This week Whole Foods launched a loyalty program for Amazon Prime members, offering them special discounts at their grocery stores. The specials are available now in Florida and will roll out to all other stores starting this summer.
Associate professor Lee McKnight in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University says this latest move is no surprise, and a logical next step in the cyber-physical strategy Amazon is increasingly demonstrating.
McKnight says:
“The latest announcement of the deeper integration of Amazon Prime membership with Whole Foods in-store pricing, not just for those customers when having their groceries delivered at home, is no surprise.
“It is a logical next step in the cyber-physical strategy Amazon is increasingly demonstrating, whether with its no-check-out physical stores in Chicago and elsewhere, its tie-ins with Sears Automotive Centers for tire installation (after online purchase), and for groceries, using Whole Foods stores and the overlap of Amazon Prime membership to extend the amount, and percent, of disposable income spent on Amazon-provided goods and services.
“Naturally, to convince customers they truly are getting Amazon-typical thin profit margin prices, and not the prior premium priced ‘Whole Paycheck’ prices of Whole Foods pre-Amazon purchase, will take some time. But there is no reason to think this presents an insurmountable obstacle. Competing grocers should be afraid. Very afraid. And better start working on their own cyber-physical strategies, or risk the fate of other industries obsolesced in real-time by Amazon’s leveraging its mega-data-centers-deep cloud analytics expertise to gain market share.”
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