So Anthony and I were discussing the perceived price discrepancies at Whole Foods one day while doing some grocery shopping up here in Mountain View. I think Whole Foods is pretty ridiculously overpriced - a place where it just costs a lot to buy stuff whose environmental and health impact is debatable. Anthony thinks that Whole Foods gets a bad rap, and that even if it does cost more, he's willing to do so because he feels like there is a better chance that what you buy at Whole Foods is sourced from more environmentally conscious and sustainable companies. This of course, is a different discussion - one that I'll let Anthony post more on later. Because the second part of the question was more of a debate, we decided to see if we could get some cold hard data on the first part - prices. Thus, the Whole Foods challenge was born. Basically, we decided to create a list of items that a shopper could find at both stores and compare the prices, head to head. Anthony knows Whole Foods pretty well, and his wife shops at Safeway - the main big box, mass market supermarket around in the Bay - occasionally, so we chose these two stores and had his wife list out products that might be at both.
Safeway also has an online presence, which made finding Safeway prices easier - however, we decided we would still go into both stores to find the items and see if online pricing and in-store pricing might be different. We also decided to list both retail prices and sales prices, knowing that stores like Safeway actually make their living off luring people in with fairly regular "sale" prices.Finally, before we went, we both decided to predict how many items we thought would be higher priced at Whole Foods, how many would be the same at both, and how many would be higher priced at Safeway.
My prediction?
14 higher priced items at Whole Foods and 6 priced the same.
Anthony's?
8 higher priced items at Whole Foods, 8 the same, and 4 higher priced at Safeway.
Some of our friends also had a side bet going - what would the price difference be? Some of the guesses? 10% higher at Whole Foods. 30% higher at Whole Foods. I thought 20%.
So...... what do you all think? Will Whole Foods be more expensive than Safeway on products that you can find at both stores? If so, by how much? If not, does it go the other way? Or, have we gotten the whole debate wrong?
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So, it was an absolute destruction. Whole Foods won by a landslide, something like 16 items priced lower and only 2 priced higher.
ReplyDeleteCould it be? Whole Foods is cheaper than Safeway?
No, the conclusion we arrived at is this - our challenge was structured improperly. Indeed, no real comparison between the two supermarket chains can really be made. Why?
1. We could not agree to compare "similar" products because we felt there was a real difference between say, organic beans and Safeway brand beans.
2. The results are skewed if we compare identical products because Whole Foods has significant economies of scale advantages - they just move more of these products than Safeway does.
3. Unless you are willing to compare apples to oranges (different products serving the same purpose) there really is not any way say which supermarket chain is cheaper.
While its still clear to me that on the basis of "feed your family", Safeway comes out cheaper, it's also fair to say that when it comes to "feed your family good, healthy food" that Whole Foods might come out ahead. It may cost more in absolute terms, but what price-tag can you put on good, healthy sustenance?
What is also clear is this - if you are looking to buy the types of organic and socially responsible items that you can find at Whole Foods, you are probably better off going to Whole Foods.