121–130 of 865 posts
https://twitter.com/dkberman/status/875701677504024576 "Amazon did not just buy Whole Foods grocery stores. It bought 431 upper-income, prime-location distribution nodes for everything it does."
$13.7B / 431 = $31.79m per store. I have zero experience with real estate prices for retail outlets, but it feels as if that's a bit on the high end?
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I don't think that is right, Whole Foods stores are already full of...food. They don't have room for hundreds of additional products, never mind tens of thousands.
The products Amazon is trying to distribute with this deal are.... food products.
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While I fully agree that it's great to see employees treated well, Whole Foods is not an example that you can be a successful capitalist this way. They worked well for a while but the reason they got bought now is because they struggled over the past years. Probably unrelated to their treatment of employees (US groceries is very competitive at the moment) but AMZN didn't buy a hugely successful company.
The day I sell a company for $13Bn I will declare myself successful. Not everything is going to be a a half a trillion dollar company.
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The major difference is that if Amazon stop running well then someone else will come along and replace them. Whereas government is a monopoly, so if it runs badly then it doesn't automatically get replaced. Now, democracy is supposed to fix this, by allowing you to vote for a different supplier of government every few years. But because of the voting system in some countries (like the US and the UK) it's actually rea…
Hmm, as I remember the socialist governments were replaced (not easily, but they were). Have we even seen a conglomerate of AMZN size replaced in living memory?
IBM, Sears (far more dominant in retail in its day than Amazon is today), General Motors (hi Toyota), US Steel (hi foreign steel), Pan-Am (hyper powerful at its peak), Alcoa (anti-trust + foreign competition), and a dozen others that were every bit as powerful as Amazon at their peak.
Oh and Walmart is slowly being replaced by Amazon. Walmart is/was the most dominant retailer in world history.
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The major difference is that if Amazon stop running well then someone else will come along and replace them. Whereas government is a monopoly, so if it runs badly then it doesn't automatically get replaced. Now, democracy is supposed to fix this, by allowing you to vote for a different supplier of government every few years. But because of the voting system in some countries (like the US and the UK) it's actually rea…
>if Amazon stop running well then someone else will come along and replace them Is this really true though? Over the past few decades we've seen that if a company is big enough, and it fails, the government will step in and prop it up with a bailout.
IIRC most of the companies in the S&P 500 didn't exist 30 years ago. I think the DJIA is mostly companies that are younger than I am. The US has an unusually dynamic economy. Bailing out companies is reserved for politically important ones (GM, Ford) or politically and financially important ones.
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The major difference is that if Amazon stop running well then someone else will come along and replace them. Whereas government is a monopoly, so if it runs badly then it doesn't automatically get replaced. Now, democracy is supposed to fix this, by allowing you to vote for a different supplier of government every few years. But because of the voting system in some countries (like the US and the UK) it's actually rea…
Hmm, as I remember the socialist governments were replaced (not easily, but they were). Have we even seen a conglomerate of AMZN size replaced in living memory?
Kodak
Polaroid
Blockbuster
Research in Motion / Blackberry
Motorola
Nokia
Sun Microsystems
Yahoo
Amazon saw it and responded quickly.
Oof. I wonder what this means for Whole Foods culture and employees. If you don't know, John Mackey, the CEO / founder, is a major believer in conscious capitalism and of empowering his employees. Whole Food employees get paid pretty darn well with some crazy good benefits for their industry and line-of-work (UNION FREE most of the time too!). WF banks on them being true believers and motivators of the cause - includ…