Thread regarding Whole Foods Market Inc. layoffs

Ladies and Gentlemen – the show is over. Not immediately, it’s going to take a decade or so for things to unravel but we have structural problems and days of growth are behind us. What we will see happen over next few years is a massive clean-up in the stores and Global and we’ll start watching pennies instead of dollars. The pricing pressures are accelerating and with more competitors pushing into our space, price points become increasingly important and we will have difficult time dealing with this. We’ve never competed on price, and we are paying the toll right now. Our guests are not some miracle creatures completely oblivious as relates to economic reasoning. They are ‘shoppers’, they shop around and if enough options of similar goods quality/service are offered, they will lean towards the less expensive option. This is where watching pennies comes into play, if we engineer a 30% drop in profit margins, we’ll need to watch pennies, we need to push folks into PT, we’ll need to cut people, we need to cut hours, we need to cut benefits, we need to do all the things that our competitors do. It hurts, but that’s the reality. This is not WFM I joined 6 years ago, however I do recognize what’s ahead of us – to survive we have to mutate and adopt a form that we all so much despise. Unfortunately, there is no alternative path, there is no workaround here – we need to face it and each of us will have a career decision to make. I had a bit of an epiphany the other day and it dawned on me… However, even though at that moment my WFM gig went from a career to ‘just a job’, I am glad I finally sorted things out – it’s much easier once you see what’s ahead of you.