Watching Wall Street hammer major food-retailing stocks immediately after Amazon’s June announcement to buy Whole Foods Market, I can understand why you — an independent natural products retailer — may have felt a shiver down your spine. Since then, those grocery stocks have recovered most of their losses as investors...
Does Amazon care what it sells? Does Whole Foods Markets care what it sells? The opposing answers to these two questions—“No” and “Yes” respectively—are at the heart of the problem Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, now hopes to solve. Put another way, can Bezos make fresh, organic, free-range filet mignon behave...
In January, we published the main findings from the 2017 – 39th Annual Retailer Survey by WholeFoods Magazine. Hundreds of independent natural products retailers from across the U.S. participated, representing $1.59 billion in sales and over 2.5 million square feet of retail space. It was by far the largest response...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The History of Rudeness At first, it wasn’t online websites that were stealing your brick-and-mortar customers; it was the vitamin discount shop down the street. Where are those discounters today? For the most part, gone. A straight hard-discount vitamin strategy inside of four walls turned out to be an unsustainable...
I squeaked through the public elementary and high school system during a time when it was still socially and culturally acceptable to win—and to lose—competitions like footraces, softball games, rope climbing, and spelling bees. Teachers still graded papers with embarrassingly bright red markers, highlighting areas needing improvement. At the time,...
With the Internet putting extreme pressure on the way you’ve always done business, it’s easy to feel helpless. First, take a moment to console yourself that you are not alone. Virtually every business in every industry has had to rethink and restructure its business model to continue to compete in...
People of a certain age will remember The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, a now-classic 1966 Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western where good-guy gunslinger Eastwood teams up with a bad guy gunslinger to find a buried cache of stolen Confederate gold during the American Civil War. The messy plot, with...
WholeFoods Magazine’s annual retailer survey, published each December, reveals tremendous detail about the variety of independent U.S. natural products stores. At my recent survey seminar for the Southeast Natural Products Association SOHO tradeshow in Orlando, attendees asked me to “build” a model using examples from the survey so retailers could...
If you’ve had a chance to read last month’s 38th Annual Retailer Survey Overview, with the Retail Insights’ 2016 Universe for Premium Natural and Organic Food, Supplement and Personal Care Sales (WholeFoods Magazine, December, 2015, page 25), you know that the Cincinnati, OH-based Kroger conventional supermarket chain is generating billions...
You’ve probably heard the term “frenemies,” a new word that combines “friends” and “enemies.” In the business world, frenemies are two competitors that cooperate with each other to increase business, but at the expense of sharing customer purchase data and other proprietary business information. The birth of the Internet spawned...
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