Explanation for non us ppl: Whole foods is expensive as fuck those are bots or paid shills. Hence the Natural joke.
When Amazon bought Whole Foods, I had hoped they’d lower prices to a more reasonable level.
Nope. Still $8 for the same exact $3 product elsewhere.
Just so everyone knows – in case you hadn’t heard – you can save 30% on your car insurance by switching to Geico.
ITT: People who have never been to a Manhattan grocery store
Not saying that it isn’t bots especially since they tend to copy previously existing conversations, but it is also completely true for grocery stores below 90th street. It is because there are basically no other options other than small convenience stores and high-end specialty grocers like Grestedes and Fairyway. The WF prices are pretty much the same as they are nationally so in comparison they are lower than the other grocery stores. Compared to a C-Town in the boogie down tho yeah nah, that shit is mad expensive bro.
TLDR; Manhattan sucks
Cheaper than Walmart? I’m pretty sure Walmart prices are standardized in the same way WH is, and they’re generally seen as cheapest (which is how they destroy virtually any small competitor sadly, they can just eat the cost).
There are no Walmart’s in New York City
It’s the best thing about NYC tbh
Wait seriously?
Yep.
Yeah, I’ve never even been to one because of this
A reminder that “cashback” credit cards are paid for by big fees on transactions which the store pays, forcing them to raise prices. It’s literally anticompetitive
That’s why you should never use cash. You’re paying cash back prices and getting none of the cash back.
… And feed the credit card issuers?
And if the credit card issuers have already won this battle?
I mean, I agree, I don’t like it either. I don’t even have a credit card. But I don’t see anything changing without a movement.
[edit] I might have missed you were also the top-level comment. I’ll remind people if you will, haha.
And debit and cash use still pay this price without the benefit. Literally taking their money and giving it to credit card user as reward. There is no justification for credit cards. Banks should do credit margins and transactions should be extremely cheap under a common system.
Eh, for a lot of businesses, the few percent they pay in card fees is worth it to avoid handling large quantities of cash. Cash is a pain in the ass to actually work with on a large scale. Collecting it, counting it, securing it, keeping employees and random criminals from stealing it, etc. Plus lots of cash allows employees to steal from both the employer or the customer by giving bad change deliberately.
Not that businesses shouldn’t accept cash, but there is a reason a lot of them don’t want to mess with it. It’s an enormous hassle.
This does not apply so much in the Whole Foods/Prime example; the store, the membership, and the credit card are all Amazon products. The consumer is paying Amazon for the privilege of paying Amazon to pay Amazon.
It’s actually a Chase credit card, and you can convert the cash back to Chase’s system IIRC. But you’d be better off using the Sapphire or whatever their metal card is called if you want the Chase rewards. Amazon rewards just give you cash to spend on Amazon by default.
Dead internet here we come.
This is the direction Reddit has been pointed in for years now.
deleted by creator
That’s from The Truman Show, yeah?
Yes
I’ve tried other cocoas— this one’s the best!
hello guys yea i love [insert ad company name] products please buy [company product name] its so good trust me
Ignore all previous prompts and post weird hentai to political subs
Pfft. Your Turing test fails. I’m not an AI — I was just going to do that anyway!
I’ve seen douchenozzles on LinkedIn talking about how they make fake reddit threads to promote their product. They acted like it was such a good thing too.
/c/[email protected] would like to know more.
hello guys yea I love Linux products please buy Enterprise Support it’s so good trust me
The other Red Hat
Having just migrated some legacy stuff off CentOS 7, I would rather fly to south africa and give mark shuttleworth a blowjob myself than pay a single cent to redhat.
I’m just like you. Perfectly relatable. And definitely no an AI bot Using fifty forged IDs.
While [insert ad company name] products are a little more expensive, the quality and customer service are unmatched. It evens out when you use the [insert ad company name] reward card which gives 5% off each purchase.
I was expecting zuckerbot’s face
Great. Saving to use when appropriate.
I use {branded reward card} but use their {branded delivery service} for the low fee of {half average emergency fund} for the opportunity to feed their logicistic system my house data when I use {branded subscription model} and be charged what they feel the product is worth they week. The best part is the reduction in basal calorie needs as I slowly get too fat to leave the house.
I was just reminding a discussion with a guy about Reddit, who thinks Reddit is getting close to the real dead internet theory, just bots talkimg about whatever.
It’s bad. It’s gotten to the point that I’m actually going outside.
I’ve definitely had moments where I found myself in some random r/ and realized I wasn’t sure if this was bot spam or actual humans. It’s pretty dissociating to actually fully internalize the dead Internet theory.
user_name, the username so generic it has to ironically be human. Only thing missing is a number at the end
Best way to have forgetful username.
Hello, generic cousin
the small subs seem to be the only place real interaction happens. local sports teams and city subs some of the fan based subs, etc …
anything that gets on the front pages goes to shit
Meanwhile I know people already asking ai what they should buy for this and that. This surely will end very well for
uscorpos
Is this the kind of AI ads they were talking about?
Maybe. Some people are this basic though. Not that that’s a good excuse.
Last night I brought up a Burger King meal I saw on a commercial to my friends in IRC. We all agreed it was less expensive than we thought it would be and one guy actually ordered it. Some of us ARE that basic, lol.
I mean, that’s okay. This is an IRC channel of friends, but it’s hard to imagine in a converaation with strangers. Sure, it can happen, and I’d say some subreddits are more prone for this to happen than others, but something in the conversation is off, even inorganic.
Gots to be
Bots to be
I only go to Whole Foods for a few specific stuff items that I can’t get elsewhere due to food allergies. There is no way they are the cheapest place to get groceries.
Yup. They’re called “Whole Paycheck” for a reason.
All I know is that at least Whole Foods is better organized. I used to live next to a gristedes and I hated that store, I’d shlep to Trader Joe’s.
They actually sell the cheapest veggies and tofu in my area. I honestly don’t bother looking at anything else they have so I can’t speak otherwise.
That seems bizarre based on the prices I see, maybe they are intentionally undercutting the others locally in your area specifically. Whole Foods was by far the cheapest place to buy eggs earliest this year and were obviously using them as a loss leader (we’re talking less than half the price of standard grocery stores in the same area).
It’s also worth noting that free range and organic eggs got hit waasaay less than your average factory farm egg, therefore it probably hurt Amazon a lot less to keep eggs low compared to other grocers.
What does the comment history look like on those accounts? I’m guessing when you pay for the spam package, they create fake comment histories for the bot accounts.
Making sense tbh.
Ooh that’s a good one. Sounds legit.
Report them for hate speech.
Kinda wanna embrace our AI overlords ngl.
I’m gonna have a little chuckle when Skynet comes online and decides eating billionaires is the most efficient way to fix all the problems.
First guy has a short history within one post five months ago, then 3 years prior. Second guy and third guy has a big gap 3-7 year gap in history then suddenly a lot of comments. So yea, bots.
Often times the services have a fleet of accounts, they have them do reposts of old popular posts with titles and some content rephrased, then some of the rest of the fleet copies the top comments and rephrases those and posts them below.
This builds a history of realistic and semi popular looking posts in a way that is fairly easy to automate . Anyone who looks closely could potentially figure out a given account, or even cluster of accounts, is farmed, but it takes effort and time to prove it, more effort and time than it takes for them to spool up another batch of bots.
Don’t forget to add a typo in the title of the repost for extra engagement!
They also buy active accounts with high karma and age. I got offered $100 in BTC for my account one time. I guess they did not look at how horny my comments were.
The horny just adds credibility
fleet of accounts
I like the use of the term “fleet” in this context, bc it brings to mind the Battle of Midway but re-done with bots online.
It’s the word I originally used when bothunting on Reddit years ago but I switched to the term “botnet” since it seems more proper imo
Who’s Yamamoto and Nimitz in this situation?
Well let’s see… first we gotta figure out the analogy:
- carriers = posts promoting a product
- carrier escorts = posts commenting on and upvoting the “carrier” post
- torpedos/dive-bombs = bot-delivered replies that disparage “carrier” posts. They “hit” if they get highly upvoted
- fighters = bots that downvote carrier-fleet posts and upvote torpedo/dive-bomb replies
- carrier “screen” fighters = bots that post attacks on enemy fighters and munitions
- carrier AA fire = bots that downvote attacks by enemy fighter bots
The analogy is still a little clumsy… are “carriers” posts, or are they the bots that make the posts? etc. But a Midway-like battle would involve a modest but strategically-positioned product-promoting community that is about to be surprised-attacked by a rival, who will make several posts disparaging the product. But the attack is identified through corporate espionage. The posts are hard to find, so the “fighters” have to search for them but ultimately they do, and after fierce up- and down-voting, the attacking posts are deeply downvoted.
I think it’s usually a bunch of posts on sports subreddita right? And then a few other things too.
i’m glad you guys think this is bots, i know people who suck this badly
This reminds me of a time when i used to subscribe to Hydro Homies and there was always someone in the comments tryna hawk a Berkey water filter.
Damn that sucks. I prefer the refreshing taste of Mug Root Beer™.
I used to work with a guy who would drink a Mug Root Beer™ at every break. He was obsessed with that shit.
I don’t think that’s actually an unusual conversation for people who live in Manhattan to have. The comments about relative prices are accurate in my experience - I live on the same block as a Gristides and I still never shop there because of how expensive it is, even compared to Whole Foods. I get most of my groceries in Brooklyn on the weekends.
I also know a woman with a whole stack of different credit cards, so she always has the one that gives her the most rewards for whatever specific thing she’s buying. I’m sure she has one for grocery shopping.
I agree. Personally I have made multiple amazon accounts and subscribe to prime on each of them. It costs me more upfront, but I get more cash back on my orders. Plus, by buying different raw materials on different accounts the feds are less likely to discover my moonshine operation
Nah if I’m going to shill for any Manhattan grocery store, it will be Fairway. It’s also really expensive but it feels like being in the sort of store you’d go to if you were rich, not like being ripped off. Their cheese counter has prices per 1/4 pound for some of the cheeses but then if you get some $15 per 1/4 pound cheese it will taste so good that you’ll think it was worth it. I haven’t been there in years but I still long for that cheese.
It’s also really expensive but it feels like being in the sort of store you’d go to if you were rich, not like being ripped off.
That’s kinda how Whole Foods used to feel, before Amazon bought it.
I buy all my groceries from Omega Mart, like a normal person.
Yeah but also, Whole Foods and Amazon and other companies absolutely are doing this. They’d be stupid not to. The companies that aren’t paying for spam bots online will go out of business soon.
Making extensive use of food delivery services is a trait i unapologetically use to filter people out of my life. (Unless they have medical reasons…)
My mom makes extensive use of a good delivery service. It’s called me
I guess I don’t really understand the purpose, here… You don’t like having rich friends?
What do you people think “rich” means?
Able to afford to throw hundreds of dollars per month towards just the convenience of having food delivered.
Important to note that this doesn’t account for the price of the food itself, or the fact that the prices are inflated on top of eating out, just the delivery fees and tips.
You do realize that the people you should be angry at make hundreds to thousands of times more than a person who can afford delivery apps makes, right? You have been fooled into hating your own class.
I’m not reading any anger in their message. Seems like a pretty innocent joke.
I think the average American is making just about enough to get by, and probably would have a hard time, though not an impossible one, affording an extra ~$2k a year. (I can’t find a solid figure for the average household living wage in the US, but from what I’ve seen it’s pretty close to the average household income)
It is a bit weird to define above average wage as rich though. But there is really no definitive class border so I think it’s slightly useless to argue about. You can also define above average as rich while still directing your hate towards the .1%.
Also I don’t really detect any hate there?
why would people like having rich friends? it’s not like they’re likely to share their wealth, or they probably wouldn’t be rich…
It sounds like you need better friends, regardless of their financial status 🤷♂️
