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Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

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Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#171

Post by maxerickson »

rainbowmverse wrote: post #141
ccorda wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Place an order by noon for groceries plus anything you want from Amazon. Amazon fills up truck(s) at whatehouse and drops off at local Whole Foods. Stop by on your way home from work and they bring your items to your car. You get free same day delivery. Amazon just greatly saved on last mile delivery costs. That's the value of those nodes without having to store all the inventory.

I'm closer to Whole Foods' nearest distribution center than an actual Whole Foods. The nearest Whole Foods is almost 40 miles away. If this works out for Amazon, I wouldn't be surprised to see Walmart try and buy Trader Joe's. They own Aldi, which has made a big push to compete with Walmart's reach outside cities. The nearest Aldi is closer than Walmart, and that's already not far away.

Walmart has ~4500 (US) stores already. Aldi is expanding rapidly but has far fewer than that.

The two Aldi locations I drive past are both located less than a mile from the nearest Walmart locations (I expect they do a fair amount of piggybacking).

The purchase doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me. I guess the most sensible thing is that they see the stores being located by the best populations to start out doing food deliveries for (affluent, so they can charge higher prices while they figure out how to do it).

Walmart has a pickup service. They keep experimenting with rapid delivery but people don't really want to pay much for it.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#172

Post by nonameface »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #117
AndrewDucker wrote: post #23

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."

They also just bought a liquor license in like every U.S. state and high-income city.

There is no Whole Foods in West Virginia. I know you were generalizing but thought I would mention a counter-case.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#173

Post by manmal »

loudin wrote: post #91
bspn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Zappos is a probably a pretty good proxy. They too had a very different culture to Amazon at the time of acquisition, but I believe it has largely remained intact many years post-acquisition. Amazon as a company has many flaws in its culture (if we are to believe the reports), but they seem to do acquisitions pretty well and know when to leave things alone and let them do their thing.

I think this is a different beast. I personally loved shopping at Whole Foods because the food is high quality and their employees are treated well. These tenets are totally incompatible with Amazon's culture. Sure, now they say they will run it independently, but if Amazon were to struggle with Whole Foods, the first thing they do will be to lower labor costs and food costs. Unions to protect workers are now more im…

And what would Whole Foods do if things were turning bad? IMO the exact same thing.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#174

Post by bflesch »

_7siz wrote: post #10

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…

It should be noted that amazon employees also "get paid pretty darn well with some crazy good benefits" and the whole IT at amazon is union free.

I feel like this is a great fit, with whole foods being a progressive company in US grocery space.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#175

Post by salesguy222 »

castis wrote: post #103
salesguy222 wrote: post #15

Checkmate, brick and mortar!! Amazon is eating the world.

I dont know if you intended an /s to follow this but brick and mortar stores as a concept aren't going anywhere.

Nah, no sarcasm intended. There will still be brick and mortar stores in the future, but it will not be the main method of shopping- online will be.

This is especially the case for food. It is not getting cheaper to run a brick and mortar operation with many moving parts. That is why Amazon is winning :)

Only art galeries with high margin unique sales and low overhead costs will be surviving 10 years from now

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#176

Post by ohyes »

spydum wrote: post #78
tantalor wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> disrupt the wine and liquor sector Explain?

Maybe they mean the inefficiency in the producer -> distributor-> retailer chain? What value does the middle guy add?

Liquor is heavily regulated on a state by state basis. The distributor relationship is often required by law.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#177

Post by meritt »

dexterdog wrote: post #145
dkural wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in the long run you are likely be right - at scale software margins are amazing. As of today, Slack looses some money & is unprofitable.

Really? Slack is bringing in 150m/yr. They can't make money with that product at that rate?

Of course they can, but an extremely profitable well-oiled small company rarely gets acquired. You need to have way more employees than necessary and running at a loss.

Slack runs a chat app and has 870 employees. It's beyond absurd.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#178

Post by dx034 »

lwlml wrote: post #153

Amazon is now (or more so now) like Evil Corp in the Mr. Robot kind of way. You can ship your Evil groceries via Evil Prime purchased via voice-command with your Evil assistant device paid for with your Evil credit-card. Evil. Frankly I don't buy as much from WF anymore considering that what they carry is much more like "organic junk-food" than actual food. If you really want to support the "cause", find yourself a l…

They don't offer bank accounts yet. Only then Mr Robot could come and change the world by hacking them /s

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#179

Post by TallGuyShort »

phreeza wrote: post #21

Somewhat off topic, but I have had a weird thought circulating in my head (triggered by reading Red Plenty) that I wanted to put out there: What is the relationship between a centrally planned economy as for example Gosplan was trying to run in the USSR, and the presence of these huge market-like but centralized entities like Amazon and Wal-Mart inside a free-market economy? This becomes particularly interesting beca…

Amazon doesn't shoot you when you protest it.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#180

Post by sidlls »

dx034 wrote: post #135
Accacin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have a healthy work/life balance (40-50 hours a week) 40-50 hours of work a week isn't healthy.

Why not? The important part is commute. 50hr work week in a job you like with a reasonable commute is no problem for your health. 30hr/week in a job you don't like with 2.5hr in traffic each day is much less healthy.

Unless all 50 hours are compensated, 10 of them at 1.5-2x base pay, the person working them is getting ripped off.

Every one of my friends in engineering (actual engineering, e.g. civil, aerospace, etc.) positions get at least 1.5x for any hour over 40 they work in a week. In fact "unpaid overtime" is something I hadn't heard of for an engineering position prior to working in software. It's almost like workers in this industry are competing to see how much they can let themselves be exploited.

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