving distance (same time in city traffic). I'm not counting convenience stores or other similar dives.

With one exception (meat) on a quality basis Whole Foods averages out to be the same price as any other store I have shopped at. Meat is the exception because it averages to be about $1/lb more than other grocers.

My local Safeway sold USDA Prime filet for $18.99/lb, the Choice at WF was always at least $26 and sometimes $32/lb.

My wife has come home with salmon from WF marked at $32/lb and I nearly had a heart attack. $12/lb for the same at Safeway, sometimes $8.99.

It seems to me WF sets prices assuming you just aren't looking and don't know better. It's a hell of a markup for shopping ambiance.

For meat, Costco is cheaper and higher quality, compared to WF and all of them.

What I do find as a plus is Whole Foods tends to get more stuff locally if they can and a store like Safeway is going more regional or to Mexico to keep its costs down.

I'll pay a little more to have my fresh food being sourced locally and more time to ripen on the vine then ripen in a truck.

I'm totally unsurprised by the article seeing Walmart, Costco, and Kroger are one-stop shops for regular and organic items at much cheaper prices. I expected this to happen to Whole Foods. They should double down on the better shopping experience (less crowds) and offering obscure items big retails are too greedy to carry.

exibit A: Whole Foods' $6 Asparagus Water Is Just Water With Three Stalks of Asparagus in It

http://www.eater.com/2015/8/3/9090797/whole-foods-asparagus-...

City Sting Reveals Whole Foods Has Been Overcharging New Yorkers Since 2010

I've never shopped at Whole Foods BTW.

The only thing I hate them for is selling/promoting snake oil. My guess is a lot of the hate towards Whole Foods is their clientele being perceived as snobby/out of touch/"richer than I am".

If Whole Foods is the only thing in your area it's not a bad option, but it's definitely possible to do much better.

I think it's probably because they tried to capitalize on selling "non-GMO" products, which is a huge marketing scam that some consumers are finally wising up to.

Don't believe me? Go find me some GMO oranges. Or GMO cilantro. Or GMO chocolate. Or GMO lettuce. Or GMO anything other than corn and soybeans.

Want to know why you can't find them? Because they don't exist. That doesn't stop companies like Whole Foods from slapping a "non-GMO" label on them and charging 2x the price of Safeway.

The TL;DR is only buy fresh vegetables, single-item bulks, fruit, meats, and seafood in descending order of volume/mass. The less processing and packaging, the better as a rule of thumb. Round out very sparingly with exceptions.

This is how we should shop regardless of store. Mackey has publicly admitted he vastly regrets taking WFM to Wall Street. I get the impression if most customers shopped as described above, crushing profit margins, in the absence of shareholder pressure to change WFM's real mission and cost him strategic control, and the profits are self-sustained, he wouldn't mind.

I'd like to see more feedback from others on whether or not they noticed WFM's efforts to broaden beyond just an organic label. They did try, and to a smaller extent are still trying (meat stages are a prominent example), and are trying not to antagonize regulatory stakeholders by pointing out the mainstream organic label is deficient in many ways, but by and large it seems most of their customer base is more concerned about labels than actually delivering change.

Once you understand that, you understand why the label is the single most important thing, and the less real details supplied the better. Any details you supply serves to break the facade that the organic label means you're doing good deeds - because ultimately, you're still killing that chicken. It's why "efforts to broaden beyond just an organic label" are doomed before they begin and will hurt sales more than they help.

The use of the organic label is to distance people from this imagery by constantly repeating the propaganda that everything is being done 'nicely'. However, actually showing any kind of killing, no matter how nice, destroys that propaganda. The key trick is to use the correct words to make sure people do not conflate what they are eating with anything negative, and the organic label is part of that.

When you go deeper and attempt to explain how the killing is better, you simply open the audience to the fact that there is still killing being done. This is the wrong approach for the target market. It's better to distance the brand from the actual realities as much as possible.

We fear our own deaths because we've forgotten our true nature, so we've attempted to banish the specter of death from society as a whole. I'm willing to bet people who have this reaction to the death of a chicken are being brought in contact with their own mortality, and that scares them. Given that we are all going to die, we should get comfortable with death rather than hide from it.

Hint: they don't run around in happy green fields.

Some of them do. I actually check the code on eggs before buying to make sure I'm getting those from free-roaming chickens.

Not to mention that farmed chickens are bred to be so fat they can barely walk anyway: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/chickens-cant-w/

Me, I figure there's all sorts of tasty critters in the world and I'm willing to try every one.

Most people cannot really identify with thousands of chickens in a cage being processed by a machine - but they can identify with a single chicken happily running around outside being taken and killed. So paradoxically, the second image would actually be something they see as even more cruel.

Informing people about this has to be done in a very clever way to ensure that people don't connect the packaged breast they buy with the actual chicken running around outside. One slip up, and your label becomes worse than the factory chickens.

While the people who choose to come for a farm tour likely know what to expect, the 'average' consumer would not react in the same way to being told that they're eating this happy, free ranging chicken. As with all marketing, it's important to come from a position of your customer's lifestyle than your own where you 'know' about death.

To put it in a completely different context - think about Target and their new bathroom policy. On the surface it seems great, and everyone supports it. The label is wonderful and everyone wants to be part of that movement. But when it actually comes time to go to a bathroom, many women freak out and refuse to actually enter that bathroom anymore. It's even costing Target customers, and now pulling back the policy would cost them even more. Marketing isn't easy and you need to fully understand what you're doing before you end up creating a marketing campaign that actually harms your business.

Same story we hear from Silicon Valley on occasion: they regret the loss of control of the company, but not the massive payday.

The fact that this chain suffers because there is so much competition for better produce is net positive. Whole Foods doesn't exist where I come from. But big chains with organic sections (even discount chains) do.

Whole Foods relies on high-margin items. The checkout areas are stuffed with homeopathic remedies, which are overpriced water. Now that's a markup.

[1] https://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/download.php?id=419

There's the typical cash crop rotation: corn to soy. This has the advantage of cash crop and cash crop. These are both well known and the differences in weather over the course of a growing season are minimized - if its a drought year, you've got the appropriate hybrid. If its a wet year, you've got the appropriate hybrid. Very predictable.

Adding wheat into the rotation helps. http://www.cornandsoybeandigest.com/make-wheat-work http://www.agriculture.com/crops/wheat/adding-wheat-to-cnsoy... - but then this also means different equipment to harvest and a different market.

When one goes to the idealistic organic the cycle could be: corn, beans, reddish, onion, melon, sunflower, broccoli, carrots, tomatoes. Rather extreme, but an example. Also note that onions and garlic can be mixed, as can peans and beans... but that is the idea.

This works nicely for the home garden plots but when trying to rotate with hundreds of acres of fields its a bit more challenging. Instead of two or three means of harvest its nine different types of plants - tomato harvest is completely unlike corn harvest. Furthermore, it means that the farmer is a bit more at the mercy of the weather (great year for corn, but you've planted radishes because you just had corn two years ago and would need some pesticides or go to a GMO variety of corn... and that's not organic anymore) and the markets (there's no demand for the things that are in the next three seasons in the harvest - do you skip forward four?).

we don't have us style industrial agriculture in austria. our fields are tiny compared to the US (avg farm size is 40 acres; and we really don't have those superfarms [2000+ acres] that seem to be common in the US). same goes for livestock, a farmer doesn't have anywhere near the same number of say kettle on his/her farm.

However, a couple of examples:

- Austria has a pretty decent wine industry, with vineyard clusters in numerous locations around the country; south east Styria, Krems/Wachau, Burgenland, just south of Vienna.

- In Styria, there's plenty of pumpkin growing, which are mostly used to make pumpkin oil, which is an outstanding salad dressing.

- Also in Styria, there is a pretty big apple growing industry around Gleisdorf/Weiz to the east of Graz.

- There are some reasonably big cropping operations in the east of the country in Burgenland where the landscape is more rolling hills than high alps.

This is fruit and vegetables that's organic and sourced in Austria that Billa sells currently https://shop.billa.at/warengruppe/obst-und-gemuese/B2-1?face...

Have you tried some more affordable "normal" supermarkets like Key Foods, C Town, Western Beef, etc? You might still complain about quality (don't know your standards), but you won't be complaining about price at least any more.

Trader Joe's is also fantastic (good quality, good deals on anything-but-produce, get that from C Town instead), if you can bear the lines (the wait time is not as bad as it looks) or just come in at an off-peak time.

I think this is what the parent is saying: that, for the price, these places have inconsistent quality and selection. This has been my experience as well. And if you live in the outer boroughs, depending on the neighborhood, these stores can be outright disgusting.

But I'm also not originally from NYC and when I go back home to visit, I'm reminded how ubiquitous cheap and high quality grocery shopping is for pretty much the rest of the country.

OP, if really high quality produce at a surprisingly reasonable price in Manhattan, you might be surprised at what Eataly has to offer. For me Fresh Direct and Food Kick are where I go for consistency.

It's just not hard to find clean, fresh produce at a reasonable price here.

But it's also not hard to find people who move here from a very different environment and it takes them a while to figure out where to get the stuff they want, because it's not organized quite the same as your average middle american suburb. That's OK, practice makes perfect

Multi-stage milling usually get rid of that. If you're shopping organic you should be happy about the bugs, unfortunately.

Now that I'm out West, I've seen the middle take over. Safeway has closed much of the quality gap, with much better prices. The top of the market can't grow forever. There's a reason they call it "Whole Paycheck." It's also an incomplete store. If I need to go to Safeway for shampoo anyways, I might as well buy my organic FancyPantsStuff there too if it's cheaper that Whole Foods.

I think there are probably a lot of people like you and me who were never part of the whole foods cult but still appreciated the product, and are realizing that now we can get the same stuff for less elsewhere.

I personally think it all boils down demography and subjective tastes. There's the millennial, "wannabe- australopithecine"/paleo crowd that tend to fancy WholeFoods and Trader Joes.

Then there's frugal crowd, or the majority that prefer function over form and don't cheer-lead unsupervised organic labeling.

There will always be someone ready to protect the rationale to pay a premium. The main problem is those who get roped into idolizing the hive-mind without noticing the sales pitch.

I do wish more meat/egg sources labelled what feed they use as I find that influences flavor far more than organic v. not.

What?

Now the cost of the ice cream could be an issue since keeping it frozen during transportation is not free.

The difference is that their quality has declined and others are catching up. The food bar was near restaurant quality in 2006, now it's slop at 3x the cost. You also have to be careful about date labels, my local store will relabel old inventory and add a few weeks to the sell by dare.

Also, Amazon impacts them harder because WF lost their monopoly on weird organic product.

It's the typical big company story. They grew too fast. I'm sure the supply chain is a shitshow.

Can you elaborate on this?

I totally agree with your other point that others are catching up and I think they realized they don't need to have an entire organic store just certain key items(grass fed beef, good produce to make everyone happy.

The little cheese wheel was wrapped in plastic. Unwrap it, as I did last week, and lo and behold, the date sticker under the plastic wrap says 12/21/16.

They play similar games with cut fruit and other stuff. I can get same or better stuff at Hannaford for 1/3 the cost.

What you say is very interesting as I have often heard people tell me how much better the quality of their products was when they 'started'. As I have precisely only lived in the US for a decade, I'd be very curious to know how the evolution of quality for regular stores such as Safeway, or other supermarkets of similar standing where people with working class wages can fill a whole cart.

I sort of have the intuition that there must have been sort of a shift in the past 20 years, possibly when the GMOs were imposed to Americans, where Excellent food became Regular and Regular food became Substandard. Now I realize I might just be somewhere close to entirely wrong right there :P

To challenge another of your assumptions, though WFM does well with households with >$100K, it also does well with other income brackets including "working class." [0] WFM targets specific customers in all demographics. WFM's prices aren't necessarily higher, and you can certainly overspend at a Safeway. Also, notice how Safeway has high affinity with WFM.

[0] http://infoscout.co/retailer/whole_foods

* Whole Foods bet big on prepared food; about 1/4 of our local Whole Foods is essentially a food court.

* Whole Foods has a sort of Trader Joe's phenomenon where the place is gradually filling up with house brand stuff. But unlike TJ's, WF's house brands aren't relabeled good outside brands; they're mostly pretty bad, and WF tends to carry them to the exclusion of any other product, so I can get 5 different kinds of chicken stock at a big chain grocer and just WF's house brand at WF.

Things Whole Foods in Chicagoland is better at than other grocers:

* Meat.

* Seasonal vegetables; no other grocer is going to carry ramps this May.

* Cheese.

* A decent house-brand olive oil.

I think that's it.

* Jewel's produce is fine, but as you note it's hard to find much of anything outside of the typical fruits and veggies. It's also highly dependent on the individual store.

* Mariano's is god-awful produce wise, so can't imagine that's what you're talking about. Which Mexican produce store?

* Coincidentally, I did this check very recently and can guarantee you that WF stocks 4-5 different brands of chicken stock.

But why does that matter? Ultimately, my research revealed the best price/quality sweet spot for stock was Kirkland (shocker!). Which only proves the point: single item (the TJ's approach) might be all the market really demands. Now admittedly, if the 365 brand isn't quality, that's a problem.

Things you are right about:

* WF way over-invested in prepared foods, probably because the markup is so damn high. Problem is, as another poster noted, the quality used to be consistently pretty high, but is now closer to slop.

* Your list of what WF excels at...with one huge omission: bulk raw ingredients.

But again, same question. Going by the rule that the outside of the store (fresh foods) is where you want to eat most of your food from anyway — if WF is consistently better at the majority of what we should be buying, what's the issue?

I think maybe the issue is that grocery stores don't make nearly as much on produce as they do on prepared foods or even on house-brand packaged foods, and it's pretty plain to see that Whole Foods optimized itself over the last 10 years for revenue maximization. Competition is an issue, but so is wedging yourself into a local maxima.

Another thought is that grocery stores might be like drug stores in the sense that they are in significant part a commercial real estate bet; the store is really just a mechanism for extracting value from specific parcels of land. One other major difference between WF and "big box" chains is that WF tends to be smaller; it can't extract dollars from square feet by stocking them with Frito Lay and Coca Cola products the way Krogers can.

I think this is also what led everyone to feel/think that WF is 100% more expensive than anywhere else. After trying the food court awhile back, and paying what was essentially $20 for a tiny box of food, it took me years to try WF again.

This. Whole Foods is a godsend when traveling, I can just nip in, grab something healthy that's already prepared and I'm good to go.

(Again: we've mostly switched to commodity grocery stores for produce, because Whole Food's produce sucks.)

As soon as they opened that store I realized someone at HQ was either clueless or arrogantly thought theyd just move in and dominate. Looks like they are getting their just desserts.

In France for example 'bio' tagged food is getting cheaper everyday, some products are sometimes even cheaper than their counter-part.

I try to buy from local 'marché' however it isn't always convenient if you work full days.

I have been wondering about this myself, products labeled 'organic' have varying degrees of quality that I assume are reflected in distributor price. Now, while in my experience WF tends to mostly have higher quality organic stuff on their shelves than my other go-to stores, my intuition is that their markup is pretty important.

When I think about it, it seems apparent that WF and similar stores simply have a strategy of luxury: the higher prices are a statement, in addition to improving the perceived value of the products to the buyer, they also secure a relative exclusivity.

In other words, they've gone a little bit apple-store of food.

For example I can buy milk straight from the cow for 80ç by just crossing the street and asking the producer's wife to fill my bottle. Organic milk is around 1.20€ last time I checked, fair milk around 1.1€, brand milk around 80-1.20€ and `cheap` milk is around 60ç.

Can't resist: the other day we made a 3 cheese fondue for four and it costed us close to a benjamin just in cheese at WF!

[0] http://www.consoglobe.com/achat-bio-cher-2846-cg

I've seen people both worship and shit on Whole Foods, have seen Sprouts described as a "Whole Foods that didn't sell its soul to Wall Street", and I've heard Trader Joes described as "half a grocery store, so you can't do all your shopping there, but its the half you want".

We have two national chains in town with big stores, a couple smaller quasi-chains (IGA, etc), and a Super Walmart, so its not like its some out of the place hole in the wall....

So, what's the draw of Whole Foods (and by extension, Sprouts and the other clones)?

One thing that surprises me about living in SV is how downmarket Safeway is here. I thought it would be like Publix in the South (nice, but not especially nice) but mine sells nothing but corporate brands, carbs, more carbs and Bud Light. People must like baked goods.

I can't find them listed online. Not sure if it's due to ethnic tastes around here or what, but they are definitely there, and they are very good.

I would not eat any of the 'fresh' things from WM though.

Then again, the fine article says Sprouts et al are also hurting...

It's a very telling sign where I live that the WF are primarily only in the most upscale neighborhoods, while Sprouts locations are much more accessible (and they always seem to be busy).

I tend not to shop at multiple places on the same day, I just don't care for shopping that much. If you have a good spot for your preferred milk/meat, just get that there, get other stuff elsewhere. There's nothing that says you have to buy everything on the same day/trip.

I've had two friends work there for over a year, one in the 90s and one in the past couple of years, and in both cases, management was just grinding through employees. The recent run ended when they cut employees and expanded duties for the remaining folks (two or more jobs now in one), with no increase in pay and no increase in technology at hand to justify the ability of one person doing what used to take two in full-time shifts.

Yeahhh he quit soon after that. I tended to avoid WF in favor of Trader Joe's, Sprouts, Natural Grocers, and straight from farmers, but after hearing how they treat their employees, again, that's just one more reason not to give them business...

I am in South Florida and it's the most expensive grocery store by far, like 20-30% it feels like for almost the same items.

This is subjective for sure.

Publix Greenwise stores and brand has done a really good job of giving me what I want for a lot cheaper.

Now, I feel like Whole foods has better quality, but it's just not worth the almost ~30% premium I feel like I pay when I shop there.

Also, Trader Joe's just opened up here and that place is so much better.

Really, I don't want to pay that huge ass premium.

Without a doubt, generic organics is where we are going.

I don't often shop at Whole Foods because I can't get my whole list there for a reasonable price compared to buying mostly a mix of organic and Simple Truth at Kroger. It's not worth making a separate trip just for a few things. If WF zoned in on this space more that could change things.

Millenials(pukes in own mouth for using said term) aren't as brand-loyal as their parents were and are quick to ditch a brand when something better & faster comes along. Just because they're "Whole Foods" doesn't mean that they can stay complacent or start behaving like an average grocery store without sudden consequences.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/foods-accused-overcharging-ex...

The answer being, some want mangos and value their time and effort more than the the difference in mango price and sliced mango price.

For instance, if I'm out and about doing stuff and happen to want some sliced mango. It's not that I decided in advance not to buy bulk mangoes and slice them at home, I just decided spur of the moment to get some.

Of course there are people who don't like slicing mangoes themselves, so for added convenience they will buy pre-sliced mangoes and bring them home or wherever specifically to eat them.

> I just decided spur of the moment to get some.

No, that's still cutting time and effort. Okay you want something spur of the moment. Your option is to buy it and then go home and slice it, buy it pre-sliced, or don't buy it at all. That is still a choice of convenience vs payment. You're not being forced to buy the mango.

http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blog/addressing-grocery-weig...

> "As has been reported in the media, our New York City stores were audited by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) for weights-and-measures errors, such as those that cause improper price labeling on some of the products that are produced, packaged and labeled in our stores."

They do have a lost liter wine for $2.49 a bottle. They hide it. Forget the name.

I despised Whole Foods for years. It was just like throwing away money. My father couldn't even pass the stores--he would take a side road just to avoid the parking lot, even when he had a tumor in his liver. My dad didn't understand high prices, or throwing away money.

Anyways, a relative whom is too old to drive, had me take her there. She bought all the expensive items because she could. I didn't buy anything, until a few years ago; they really did lower the prices on certain foods.

(If anyone from corporate happens to read this--get rid of uniformed security. Hire undercover on the stores with high customer theft. For what you charge, I don't want to see security guards. While I'm at it get rid of the time clock sensors the Janitors scan. The job is degrading enough, you don't need to micromanage them. If I'm paying extra; treat all employees well. Yea, I do notice.)

Those 'clock sensors' aka sweep logs [1] are for legal purposes. Slip and fall claims are a major liability in the grocery industry.

[1]: http://www.blanelaw.com/blog/sweep-logs-establishing-notice-...

If you compare prices of organic food and quality, Whole Foods is better and chair than any other place. Maybe downtown Toronto would be cheaper, but then I won't travel 35km for groceries.

The only thing I really dislike is the lack of true organic meat selection (only ABF) and they don't have things like lard.

1: Those stores that have carts that you can actually use to shop without being a CEO.

Also, they expanded well beyond what is supported based on their pricing demographic.

I guess if I could get a list of pesticides and herbicides I'm avoiding it would bring me more value. Right now I have no idea if it's a gimmic or what.

continues strolling around in a Che shirt

Now it has a definition, but I guess I am a contrarian. I find the organic industry to be pretty much a scam. It promised healthier, better tasting food. You can find studies showing that, but if you look at the totality of the literature, you find out that it isn't inherently either of those things. It is basically the naturalistic fallacy applied to the food industry on a wide-scale.

I haven't actually looked at the available lit in a year or so, but if this is true, it's a huge change from the last time I did. My understanding is that several very good, large studies had shown dramatic differences in organic vs orthodox food.

Or maybe you've seen reports on greater antioxidants or whatever. To make the leap to healthier is actually a completely separate matter. (Side note--too many antioxidants actually appears to interfere with your own cancer fighting processes. It was believed that free radicals were evil in the body, but it turns out they serve important functions too. As with most health news, things are more nuanced than the headlines suggest).

While talking about nutrients, I should point out that there are other studies showing conventional food have more of this or that nutrient. Those don't make big headlines, nor should they. Again, the amounts we're talking about are usually insignificant. The foods may be "different" in small ways, but "better?" Nope.

I could go on and on (e.g., let's say the numbers are significant--does it lead to better health in practice or is it a simple, possibly unjustified, extrapolation from other studies on the component in question). I could talk about dietary pesticides (99.99% that you consume are those produced by the plant itself) or herbicides or whatever. Careful observation makes you less trustful of the marketing hype.

Eating good food is important. Eat a reasonable amount of a variety of foods, mostly plants. Process it appropriately, according to established guidelines. That stuff is important. Organic? Probably not so much.