
Whole Foods admits trying to sell asparagus water for $6 was a mistake (2015) - colinprince
https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/whole-foods-pulls-6-dollar-asparagus-water-after-internet-backlash-1.3180697
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freehunter
I don't get the controversy. Now, I would never buy asparagus water, but I
also don't shop at Whole Foods. It's long been known that Whole Foods is
historically a place that sells a lot of merchandise that is not necessary but
is trendy, and they charge a premium for it.

You could just as easily say that sparkling water is a mistake when you can
get tap water and seltzer tablets for cheaper, or that Coca Cola is a mistake
when you can get sugar and caramel and water and mix them yourself.

Asparagus water sounds awful to me. But so does a lot of stuff that normal
people buy, things that are not strictly necessary for survival but people
like for some reason. This article is just "hey Whole Foods is expensive and
trendy, has anyone noticed this?"

~~~
giancarlostoro
> You could just as easily say that sparkling water is a mistake when you can
> get tap water and seltzer tablets for cheaper, or that Coca Cola is a
> mistake when you can get sugar and caramel and water and mix them yourself.

Not sure how you will get the coca / kola[0] taste in there though.

Edit: fixed cocoa to coca/kola.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-
Cola#Coca_%E2%80%93_cocai...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-
Cola#Coca_%E2%80%93_cocaine)

~~~
orev
Clearly the example given is just meant to make the larger point and not to
serve as an exact recipe to make your own Coke knock-off.

Also, since we’re being pedantic, cocoa? That’s chocolate. Coca Cola is made
with kola nut and other flavors, not chocolate.

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jorgesborges
It's not impossible to imagine an established brand being successful with
better packaging and marketing. But it's clearly just Joe from the produce
department filling bottles with water and asparagus, haphazardly slapping a
generic sticker on it, and calling it a day. I wouldn't be surprised if it was
the lone initiative of a creative store manager who wasn't thinking too much
or hard about it. I've seen equally egregious products at Starbucks.

~~~
jbob2000
> clearly just Joe from the produce department filling bottles with water and
> asparagus

Oh this is even better! You're telling me the asparagus water is hand-made?
And Made in America? Bump that price to $10, this shit is gold! And fire Joe
and replace him with Jane and then we can charge $15.

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josefresco
To be fair, other stores sell just ... tap water (no asparagus!)

It may be good social media outrage fodder, but asparagus water is low on the
list of insanely dumb things we buy.

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SketchySeaBeast
It's only a mistake because it didn't catch on.

~~~
Verdex
I actually came here to say the same thing (only I was going to be much more
verbose).

The fact of the matter is that people buy even sillier things for much more
than $6. If you're happy with your $6 asparagus water, then I don't see what
the problem is. In fact, the only time I would suggest that something bad is
going on is, I think, when you try to convince me I'm the one in the wrong for
not enjoying your weird and expensive food.

Their statement indicating it was a mistake is actually much worse:

"It was made incorrectly and has since been removed."

So, you sold people a product that was made incorrectly. So incorrectly that
you have permanently discontinued the product. Selling something stupid that
doesn't take off isn't a crime, but selling something that was made
"incorrectly" to such an extent that it has to be banished _forever_ actually
does sound like it should be a crime. Like, if I sold uranium water and
realized it was actually horrible and not as I previously thought good so I
removed it forever, then there should probably be some sort of a fine involved
at the very least.

Culturally this whole thing stinks. People enjoy silly things that cost too
much money. Ideally, this wouldn't happen, but technically I don't see the
harm. We all have to do something and if your something seems silly and
expensive to me that shouldn't be a reason for me to try to stop you from
having your fun.

But when people try to join in and start a new silly and expensive trend, the
cost of failure shouldn't be absolute ostracization. We need people to try new
things or else no progress is made. If we're going to accept some silly
things, then we should accept people trying to start any silly thing. And at
any rate, asparagus water isn't where I would draw the line. Is expensive
water really where we want our moral outrage to be focused on?

And the worst of it is that the excuse they have is horrifying. If they just
said, "sorry we messed up," then we could all move on with our lives. But
instead they said that they, a high end food distribution service, provided
their high end customers with a defective product. So defective in fact that
they had to treat it like radioactive waste and banish it to Yucca mountain
until the end of time. And it worked.

Try something stupid that's basically the same as all the other stupid things
that have already been normalized. Your company deserves to be destroyed.
Excuse yourself by saying you were only trying to commit war crimes. Oh never
mind, that's fine then.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I assume it's to reduce the cognitive dissonance - you can't say "I tried to
sell a stupid product" if you have a belief in your rightness. The product was
RIGHT, but the implementation was bad is a lot easier to deal with if you're
trying to justifying selling 2.2 oz of beef jerky for $8.00.

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avgDev
I honestly did not understand the outrage with the asparagus water.

Company makes a product, if someone is willing to buy it the company will
continue to make it. If nobody buys it, company stops making it. Yes it was a
weird decision, but people buy 'diamond' water (btw it dropped in price if you
are interested, probably due to low demand)

------
darkpuma
Quirky products don't bother me. What bothers me more is fraudulent labeling
of weights of store-packaged foods sold by weight (meats, etc).
[https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2015/06/whole-
foods...](https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2015/06/whole-foods-under-
fire-for-overcharging-customers/index.htm)

Unfortunately this isn't uncommon in the grocery industry. Stores most often
get tripped up when they sell something by the pound, package up nominal
pounds of the stuff, then label each of those packages as _precisely_ one
pound when such precision is unlikely. Next time you're in the store take a
look at the packages of ground beef; they'll say "$x per pound" and they
should then also list a precise weight of that particular package with a price
calculated for that particular package. Sometimes, not too infrequently,
stores will cut corners and simply label each package as precisely one pound,
with the error systematically in their favor.

If you believe you've discovered a store doing this, you may be able to report
that store for investigation by your local weights and measures:
[https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/dms/index.html](https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/dms/index.html)

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Jhndb
In other news (2018):
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42639479](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42639479)

~~~
freehunter
How are individually wrapped whole pickles still a real thing though?

~~~
darkpuma
Those are bizarre, I bought one as a gag gift once. Maybe I'm part of the
problem and those products survive off their novelty factor?

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JustSomeNobody
I cannot imagine when the product group was sitting around kicking out product
ideas that this didn't make at least a few of them chuckle. I can imagine that
at least a couple of them went home that night and, laughing, told their SO,
"... and we're going to put asparagus in it and sell it for $6!!!"

I mean, how could any normal person NOT laugh at this?

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I can't wait for their cross promotion with GOOP, featuring homeopathic
Gwyneth Paltrow pee.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
If it's mixed in with Kombucha I'd probably buy it.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I've only tried Kombucha once, but I'll admit I probably couldn't tell the
difference.

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ghostbrainalpha
Asparagus water badly needed a new branded name... something like VitalitE
Water.

Its way to easy to change this headline to read "Whole Foods admits trying to
sell AsparGROSS water for $6 was a mistake".

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throwaway5752
If you think that's bad, there are people that don't vaccinate their kids on
the intended schedule and others that demand antibiotics for viral infections.
There are others that take new, $30k+ cars and use them to Uber not taking
depreciation on their vehicle into account.

This is may be easy to laugh at, but there are plenty of things that are much
more stupid that people regularly do.

edit: fine, downvote me. But if you actually read the article and look at the
the reaction of people, you'd think that was in the top 100 stupid things that
you could name off the top of your head. The fact that I'm even being
downvoted as controversial for mentioning vaccines/antiobitic
overprescription/unprofitable gig economy participation is much closer to a
"fall of Rome" type behavior than a stupid item on the shelf at a grocery
store.

edit 2: here's a free example of much stupider behavior we take for granted:
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-autos-trucks-
texas/hu...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-autos-trucks-texas/huge-
pricey-trucks-haul-jobs-and-profits-for-the-detroit-three-idUSKCN1PU1E4)
(grossly oversized, inefficient trucks that causing poor strategic moves at US
automakers as a result of trade protections for a specific class of
vehicles... and I have nothing against pickup trucks, but these $70k luxury
cars are the truck equivalent of $1k air jordans)

