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Whole Foods buys Wild Oats [moved from General Topics]

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Anyone else heard of this recent corporate merger? As someone who shops at W.O. when I can afford it, I am wondering how this wil affect my life in a noticeable way. There are no Whole Foods near me. Any thoughts?

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  1. Yeah, my first thought is "thank goodness, maybe they can get Whole Foods-sized retail footprints with Wild Oats-style service". Or maybe they'll just screw both sides of the equation and we'll get Whole Paycheck's arrogant "of course we have pate -- one whole $9 2oz. blister package of it!" service and bigeminy-inducing price tags in a 7-11 footprint on every corner. Hopefully Trader Joe's will buy and decommission both of them, down the road a piece.

    That said, Whole Paycheck does behave very well as corporations go, and probably has a lot more positive impact on the world at large than I do. So maybe the economy of scale will be a good thing. I just take offense to the foot soldiers at Whole Foods, I suppose. The underpaid cashiers and baggers at my local Ralph's grocery store do a vastly better job than their counterparts at Whole Foods, which saddens me a bit. The union stiffs are supposed to be the bad guys!

    I can't think of any way in which this would be bad for existing Wild Oats locations. Whole Foods leveraged their larger retail footprints into bigger revenues, more locations, and eventually domination of the market segment. Wild Oats became an also-ran with insufficient leverage to support house-brand organics to the extent that Whole Foods did. Now it won't matter and you as a customer should get the benefits of both.