Does Amazon Even Care About Whole Foods Anymore?
The upscale grocer doesn’t seem to be as much of a priority for its parent. It’s just one of many retail experiments.
Whole Foods’s underperformance during the pandemic is a sign of parent neglect.
Photographer: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Months of stay-at-home living have not brought Whole Foods Market quite as much of a bounty as you might expect.
The upscale grocer, owned by Amazon.com Inc., experienced a sharper year-over-year decline in traffic to its brick-and-mortar stores in September than its competitors did, Bloomberg News’s Matt Day reported this week. While its total sales are estimated to have grown during the pandemic, the gains haven’t matched those of other grocery chains, Day said. In some ways, it’s surprising that Whole Foods has not outperformed its rivals. Many of its customers are relatively affluent, the kind of people who have been able to work from home amid the public health crisis and thus have not suffered a loss of income. Those same teleworkers are likely spending more money on groceries than they did before the pandemic, when networking happy hours and business lunches were still routine.