There is an Amazon locker in the Whole Foods on NW Couch, about fifteen feet from the bulk bins. I stood between them longer than a normal person would. On one side, a wall of matte gray steel with a screen on it. On the other, gravity dispensers of steel cut oats and a handwritten card about a farm in Hood River.
Two years after the acquisition, that fifteen feet is still the entire story.
Whole Foods built a brand on friction that felt like virtue. You paid more. You waited in a longer line. The sign told you the name of the person who raised the chicken. The inefficiency was the product.
Amazon built a brand on the opposite religion. Remove every step between wanting and having. One click. Two days. Then one day. Then a locker in the store you used to walk into slowly.
You cannot merge a brand built on friction with a brand built on erasing it and expect the shopper to feel nothing.
So far the integration has been priced, not positioned. Prime discounts on the shelf tags. A blue Prime logo where the store used to put a farmer. Cheaper avocados, which everyone wrote about, and a slow erosion of the reason anyone paid extra in the first place, which almost nobody did.
Here is the part that gets lost. Price was never Whole Foods' problem. Whole Paycheck was a joke people told affectionately, the way you complain about a restaurant you keep going back to. The premium was the proof. Fix the price without replacing the proof and you are left with a slightly expensive grocery store and no argument for itself.
Trader Joe's is the useful contrast. Cheap and weird, and the weirdness does the work the price cannot. Costco is cheap and enormous, and the enormity does it. Whole Foods was expensive and moral. Take away expensive and the moral part has to carry more weight than it has ever carried, and right now nobody at either company is saying out loud who is responsible for carrying it.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Acquisition decks answer the operational question and defer the identity one. Distribution, margin, supply chain, synergy by slide nine. Nobody stands up and asks what the combined thing believes.
Price was never Whole Foods' problem.
Truffles has opinions about exactly one grocery brand, which is whichever bag currently lives in the pantry, and she will yell at that bag until it opens. Barnaby has no opinions and gets fed at the same time anyway. Two years in, I still cannot tell you which of them is Amazon.