Our customers will not shop with us for lower prices if we sacrifice our team members. They will go elsewhere and receive the same piss-poor service at Ralph's or Vons because there will be no reason to step foot in a whole foods. The whole paycheck concept WILL NOT GO AWAY just because you lowered prices. People will not use word of mouth to tell their friends and family about whole foods prices being lowered, they will tell them about the poor service they received, upset and unhappy team members likely being rude to them because they don't have time to finish their tasks and are afraid of being fired. I believe the ONLY thing that has set us apart lately, until now, is our team members. Say goodbye to what once was and say hello to corporate greed.
9 replies (most recent on top)
imagine when everything is computerized and WF gets hacked, it will happen
forget WF, we have co-ops and local markets that are dedicated to organics and don't scam people. and the produce and meats are better. WF sells fancy junkfood as their unique catch.
i've been a diehard customer (due to food allergies and much traveling, which make it hard to find clean food quickly) since 1998 or so. i find this all very interesting. i mean, people aren't going to be scammed forever, esp when the brand image is already one of high prices. the scams just confirm everyone's jokes as being reality. thus, WF becomes a joke.
You are completely correct. We have gone from shopping only at Whole Foods forever, our parents shopped there, to shopping mostly at another store because the new WF store near us is already too corporate and sucky. I practically grew up on WF.
169092--NAILED it.
I am a customer. Ralph's and Vons and Albertsons and EverySingelOtherStore smell pretty bad, seriously. That's the primary reason I hate going there, at least for me. TJ's fine, you guys are fine.
continued (from first reply which was getting too long but there's so much to say) - I love that we are about healthy, natural foods. In fact that's why I'm in this business in the first place, and have been for a long time. And there are some things WFM has done that I applaud, for example our leadership in animal welfare. This is just as core and essential as organics to me. But with other things I think we've gone way off the rails, for example HSH. Sure it's great to promote healthy eating and communicate the nutritional values of food. But I think we made a fatal mistake in aligning ourselves in any way with any SPECIFIC STYLE of healthy eating. The public is way ahead of us on this and doesn't need our "guidance". And the way HSH was handled it did not promote passion, it was just another list of crap we had to comply with to please somebody on a walk. The new ratings system in produce is like HSH but a hundred times more burdensome. Nice concept maybe, but are we up to executing it? And do customers give a damn about these ratings? We've just come up with too many bad, superficial, distracting ideas and all this other crap has taken up any space that was left for passion. So what do we do in response to this dire situation? Let's get rid of a whole bunch of people, and not just anybody, no lets get rid of some of the MOST PASSIONATE people we have. Yeah, that's the ticket :(
They caved to the NASDAQ and greedy money barons. Instead of standing behind their prices and explaining that paying fair wages from seed to mouth actually costs more money they layed off more talented employees to cater to stockholders. Crazy right!? Yes, if you want the farmer and everyone involved to get paid a fair wage then you have to pay for it. Educated consumers get this. Walmart customers do not. Weird that Walmart execs own so much Whole Foods stock too....interesting to say the least.
Goodbye Whole Foods
Its true. Prices need to come down somewhat, but I believe we could still get premium prices relative to others if we had stayed true to WFM's original core passion for food. When passion drove the business, everything else took care of itself and excellent customer service was just one of the natural outcomes. But for a few years now everything the company has done has ended up crushing that passion under workload and fear. Our success has floundered as a result, and all the reactions from management, instead of re-focusing on that passion and getting back to have been to squander huge amounts of money on FAKE PASSION (the pointless Values Matter campaign... happy, passion-filled TMs and good product are all you need to convince the public of our values, throwing money away doesn't do that). And this push for tech upgrades. Yes, some aspects of this are good in that infrastructure needed replacing in some places. But management has to my mind an almost cult-like religious conviction about how technology is somehow going to save WFM. I seriously don't think that's going to happen. In fact it will probably blow up in our face in some way over another. We are not going to recapture customer loyalty with technology, I'm sorry. Just another diversion and just another example of biting off more than we can chew as always. Only we keep upping the ante on these things and our failures get more and more expensive.