{"id":489341,"date":"2010-03-30T06:38:30","date_gmt":"2010-03-30T10:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/whole-foods-sales-2010-3"},"modified":"2010-03-30T06:38:30","modified_gmt":"2010-03-30T10:38:30","slug":"affluent-americans-going-even-more-gaga-for-high-end-groceries-wfmi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/489341","title":{"rendered":"Affluent Americans Going Even More Gaga For High-End Groceries (WFMI)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From JPMorgan analyst Charles Grom, good news on the Whole Foods (WFMI) front:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"padding: 0pt 0pt 0pt 5px; margin-top: 0em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; font-size: 13px;\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left; font-size: 13px; color: #000000;\"><img border=\"0\" alt=\"*  \" vspace=\"2\" width=\"0\" height=\"0\" \/><strong>Sales trends remain strong.<\/strong> Based on our store work and conversations with industry contacts, we believe that WFMI&rsquo;s IDs have remained very healthy and are likely trending above the 6.0% the company experienced during the first four weeks of 2Q. Recall, the 6.0% QTD ID represented a meaningful 350 basis point improvement over the +2.5% 1Q trend (+260 bps improvement 2-yr stacked) and was 650 bps above the trailing 3-quarter average. While the bears would point out that WFMI&rsquo;s strong QTD sales were modestly boosted by February&rsquo;s Mid-Atlantic region snowstorms (we don&rsquo;t completely disagree), we believe the company has managed to hold on to its pre-storm momentum and think the top-line is still seeing improvement. Looking ahead, we think Whole Foods&rsquo; IDs will continue to benefit from 5 factors going forward: (1) strong unit volume, (2) solid traffic trends, (3) a modest uptick in discretionary sales (e.g. floral, coffee, some confectionary), (4) reflation trends as product costs turn positive, and (5) an expanding basket size.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But, this is telling, in terms of our jobless recovery:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"padding: 0pt 0pt 0pt 5px; margin-top: 0em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; font-size: 13px;\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left; font-size: 13px; color: #000000;\"><img border=\"0\" alt=\"*  \" vspace=\"2\" width=\"0\" height=\"0\" \/><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Take #3:<\/strong><\/span> SG&amp;A in Focus &#8211; Evidence of Ongoing Expense Control.  We believe Whole Foods is firmly on its way to achieving 100 bps of SG&amp;A improvement (direct store expenses, G&amp;A, pre-opening, relocation) within the next 3-5 years. Two noteworthy observations: <strong>First<\/strong>, on the labor front, the company (1) <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>plans to keep leveraging its full-time employee base as it opens new stores, which will further reduce its full-time\/part-time split below the current 83% &#8211; driving it closer to the 70% target, and (2) has been very cautious about hiring new team members into stores less than a year old &ndash; enabling the location to reach target margins before ramping up the employee base.<\/strong><\/span> <strong>Second<\/strong>, the challenging environment has also enabled Whole Foods to completely eliminate some underperforming gourmet departments in certain stores (for example we observed noticeably fewer chocolate fountains) &ndash; thus cutting costs and helping drive the shift back to a healthy product assortment at the same time.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/whole-foods-sales-2010-3#comments\">Join the conversation about this story &#187;<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/TheMoneyGame\/~4\/knkGrSPfWCQ\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From JPMorgan analyst Charles Grom, good news on the Whole Foods (WFMI) front: Sales trends remain strong. Based on our store work and conversations with industry contacts, we believe that WFMI&rsquo;s IDs have remained very healthy and are likely trending above the 6.0% the company experienced during the first four weeks of 2Q. Recall, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-489341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}