they have similar developments at similar pricepoints in downtown Austin. which seems crazy to me since for the same money you could buy a really nice place with acreage like a mile away. and now they just opened a ridiculous new Whole Foods which has a 3-level underground parking lot, which takes forever to get into and out of. long term, i don't know if they can depend on a lot of people spending an extra 45 minutes in the parking lot for the pleasure of spending time in exhaust fumes in the dark.
now, i can understand having an underground parking lot for a grocery store in a place like Manhattan or Tokyo, but there happens to be a lot of land in Texas. it's almost like they want to have this fake land scarcity to make things seem more urban.
it reminds me of the scene in "A Man in Full" where, in the middle of blistering summer heat, this rich guy blasts the A/C so that it will be really cold in his "lodge" and he can have a big fire blazing in the hearth.
these same Whole Foods geniuses just closed their "old" grocery store (which wasn't even 10 years old, i don't think), which was literally across the street. at that location, they had a regular parking lot, and then they had this stupid parking garage that was like 400 feet from the store. they thought they could "shuttle" people to the parking lot in a golf cart, but nobody ever used it. what a waste of money.
WFMI was my first stock purchase at around 10 bucks in the early mid-90s, after it went public. now it's a ten-bagger (unless it's split, in which case it's more). based on what i've seen of their "intelligence", i can only surmise from the stock's stellar performance that the rest of the public grocery-chain industry is run very poorly.
that, or it's the Neiman-Marcus/WMT disparity thing. maybe the latter, since obviously WFMI must rely on a certain kind of high-margin shopper to pay for its parking lots. |
