Here are several notable excerpts from our chat with Buechel.

On the new smaller-store Daily Shops concept:

“As it relates to the Daily Shops, we’ve got 12 stores, six of them are in London, six here in the US — most in Manhattan. The store you shop at is about 40,000 to 45,000 square feet. We’ve got full-service offerings basically spread across the perimeter of meat, seafood, specialty cheese, prepared foods. And what we’ve done is taken the very best of Whole Foods and condense it down into what is closer to a 9,000-to-12,000-square-foot experience. By having a smaller footprint, we can be closer to where our customers are at. As you might imagine, especially in Manhattan, the ability to open a dozen more 40,000-square-foot stores is a very complicated process and would take years and years and hit probably a decade when we look at how complicated some of those projects can get. And the reality is, in this smaller footprint, we can move much quicker and help serve our customers’ needs. And this is really allowing customers to quickly grab and go. A lot of this is really geared towards how our customers are shopping today, which is more frequently. They’re not doing one large basket for a week or two. They’re shopping on a regular basis. The average customer right now is shopping for food three to four times a week. And this new concept is really helping support that.”

On the potential for Daily Shops:

“I see hundreds, quite frankly. This will be an opportunity where not only do we see this showing up in many dense urban areas across the country, but I think this concept will allow us to get to places that maybe we wouldn’t be able to put a full-sized Whole Foods. I also think about things like college campuses.”

On the new Dash Carts:

“Something that I’m excited about is some of the work that we’ve been doing right now with our Dash Carts. Earlier this year, we unveiled a brand-new version of our Amazon Dash Cart. It is 25% lighter than our previous version. It’s got 40% more capacity. And it’s really aimed to help serve sort of family-size shopping trips. And we’ve gotten tremendously positive feedback on customers because they can actually shop, check out, and bag their groceries all at once.”

On the “whole paycheck” moniker:

“You’re the first person to bring it up to me in a very long time at this point. And a lot of the folks who do, I sort of challenge them by saying ‘Hey, I want you to … go to the store, do an honest comparison of like items, and tell me what you see.’ I had a retail analyst who really challenged me about 18 months ago or so, and was trying to point out where he thought things were a lot better, and came back afterwards and was like, ‘Hey, I might not have believed you exactly, but I was able to see it for myself.’ And when you layer in the promotional side of it — and this is where the value really rings for customers — if you are a Prime member, you get that extra 10% off sale items.”

On high meat prices:

“This is an area that we are focused on with suppliers. There’s some macro challenges at play here that a lot of us aren’t in control of. One of the things that we really lean into is making sure that we are absorbing as much of the costs we can ourselves before passing on to the customers. Hopefully you’ve noticed as you go to the meat case, we have some great value every single week in promotion.”

Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor, host of the Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast, and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.

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