Amazon-Whole-Foods Already Rattling the Grocery Sector

Here are the numbers since the August 28 price cuts.
When Amazon’s deal to acquire Whole Foods Market closed on August 28, the first thing that happened was a panoply of strategic and massive price cuts on some items at Whole Foods. The second thing that happened was that the media jumped on it, creating enormous hoopla, so that every consumer in the US would know about it. No advertising needed. It was ingenious marketing. The media fell for it. And consumers flocked to Whole Foods to see for themselves.
Whole Foods used to be known as ‘whole paycheck’ based on the prices it charged for even mundane items. So price cuts of this type were a shift in strategy – and a sign of how Amazon would be shaking things up.
Now we have some numbers, gathered by data intelligence firm Thasos Group via real-time location data from smartphones (yup, that spy device in your pocket that never stops giving). It used its technology to ‘quantify the competitive impact of the price reduction.’
Here are the key nuggets from its report (PDF) about how it turned out for Whole Foods:
Average daily foot traffic of new and regular customers (those who shop at a given Whole Foods at least twice per month) jumped 17% year-over-year during the week starting on August 28, the day of the price reduction.

This post was published at Wolf Street on Oct 4, 2017.