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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

#271

Post by Chaebixi »

kesselvon wrote: post #200
emodendroket wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know that there are some stories about bad experiences in the fulfillment centers, but keep in mind that those positions are temporary seasonal work by unskilled labor. That's a completely different environment than full time employees work in. But probably more similar to most jobs in a grocery store than a software engineering position.

I mean keeping an ambulance outside the doors to a warehouse because its cheaper than cooling it is a tad inhumane.

> I mean keeping an ambulance outside the doors to a warehouse because its cheaper than cooling it is a tad inhumane.

Just a tad, but the financial analysis told us inhumanity was the right direction to move in. /s

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#272

Post by dsfyu404ed »

quantdev wrote: post #164
JackFr wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has given more disposable income to poor people than Wal-Mart and Amazon. It just hasn't come in the form of wages.

To your first statement, is this even true of Amazon? In the US, Amazon Prime has something like 80% penetration into households making >= $100k/year. This move into Whole Foods reaffirms this focus on high-income households, where convenience is often as large a factor as costs. My hunch is that Amazon has been a massive positive in aggregate , but poor households have been negatively impacted by Amazon, taking into…

>but poor households have been negatively impacted by Amazon

Households where money is tight are sharing prime memberships among them and using that to undercut the cost of buying consumer goods locally. You can go into your local $typeofstore and get ripped off for a set of $releventproduct or you could buy something that came out of the same overseas factory with a different brand label on it and wait 50hr for a third of the price.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#273

Post by Chaebixi »

ice109 wrote: post #265
kesselvon wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean keeping an ambulance outside the doors to a warehouse because its cheaper than cooling it is a tad inhumane.

source?

It took literally two seconds to find:

https://www.google.com/#q=amazon+ambulance+warehouse

https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-ver...

> In a lengthy and heavily reported article, The Call said a warehouse employee contacted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on June 2 to report that the heat index in the warehouse had reached 102 degrees, and that 15 workers had collapsed. The employee also said workers who were sent home because of the heat received disciplinary points.

> Eight days later, the paper said, an emergency room doctor at a local hospital saw enough Amazon employees suffering from heat-related injuries to call OSHA and report “an unsafe environment.”

> So many ambulances responded to medical assistance calls at the warehouse during a heat wave in May, the paper said, that the retailer paid Cetronia Ambulance Corps to have paramedics and ambulances stationed outside the warehouse during several days of excess heat over the summer. About 15 people were taken to hospitals, while 20 or 30 more were treated right there, the ambulance chief told The Call.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#274

Post by ethbro »

opportune wrote: post #99
illumin8 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pastry chef is unskilled?

How many employees at WF are pastry chefs and how many are in stocking, orders, cleaning, and manning the register?

I feel like at least half of the average grocery store staff I see are skilled: butchers, fishmongers, cheese and wine managers, and pasty or bakers. Proportion varies with class of grocery: BiLo obviously having fewer than WF.

There's the checkout counter and stock in the back, but I feel like the employed-during-the-day crew definitely has career opportunities.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#275

Post by harrisreynolds »

dawhizkid wrote: post #60

This is not good for Instacart. My understanding is WF was their biggest partner and source of revenue. No way amazon will use them.

I was the early CTO for Shipt who helped build their grocery delivery platform and engineering team. This is obviously HUGE news in the grocery delivery space. Both Instacart and Shipt will need to double down on customer service in order to continue to thrive. The Publix/Instacart partnership is BIG for them and Shipt's partnership with Meijer is helpful to them in the midwest. The biggest keys to success here going forward is extreme efficiency and laser customer focus.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#276

Post by murbard2 »

mayneack wrote: post #237
_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…

> If you don't know, John Mackey, the CEO / founder, is a major believer in conscious capitalism and of empowering his employees. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/whole-foods-ceo-oba... > “It’s more like fascism,” Mackey recently told NPR. “In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it — and that’s what’s happening with our health care programs and these reforms.” > Ma…

So he believes in empowering his employees, and is principled.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#277

Post by hollerith »

RobAley wrote: post #186
dx034 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you bought it for $20bn. Wholefoods is publicly owned and the price that Amazon pays is below their price a few years back. It's not about size, $13bn is a lot of money. But Wholefoods needed a strategy or buyer, otherwise they would've faced serious problems in a few years.

If I had $20bn to buy it in the first place, or be in the position where I could even raise that kind of capital, I would already be successful (in my mind at least).

OK, but WF stock is held mostly by ordinary people (or by pension funds acting on behalf of ordinary people) and the argument being made above is that there are signs that the reason WF ended up being owned by a company without WF's reputation for good treatment of employees is that selling the company was the only way for WF's management to meet their fiduciary responsibility to those ordinary people who hold WF stock.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#278

Post by jasonjayr »

clutchdude wrote: post #217
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.

There's also Woot.com - a company who's culture was a strange counterpoint. Amazon thought they understood it, messed it all around and now it's a sad parody of the former site. https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2014/july/... That particular bit about Bezos and the octopus sells it - You'll be fine if Amazon "gets" your company and it's culture. If not, well...

It looks like the original Woot folks want to try again:

https://meh.com/forum/topics/faq#q-whats-the-story-here-53a3...

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#279

Post by djur »

adventured wrote: post #126
izacus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure, frequently. 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.

The rise and fall of major corporations isn't necessarily the result of the inexorable application of market forces. Alcoa's grasp on the market was broken as much by the aftermath of 'war socialism' as anything else, for example. Companies compete with each other on legal, regulatory, and social planes as well as in the marketplace.

I think it's difficult to find any single X that makes "if a company is bad at X, it will be replaced by competitors" a consistently true statement, without X being essentially synonymous with "succeeding".

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#280

Post by dkrich »

maxerickson wrote: post #56
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."

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.

This was exactly my thought. In fact, why would a retailer like Amazon want to have upper-income distribution facilities? The cost of storage would be exceedingly high. And if that's the winning strategy, isn't Costco already pretty well positioned in that space?
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