Just got back from Austin...
A whole new ballgame in grocery shopping
Whole Foods turns drudgery into entertainment
By Bruce Horovitz
USA TODAY
AUSTIN � Some folks go to the supermarket for food. How quaint. How boring. How 2004.
Whole Foods, the all-natural grocery chain beloved by soccer moms, Hollywood starlets and the organically inclined, is about to stake its future on a very different premise: shopping as showtime.
You don't need a ticket to enter the pulsating, almost-as-big-as-a-Wal-Mart concept store that opened six days ago adjacent to its new headquarters here. But you do need to wipe clean all preconceptions about grocery shopping as drudgery. Call it a better-for-you food bazaar on organic steroids. Or the grocery equivalent of Disney World for food junkies.
Whatever you call it, Whole Foods executives believe that the ideas in the store � which is broken up into enticing, food-centric lands, la Disney � could have the kind of industry-shaking impact on grocery shopping that Starbucks has had on coffee drinking. Whole Foods could help transform grocery shopping into interactive theater.
�Americans love to eat. And Americans love to shop. But we don't like to shop for food. It's a chore, like doing laundry,� laments John Mackey, 51, the sneaker-and-jeans-wearing founder of Whole Foods. �Whole Foods thinks shopping should be fun. With this store, we're pioneering a new lifestyle that synthesizes health and pleasure. We don't see a contradiction.�
Whole Foods is bulking up at a time when many Americans are becoming more food enamored and health conscious and are turning away from the local supermarket that knows them only by their frequent-shopper number.
Whole Foods is waving goodbye to those smallish, 31,000-square-foot stores and saying hello to 50,000-square-foot versions, 58 of which will be built in the next four years. This, at a time when the rest of the industry is actually shrinking its stores to an average 34,000 square feet, the Food Marketing Institute estimates.
This showcase Whole Foods is 80,000 square feet. Executives won't say what it cost, but supermarket real estate experts familiar with Whole Foods peg it as high as $15 million, about twice the industry average.
What that investment bought: more room to wow shoppers � and more reasons for them to dawdle. And, as always, all the food is free of artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, sweeteners or hydrogenated fats.
The premise is simple: make grocery shopping fun. Just bring your platinum card for a visit to:
�Candy Island, where you can dip a fresh strawberry in a flowing, chocolate fountain for $1.59 each.
�Lamar Street Greens, where you can sit among the organic produce and have a salad handmade for you to enjoy with a glass of Chardonnay.
�Fifth Street Seafood, a version of Seattle's Pike Place Market, where you can have any of 150 fresh seafood items cooked, sliced, smoked or fried for instant eating.
�Whole Body, where a massage therapist will work the kinks out with a 25-minute deep-tissue massage for $50.
Each of the sections is designed with self-contained architecture that is curved inward to feel intimate � and to encourage shoppers to linger. Whole Foods plans to plop some of these elements into future stores, from Annapolis, Md., to Salt Lake City to Cincinnati. Many current stores also will adopt pieces. It's a good bet the upper crust of the $450 billion supermarket industry will try to follow.
The new store is light years from the tiny, Safer Way Natural Foods store that Mackey founded 27 years ago in Austin. And a far cry from the 10,000-square-foot Whole Foods he co-founded two years later. The chain that grew mostly by acquisition now is growing one store at a time.
Pleasure is woven into every crevice of the new flagship store. Such as the guy who hawks fresh hot doughnuts � with no artificial ingredients, of course. A walk-in beer cooler (bring your mittens) and 800 kinds of beer. And 14 pastry chefs � any of whom will be happy to whip up a baked Alaska on the spot.
�We're not Holy Foods,� explains co-President Walter Robb, chief creator of the new store. �We're Whole Foods.�
It's not even just about food anymore. The chain's first all-organic clothing section is here, with a private dressing room if you need to try on that $44 robe.
And it's hard to miss the display of organic baby clothing. Does any kid really need a $14 organic cotton onesie? Whole Foods thinks so. Most conventional cotton is grown with fungicides and insecticides.
And who goes to the grocery store expecting to purchase an $89.99 vat of almond butter? Or some candy S'mores covered in apparently-not-so-bad-for-you chocolate at $16.99 a pound.
To be fair, a roll of the store's own 365 brand paper towels (recycled paper, of course) fetches a modest 99 cents. And while you can easily spend $49.99 on a bottle of wine among the 1,800 varieties it sells, you can also find some for $4.99.
�They're not selling food,� supermarket guru Phil Lempert says. �They're selling life.�
Not just a longer life � also a better one, particularly while you're in the store. Store designers stretched hard to appeal to every sense.
The lighting for the produce is the kind used in art galleries. The music is classical. Walk by the hot nut section and special fans waft that tummy-teasing smell of roasting nuts your way. The store signs and displays aren't plastic and particle board but a more eco-friendly, woodlike product made from wheat straw.
�Whole Foods offers a psychological absolution of our excesses,� says Jerald Jellison, psychology professor at University of Southern California. �After filling your cart with sinful wine, beer, cheese and breads, you rationalize it's healthy, so that cancels out the negatives.�
No one's laughing.
Certainly not the grocery industry. Whole Foods, which just turned 25, has only 168 stores but has the industry's full attention. A typical supermarket sells south of $400 per square foot; a Whole Foods exceeds $800. Sales at the average market grew about 1% last year; the typical Whole Foods posted a nearly 15% jump. The results �speak for themselves,� says Mackey, who expects Whole Foods' revenue to mushroom to $10 billion in 2010 from $3.9 billion in 2004.
Supermarket experts say Whole Foods has raised the bar for the industry. �You can't just be a purveyor of meal ingredients anymore,� says David Merrefield, editorial director at Supermarket News. �Whole Foods brings excitement to an industry that needs it.�
So, other executives take note when Whole Foods changes the formula. Such as making new stores Wi-Fi hot spots. Or plopping sit-down eateries in unusual places, such as next to the lettuce bin. Or devoting up to two-thirds of the space to more profitable, prepared foods.
�Traditional supermarkets don't have a driver to get customers in,� says Jason Whitmer, analyst at FTN Midwest. �Whole Foods has the one thing that's lacking in the food retail business: creativity.�
Most customers thrive on it, but a few are overwhelmed. �It's too much for me,� says Craig Johnson, 27, a store manager from Austin who bought fresh-ground coffee and left. �They took it over the top.� He plans to shop at a smaller organic-food store, but he'll still stop by the new store on occasion so his 2-year-old son, Reed, can use the outdoor playground.
But on the store's opening day, the mood of hundreds of shoppers who waited in line just to get in was closer to adulation.
Lynn Larson is a self-described Whole Foods junkie. �I moved to Austin for Whole Foods,� brags the 42-year-old Pittsburgh native. She doesn't buy the stereotype about the chain being only for the rich. For lunch, she sat at the store's handmade salad eatery with a friend, munching a $6.95 Tropical Green Salad � that was big enough for them to split.
That's lunch for less than $3.50 � cheaper than McDonald's � with the guarantee of natural ingredients. �If you're a foodie,� she says, �this store is heaven.�
Julie Danehy had a lot more than a low-budget lunch in mind. She waited with her 14-month-old daughter, Sadie, for the store to open. Danehy, whose second child is due in May, spends $250 on a typical Whole Foods trip. That's pocket change compared with the $600 she spent weekly when she was a personal chef for an organic-minded Austin family of four.
This stereotype of Whole Foods as �Whole Paycheck� � or a Volvo parking lot � infuriates Mackey.
�Let's go down right now and count the Volvos in the parking lot,� he says, his face turning almost scarlet. �Many of our customers are so environmentally conscious they don't even own cars.�
But most are well-educated. �The common link is education, not income,� Mackey says. �That correlates with income, but not perfectly.�
Supermarket News recently named Mackey � who never finished college � the seventh-most influential person in the food industry. That's two notches ahead of Costco CEO Jim Sinegal and only a handful of notches below top-ranked H. Lee Scott Jr., CEO of Wal-Mart Stores. Not that Mackey has any desire to challenge Wal-Mart, which has an estimated 20% share of the industry while Whole Foods is still well under 1%.
�We're not a religion. We're not a cult,� Mackey says. �We don't think you'll go to hell if you don't shop at Whole Foods.�
It was amazing, There is no other grocery store on the planet that is so much fun to shop in and certainly no other store of any kind that is so much fun to work in.
Other news...
I am totally bonding with the new scooter! It's so fab, more powerful and so cush to ride. I'm ranging far and wide about town and comfortably. It rides and sounds like a motorcycle... (well, a gay motorcycle)... but that suits me fine.
My family will all be here in New Orleans soon. My sister and her partner will be here for a week for Jazz Fest, just like they always are. But, in addition, my brother and his wife, and da niece and da nephew and our friend Judy will be passing through for three days as well. The new store opening has been moved two weeks further on so I will be able to take some time off to hang with them. This is a very good thing.
>
Geek Attack! I am going to get a Crack, er Blackberry... the 7100g model; looks like a mobilephone, acts like a PDA. I can't help myself, it's so fabulous! I can do e-mail from it and it's also really good at address book, calendar and task management. It syncs with my Outlook accounts... and...and... O.K. I just want it! I realize now that a picture phone is stoopid, (just ask luca, hehe), and all the "multimedia" stuff is kind of useless. I need more of a business device and this is it.
And the phone I got six months ago is so out of date. At least the very nice man at the store didn't sneer at my hopelessly "outdated phone" when I showed it to him. He explained that since the huge merger, (you know which one...), what I needed was a new 64 bit chip in my phone instead of the 32 bit chip that was originally installed, and he promptly installed the new and mo' better chip.
He flicked me his biz card with a wink and said to come see him next week when their new stock of Blackberry 7100g units came in. Did I mention that he was attractive and charming?
I will so be there.
I have been so busy; there's so much going on for work... and it's all really great. I'm at the top of my form right now and in the right place at the right time it seems.
I'm building a new team. I'm thinking what shall I use as a binding force?
Buzz cuts? Do we climb a rope together? Paint ball? Team Tatoos? Lip Sync competitions? Knee walking drunk expeditions in the French Quarter? A Team spelling bee? Poetry recitations? Twister? Truth or Dare? Gymnastics competitions?Who's yer mama? Line dancing?
I'll think of something.
I'm having such a good time.
durlx
A whole new ballgame in grocery shopping
Whole Foods turns drudgery into entertainment
By Bruce Horovitz
USA TODAY
AUSTIN � Some folks go to the supermarket for food. How quaint. How boring. How 2004.
Whole Foods, the all-natural grocery chain beloved by soccer moms, Hollywood starlets and the organically inclined, is about to stake its future on a very different premise: shopping as showtime.
You don't need a ticket to enter the pulsating, almost-as-big-as-a-Wal-Mart concept store that opened six days ago adjacent to its new headquarters here. But you do need to wipe clean all preconceptions about grocery shopping as drudgery. Call it a better-for-you food bazaar on organic steroids. Or the grocery equivalent of Disney World for food junkies.
Whatever you call it, Whole Foods executives believe that the ideas in the store � which is broken up into enticing, food-centric lands, la Disney � could have the kind of industry-shaking impact on grocery shopping that Starbucks has had on coffee drinking. Whole Foods could help transform grocery shopping into interactive theater.
�Americans love to eat. And Americans love to shop. But we don't like to shop for food. It's a chore, like doing laundry,� laments John Mackey, 51, the sneaker-and-jeans-wearing founder of Whole Foods. �Whole Foods thinks shopping should be fun. With this store, we're pioneering a new lifestyle that synthesizes health and pleasure. We don't see a contradiction.�
Whole Foods is bulking up at a time when many Americans are becoming more food enamored and health conscious and are turning away from the local supermarket that knows them only by their frequent-shopper number.
Whole Foods is waving goodbye to those smallish, 31,000-square-foot stores and saying hello to 50,000-square-foot versions, 58 of which will be built in the next four years. This, at a time when the rest of the industry is actually shrinking its stores to an average 34,000 square feet, the Food Marketing Institute estimates.
This showcase Whole Foods is 80,000 square feet. Executives won't say what it cost, but supermarket real estate experts familiar with Whole Foods peg it as high as $15 million, about twice the industry average.
What that investment bought: more room to wow shoppers � and more reasons for them to dawdle. And, as always, all the food is free of artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, sweeteners or hydrogenated fats.
The premise is simple: make grocery shopping fun. Just bring your platinum card for a visit to:
�Candy Island, where you can dip a fresh strawberry in a flowing, chocolate fountain for $1.59 each.
�Lamar Street Greens, where you can sit among the organic produce and have a salad handmade for you to enjoy with a glass of Chardonnay.
�Fifth Street Seafood, a version of Seattle's Pike Place Market, where you can have any of 150 fresh seafood items cooked, sliced, smoked or fried for instant eating.
�Whole Body, where a massage therapist will work the kinks out with a 25-minute deep-tissue massage for $50.
Each of the sections is designed with self-contained architecture that is curved inward to feel intimate � and to encourage shoppers to linger. Whole Foods plans to plop some of these elements into future stores, from Annapolis, Md., to Salt Lake City to Cincinnati. Many current stores also will adopt pieces. It's a good bet the upper crust of the $450 billion supermarket industry will try to follow.
The new store is light years from the tiny, Safer Way Natural Foods store that Mackey founded 27 years ago in Austin. And a far cry from the 10,000-square-foot Whole Foods he co-founded two years later. The chain that grew mostly by acquisition now is growing one store at a time.
Pleasure is woven into every crevice of the new flagship store. Such as the guy who hawks fresh hot doughnuts � with no artificial ingredients, of course. A walk-in beer cooler (bring your mittens) and 800 kinds of beer. And 14 pastry chefs � any of whom will be happy to whip up a baked Alaska on the spot.
�We're not Holy Foods,� explains co-President Walter Robb, chief creator of the new store. �We're Whole Foods.�
It's not even just about food anymore. The chain's first all-organic clothing section is here, with a private dressing room if you need to try on that $44 robe.
And it's hard to miss the display of organic baby clothing. Does any kid really need a $14 organic cotton onesie? Whole Foods thinks so. Most conventional cotton is grown with fungicides and insecticides.
And who goes to the grocery store expecting to purchase an $89.99 vat of almond butter? Or some candy S'mores covered in apparently-not-so-bad-for-you chocolate at $16.99 a pound.
To be fair, a roll of the store's own 365 brand paper towels (recycled paper, of course) fetches a modest 99 cents. And while you can easily spend $49.99 on a bottle of wine among the 1,800 varieties it sells, you can also find some for $4.99.
�They're not selling food,� supermarket guru Phil Lempert says. �They're selling life.�
Not just a longer life � also a better one, particularly while you're in the store. Store designers stretched hard to appeal to every sense.
The lighting for the produce is the kind used in art galleries. The music is classical. Walk by the hot nut section and special fans waft that tummy-teasing smell of roasting nuts your way. The store signs and displays aren't plastic and particle board but a more eco-friendly, woodlike product made from wheat straw.
�Whole Foods offers a psychological absolution of our excesses,� says Jerald Jellison, psychology professor at University of Southern California. �After filling your cart with sinful wine, beer, cheese and breads, you rationalize it's healthy, so that cancels out the negatives.�
No one's laughing.
Certainly not the grocery industry. Whole Foods, which just turned 25, has only 168 stores but has the industry's full attention. A typical supermarket sells south of $400 per square foot; a Whole Foods exceeds $800. Sales at the average market grew about 1% last year; the typical Whole Foods posted a nearly 15% jump. The results �speak for themselves,� says Mackey, who expects Whole Foods' revenue to mushroom to $10 billion in 2010 from $3.9 billion in 2004.
Supermarket experts say Whole Foods has raised the bar for the industry. �You can't just be a purveyor of meal ingredients anymore,� says David Merrefield, editorial director at Supermarket News. �Whole Foods brings excitement to an industry that needs it.�
So, other executives take note when Whole Foods changes the formula. Such as making new stores Wi-Fi hot spots. Or plopping sit-down eateries in unusual places, such as next to the lettuce bin. Or devoting up to two-thirds of the space to more profitable, prepared foods.
�Traditional supermarkets don't have a driver to get customers in,� says Jason Whitmer, analyst at FTN Midwest. �Whole Foods has the one thing that's lacking in the food retail business: creativity.�
Most customers thrive on it, but a few are overwhelmed. �It's too much for me,� says Craig Johnson, 27, a store manager from Austin who bought fresh-ground coffee and left. �They took it over the top.� He plans to shop at a smaller organic-food store, but he'll still stop by the new store on occasion so his 2-year-old son, Reed, can use the outdoor playground.
But on the store's opening day, the mood of hundreds of shoppers who waited in line just to get in was closer to adulation.
Lynn Larson is a self-described Whole Foods junkie. �I moved to Austin for Whole Foods,� brags the 42-year-old Pittsburgh native. She doesn't buy the stereotype about the chain being only for the rich. For lunch, she sat at the store's handmade salad eatery with a friend, munching a $6.95 Tropical Green Salad � that was big enough for them to split.
That's lunch for less than $3.50 � cheaper than McDonald's � with the guarantee of natural ingredients. �If you're a foodie,� she says, �this store is heaven.�
Julie Danehy had a lot more than a low-budget lunch in mind. She waited with her 14-month-old daughter, Sadie, for the store to open. Danehy, whose second child is due in May, spends $250 on a typical Whole Foods trip. That's pocket change compared with the $600 she spent weekly when she was a personal chef for an organic-minded Austin family of four.
This stereotype of Whole Foods as �Whole Paycheck� � or a Volvo parking lot � infuriates Mackey.
�Let's go down right now and count the Volvos in the parking lot,� he says, his face turning almost scarlet. �Many of our customers are so environmentally conscious they don't even own cars.�
But most are well-educated. �The common link is education, not income,� Mackey says. �That correlates with income, but not perfectly.�
Supermarket News recently named Mackey � who never finished college � the seventh-most influential person in the food industry. That's two notches ahead of Costco CEO Jim Sinegal and only a handful of notches below top-ranked H. Lee Scott Jr., CEO of Wal-Mart Stores. Not that Mackey has any desire to challenge Wal-Mart, which has an estimated 20% share of the industry while Whole Foods is still well under 1%.
�We're not a religion. We're not a cult,� Mackey says. �We don't think you'll go to hell if you don't shop at Whole Foods.�
It was amazing, There is no other grocery store on the planet that is so much fun to shop in and certainly no other store of any kind that is so much fun to work in.
Other news...
I am totally bonding with the new scooter! It's so fab, more powerful and so cush to ride. I'm ranging far and wide about town and comfortably. It rides and sounds like a motorcycle... (well, a gay motorcycle)... but that suits me fine.
My family will all be here in New Orleans soon. My sister and her partner will be here for a week for Jazz Fest, just like they always are. But, in addition, my brother and his wife, and da niece and da nephew and our friend Judy will be passing through for three days as well. The new store opening has been moved two weeks further on so I will be able to take some time off to hang with them. This is a very good thing.
Geek Attack! I am going to get a Crack, er Blackberry... the 7100g model; looks like a mobilephone, acts like a PDA. I can't help myself, it's so fabulous! I can do e-mail from it and it's also really good at address book, calendar and task management. It syncs with my Outlook accounts... and...and... O.K. I just want it! I realize now that a picture phone is stoopid, (just ask luca, hehe), and all the "multimedia" stuff is kind of useless. I need more of a business device and this is it.
And the phone I got six months ago is so out of date. At least the very nice man at the store didn't sneer at my hopelessly "outdated phone" when I showed it to him. He explained that since the huge merger, (you know which one...), what I needed was a new 64 bit chip in my phone instead of the 32 bit chip that was originally installed, and he promptly installed the new and mo' better chip.
He flicked me his biz card with a wink and said to come see him next week when their new stock of Blackberry 7100g units came in. Did I mention that he was attractive and charming?
I will so be there.
I have been so busy; there's so much going on for work... and it's all really great. I'm at the top of my form right now and in the right place at the right time it seems.
I'm building a new team. I'm thinking what shall I use as a binding force?
Buzz cuts? Do we climb a rope together? Paint ball? Team Tatoos? Lip Sync competitions? Knee walking drunk expeditions in the French Quarter? A Team spelling bee? Poetry recitations? Twister? Truth or Dare? Gymnastics competitions?Who's yer mama? Line dancing?
I'll think of something.
I'm having such a good time.
durlx
posted by durlx at 3/18/2005 11:06:00 PM
2 comments
