Everyone wants a starbucks a few blocks away from their house. There is a belief that having a Starbucks in your neighborhood actually increases the value of your home - since Starbucks is the BMW/Lexus brand of coffee. I believe that's an urban myth but I do have a hypothesis that Whole Food locations are closely correlated with high home valuations.
In order to support a Whole Foods in your neighborhood you need one of two things - lots of money or easy access for people with lots of money. There is no denying that if you buy 100% of your groceries from a Whole Foods your food bill would be 20-30% higher than a Safeway. For most people that would work out to $2K-$3K incremental grocery bill.
So my theory is this; for expensive areas of town look no further than the Whole Food locations that have been around for 3-5 years, for up and coming areas of town look for the 'soon-to-be-open' Whole Foods and for any Whole Food locations that are within minutes of a highway - well forget everything i said - because that makes it easy for people with lots of money to shop there.
Now what good would a theory be if i didn't test it. Below is a Zillow heat map of home valuations from Zillow.com (my employer). I've plotted in pink arrows all the current locations of Whole Foods and in green arrows all the 'soon-to-be-open' locations.
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Wow, what a surprise. There isn't one Whole Foods (current or 'soon-to-be') in any of high rent areas of Seattle - but all of the current ones are within a stone's throw of Seattle's major highways. I assume Whole Foods needs to balance their building rent and the proximity of their shopper base. It is interesting to note that the 'sonn-to-be' locations are breaking away from their highway strategy and imbeding themselves into neighborhoods. We'll wait and see if this strategy pans out for them.
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