In the past year, Whole Foods has increased foot traffic at the expense of Trader Joe’s, Walgreen’s and Dollar Tree, according to Sense360, a California-based company that tracks location data from millions of smartphone users. The data covers Whole Foods locations that are within a mile of competing stores.
In addition, the number of shoppers who visited a Whole Foods at least six times in the past year increased to 11 percent in August as compared to 9 percent a year earlier, according to surveys by consumer products research company Tabs Analytics.
As for the competition for grocery dollars between Amazon / Whole Foods and Walmart, a former Amazon executive said that Amazon is “willing to experiment and be totally misunderstood for long periods of time. Walmart is built to deliver pallets to 4,000 stores and Amazon is built to deliver packages to millions of homes. Who do you want to bet on: the pallet people or the package people?”