Amazon Is Still Sorting Out Its Grocery Strategy
The Whole Foods deal highlights the need to make its food-related offerings more coherent.
Remember when the toughest choice was paper or plastic?
Photographer: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images
When Amazon.com Inc. announced a year ago this week that it was buying the Whole Foods supermarket chain, investors braced for an industry shake-up. Stock prices of companies even remotely connected to groceries tumbled. Experts imagined supermarket price wars and stores transformed by Amazon robots. Some predicted Amazon would leverage Whole Foods stores as online delivery hubs, or as a launchpad for the pharmacy business.
The outlandish hopes weren’t Amazon’s doing, but so much — too much — was expected of Amazon to transform the grocery shopping experience. What’s perhaps most surprising since the world’s most ambitious company stomped into groceries was how little has changed. For Amazon, adding Whole Foods made its jumble of grocery-related offerings more disjointed. And while the ripple effects from the Whole Foods deal have been profound, as my colleague Sarah Halzack pointed out, predictions of Amazon bushwhacking the grocery business haven’t come true yet.