Amazon claimed they would drop prices at Whole Foods to be more competitive. Bah. I checked on price changes, and they were minuscule. We have written Whole Foods off as a snob store for the filthy rich who shop by name, not be price.
But, it gets worse. Amazon is now taking over product management away from its big vendors. Amazon is then charging the vendors a fee to manage the product in their own Whole Food stores. This is simply a sneaky trick to make vendors help pay the wages of store employees.
Rotating products on the shelf is no trick if you pay employees enough to get really bright people. But, Amazon hires low lifes. The Whole Food employees are friendly, but under Amazon I suspect that to change to morbid. When Wal Mart started treating their "associates" like trash, the smiles and attention to detail went south. Amazon will do the same.
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Amazon is also eliminating sourcing from local vendors and gardeners. This was the key to the Whole Foods success, in that, the produce area had rare and unusual varieties of veggies because they were locally grown by heirloom gardens. So, it is Big Business again destroying a good thing with high browed marketing tricks. The love of money is the root of all evil.
The only thing I go into Whole Foods for now are the home baked cookies and tea cakes, but I fully expect to see these disappear when Amazon finds that they can buy them cheap from Dolly Madison.
This whole picture is driven by business people who do not give a flip for really good food. The modern food marketing industry is based on processed garbage and fooling the public into thinking there are no other choices. This is why you can pick up 50 brands of bread down the aisle and find soy products and high fructose corn syrup in every one of them. We have one brand here in central Texas which is really made 100% of real food and no plastic. And, it is produced right here in Austin.
COSTO buys locally from healthy food producers. If that monster marketer can do it, Amazon has no excuse for cutting out local vendors.
The only way to change this is to refuse to stop being picky. Complain to the main office of these companies by email online. Do not talk to store managers. Parent companies do not listen to store managers who pass on customer complaints. Withhold your business and visit farm markets in your area. For meat, buy from ranchers and farmers who slaughter their own meat. Free range egg signs are all over America on your way home from work. Stop, and buy real food. Buy bread and pastries from hole in the wall shops who promise to use organic.
Or, may I dare suggest a revolutionary concept? .......
Bake your own bread. You can find a used bread machine cheap at the Salvation Army store or Goodwill. Bake your own cakes with six ingredients instead of twenty six varieties of plastic and industrial waste. It is all about things like cancer and Alzheimers. You don't have to worry about living longer, but how about living healthy right up to the end and dying during a midday nap sitting in your favorite chair, like grandpa did?
And, let us not forget Natural Grocers. They buy from local vendors for produce. They also have fantastic sales, mark downs, and clearances. They know their products and will help
It is not all bad news if you decide not to become the slave of online money grubbers. I personally shall make a prophecy here. The day will come not too far from now when super markets and many brick and mortar companies will be delivering just as efficiently as Amazon. Some company will find a way to streamline mail order delivery for these companies, and Amazon will have to upgrade their attitude or die. "Look, Mommy, there is the drone on our lawn with your grocery order." "Right, Johnny, so we can have strawberries on our ice cream for supper."
So be it.
For you skeptics, consider please. You will go register at Krogers with their delivery program, and they will give you one of those round disks restaurants use to tell who gets which order. They will tell you to cut a slit in your lawn right where you want the drone to land, out in the open, and slip the disk into the hole so that it is just below the surface. Voila, the drone will be assigned to land on your disk, and you will get your groceries thirty minutes after you order them online.
