Wholly Empty

I stopped by Whole Foods today to pick up a couple of things. And, as one might expect for a Sunday afternoon, the store was fairly busy. Despite this, there were two, or maybe three, checkstands open. So there were lines. Event he self-checkout stand had a line, and it didn't appear that it was being actively managed, with customers needing to be on the lookout for the next available register, and if something went sideways, waiting for a Whole Foods employee to come over to assist.

It was your run-of-the-mill substandard retail experience. Which may be fine for your average chain grocery store, but seemed really broken at a place that's often nicknamed "Whole Paycheck." And I think that this is what tends to drive the perception of inflation for a lot of people; the idea that certain experiences, let alone goods and services, are noticeably cut back from what they were, even though the prices haven't changed.

The point behind "shrinkflation," as it's often called, it that the average person isn't going to notice the difference. Okay, that formerly 20 ounce package of snacks is now 18 ounces for the same price, or the allowable percentage of screws in a box has gone from 2% to 3%. That's intended to be invisible to the public at large. (Whether or not it's as invisible as it's made out to be, I'm not sure.) But service industries have a harder time getting away with this, because the service is most of what they're offering as a value proposition.

Whole Foods has, for the most part, its niche of the grocery business to itself, at least on the nationwide level. So it's not in immediate danger of a competitor swooping in and scooping up large segments of its customer base. Which is too bad. Capitalism doesn't do very well when market players aren't subject to decent levels of competition.