The Guardian reports today that the British operation of Whole Foods Market, which took over the old Fresh and Wild organic chain and opened up a huge supermarket in a former department store in Kensington, is £36 million in the red. The company has already closed the loss-making Bristol shop, but the Kensington shop “has been criticised for a lack of customer parking and operating a costly fish counter, out-sized and underused”.
Well, the Kensington shop has been criticised for a whole lot else, including operating a vast, wasteful buffet. It’s also in completely the wrong part of town, which is heavily congested (and is likely to become more so once the western congestion charge area is removed) and dependent on the slowest and most unreliable part of the London Underground. I suspect it would be better suited to a suburban location rather than in a neighbourhood convenient for Harrod’s and with a population wealthy enough to shop there. A lot of the fresh produce it sells is, in fact, not organic and as I’ve complained about before, it likes to play nanny by refusing to stock products such as flouridated toothpaste.
I have no idea about the financial status of its nearest rival, Planet Organic, but PO is the one place you can go for affordable vegetarian food, which isn’t so with Whole Foods at Kensington or anywhere else. Whenever I buy foods such as tofu (my aunt in particular likes tofu sausages and I buy them for her whenever I’m in London), I have a shop-around policy because sometimes, even local health food shops can be cheaper than the big London chains, where economies of scale are counteracted by prime rents. A lot of prepared organic food is very fine, but I remain unconvinced of the value of organic fresh produce.
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Salaams Yusuf, there still is an ongoing ‘Fresh and wild’ near where we used to live in Stoke Newington, but to be honest with you, it’s too expensive for all but the odd ‘little pleasures’ purchase. Also, I read about a Muslim-owned farm that specialises in halal, organic, free-range meat, but again found it to be prohibitively expensive compared to the local halal butchers here in North London. Where do you draw the cost/benefit line with regards to things like this? How damaging is the food we live on from mainstream supermarkets, on a physical and spiritual level? Can we trust our local ‘halal’ butchers?
I’m still waiting for our Whole Foods to tank. The words “out-sized and under used” seem to apply to our Whole Foods as well. It is a beautiful building, even has a copper waterfall, but the prices? OY!
Its no £36MM It’s £50MM and rising. You would be horrified at the amount of waste food being compacted at the back of the store. It is an unmitigated disaster of a store and is empty all o0f the week with w/e being busy with tourists and rubberneckers. It really is a blight on Kensington and shows the arrogance of their Management who were told it would not work but would not listen…a bit like our Government