Quote Originally Posted by gbaji View Post
Whole Foods (or "whole payheck" as some of my friends refer to it) has an "odd" buisness model. They really target a specific type of shopper and I'm sometimes convinced that it's counterproductive, and yet, somehow they remain in business. It's "odd" in that they seem to target folks who want fresh ingredients, but want it packaged the same way the processed stuff is. Which is just... strange. It's like their entire business model is to grab people who grew up "cooking" boxed mac and cheese, but want to be "really cooking", so they separately package the noodles, and the cheese, and the bechemel sauce, charge 3x the total amount, and then have the consumer combine them together. Heck. I'm pretty sure if they thought they could get away with selling a pre-measured box of water for the consumer to boil to make their mac and cheese, they'd do it. I fully expect someone to link to boxes of water at Whole Foods now.

It falls in that uncanny valley between people who buy ingredients and then combine them themselves to cook various meals and people who want to buy boxed meals. At least, that's my impression. I could be totally off on this, but I've scratched my head for years trying to figure out what the whole "individually packaged vegetables/<things that aren't normally packaged like that>" is really about, and that's the best I can come up with. Consider me baffled.
I stopped shopping at Whole Foods 15 years ago. Thanksgiving was being held at my house that year. My brother was making the stuffing and I was buying ingredients before he flew in. He insisted I should buy everything at Whole Foods. Everything cost too much but the "bread crumbs" broke the camels back. Whole Foods was selling a box of bread crumbs for $8.00!

Part of me admires this. I mean, they were taking loaves of bread that didn't sell, drying them out in an oven, crushing them, repackaging them, and selling them at a profit. I bet they turned a $2.00 loaf of bread into 2-3 $8.00 boxes of bread crumbs.