Despite all the publicity around the additional savings Prime members would receive at Whole Foods, shopping there is still a luxury experience. Yes, the Amazon/Whole Foods team has had a couple of iterations of additional savings) but outside some produce and savings sprinkled throughout the store, customers are still paying a premium.

As we are witnessing in the next-day shipping wars, cost cutting essentially becomes a zero sum game. It’s time for Whole Foods to establish a real loyalty program, one that gameifies the shopping experience. Considering all the synergies between the Amazon Prime members and Whole Foods customers, why not consider letting the members leverage their points/dollars towards Amazon or grocery items?

Loyalty programs are an outstanding way to connect with consumers and give them the perception that they are getting something back from the Amazon team.

Oh man, this one hits too close to home. I have this little argument with my wife all the time. She believes that the prices are comparable, sorry honey (to other grocery stores) and I say they are not. So put me in the “calling it BS” category. Yes the campaign has been trying to convince us that they are lowering prices across the store, but I think as soon as they lower them in one category like produce, they raise them another category like fish. And although perhaps it’s not a fair comparison, shopping anywhere else outside of NYC the price differences are dramatic in every single category across the store! It’s true when comparing Whole Foods compared to Stew Leonard’s or Whole Foods to Stop and Shop. I will say that the seafood at Stew Leonard’s is just as good if not better than Whole Foods. Some of the other supermarket chains, not so much.

Whole Foods’ discounts for Prime members are also a reminder that there aren’t discounts for those of us who refuse the pay the Prime fee. It’s one thing to surrender your phone number to get a discount at a traditional grocer; it’s another to have to pay $12.99 a month for it. Whole Foods remains a luxury experience for us.

The last sentence about Prime members only saving an additional $1.54 on a basket of $400 makes me raise an eyebrow on the whole study. That just doesn’t sound plausible. My own one-person shopping survey showed Whole Foods hitting parity if not lower prices than my former first-choice grocery store on the produce I buy most often. And Whole Foods had obviously better quality. No I do not buy any of the exotic, organic packaged goods. They were and continue to be ridiculously expensive. A review of the summarized data here would be interesting. I’m not sure it’s so easy to create apples-to-apples comparisons with before and after Whole Foods to before and after “other” grocery stores. No pun intended.

Amazon owned properties get more free press than anyone. I still can’t believe a markdown on 44 items became front page news, rather than a paid-for ad.

Art is right about the media, and this fixation on clickbait is going to drive the demise of our country. And no, I am not exaggerating.

Whole Foods’ core customers aren’t going to shop more or less over a 1 percent to 5 percent decrease in prices. They are there for the perception that their products are fresher, healthier, and overall better than what they get from other groceries. Whole Foods needs to own their image as a premium chain.

Whole Foods is strictly applying science (in this case, data science) to a challenge that still requires some art. As much as they’d like to think that their shoppers’ fickleness can be modeled using advanced algorithms, it can’t be. There is still a need for humans to give the pricing, promotion and assortment programs generated by those algorithms a thorough review for quality control. Call it a sniff test to uncover potentially reputation impacting marketing activities. Without these QC efforts, Whole Foods will continue to operate in a shifting minefield of public opinion.

We should not be surprised about the differential in pricing between, for example, Walmart and Whole Foods. Nor should we be surprised that Whole Foods is the highest priced grocer in the market. Their positioning to deliver quality, “natural” foods in a unique environment has always been delivered with a cost premium attached.

Two disappointments:

1. The so-called integration with Amazon Prime has delivered nominal value to Prime members and has not done anything to change behavior towards Whole Foods. Will Amazon ever decide to put real value on the table to entice shoppers?
2. When will eating healthy become affordable or at least priced in line with or at a small premium over traditional grocery items? There is a big disconnect between the obvious need for us to eat a more healthy diet and our ability to fit it into our budget.

This comes as no great surprise. The price cuts have always been headline-grabbing and cosmetic. They have never represented a substantial repositioning of Whole Foods.

There are some products at Whole Foods where a higher price is justified. These include things like deli products, meat, fish and the patisserie. Here the quality justifies the price.

However, there are many more basic items – including branded products available elsewhere – where prices are very out of kilter and are unjustifiably high. Until Whole Foods remedies this it will continue to be seen as bad value for money.

One of the value propositions that Whole Foods offers is the quality of its merchandise. And you get what you pay for. You can’t compare a premium experience to a value experience (as in Whole Foods versus Walmart). Whole Foods never said they were the lowest-priced grocer. If there is something to be owned, it is proving that it is worth it to shop at Whole Foods. Same goes for the other side. There’s a reason it’s worth shopping at Walmart. The customer has to decide which experience and merchandise they want. The customer decides if it’s worth the difference.

There is something insulting about shopping Whole Foods, before and after Amazon. Pricing. With so many good places to shop for equally good produce and everything else, I dislike the feeling of being robbed at the checkout counter. Whole Foods is a presentation experience at best. At worst, yes Paula is correct, the media cannot resist the easy clickbait of faux journalism on anything and everything Amazon. Amazon just needs to own its “Whole Paycheck”!

The high cost of shopping at Whole Foods comes back to that old retail adage, “There is no reality, only perception.” You are what you are perceived to be by your customers and your community whether you like it or not. In the case of Whole Foods this perception IS reality – prices are higher than other grocery stores.

Whole Foods customers don’t seem to mind the higher prices because they are looking for a different experience than discount shoppers. But touting price cuts when Prime members are actually saving minuscule amounts over non-members will catch up to Whole Foods sooner or later. Consumers aren’t stupid.

The whole Whole Foods concept has been whacked out of proportion because of Amazon’s marketing machine. They are a mere 1.1% of the grocery market (or in that range). It’s also very much against the grain of Amazon — where Amazon is commoditizing products, Whole Foods attempts to build premium branding.

As many on this thread have already stated, this is not new news, and consumers have already factored Whole Foods pricing into their decision on whether to shop there. Ideally, Whole Foods needs a new angle, as their original premium organic play in the market has been copied by tons of large and regional grocers, diluting any brand image edge they had.

They still have the “status” value for some customers, and I believe most of their locations are in more affluent neighborhoods, but it’s a deteriorating image that needs to be revamped. Amazon still hasn’t done much to enhance it.