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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

#321

Post by zitterbewegung »

_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…

Amazon usually is mostly hands off to acquisitions like these. Look at Zappos and Twitch. I think that what will occur is probably some kind of service that they will tie into Prime Membership. Maybe also integrate things from their prototype store. Usually Amazon enhances experience in this acquistion and they are free to do what they want. Nothing will happen to their employee culture.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#322

Post by shimon »

baccredited wrote: post #219
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.

Challenge often becomes an opportunity. Instacart recently landed Publix who has MUCH higher market share in the markets they serve. Disclaimer: I'm an Instacart investor.

Instacart's service model, which allowed them to scale up really fast and cheap, should also allow them to scale down fast and cheap. They still have a brand, customer relationships, and demonstrated credibility partnering with retailers. I'd say the company will be fine, but many of their workers will face tough choices soon.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#323

Post by dx034 »

nissimk wrote: post #244
dx034 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Credit accounts + gift card balances is almost the same thing.

No, they don't really control the money. If all amazon balances were gone it would not be a significant event for the US. Evil corp is like a Bank of America or Wells Fargo. If they close, people can't pay rent, food, etc. For Amazon that's (luckily) not the case (yet).

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#324

Post by vnchr »

rmc wrote: post #289
pc86 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice to see non-union employees treated well and paid well, not because of any negative feelings toward unions or unionization, but because I think it shows that you can be a successful capitalist without trying to suck every ounce of productivity and profit out of your lowest-paid employees.

In the 1880s Bismarck increased the modern welfare state (it was called State Socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Socialism_(Germany) ). The idea was that, if the poor people can get some form of social welfare from the existing state, they're less likely to support a proper socialist/communist revolution. Sounds like that. People won't unionise when they don't think they need to.

Interesting comparison. In this case, people aren't unionizing for essentially the opposite reason. Rather than state provided social welfare, their needs are satisfied through this capitalistic solution. Employees are empowered and rewarded through their work.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#325

Post by refurb »

emodendroket wrote: post #221
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good old investors, so short sighted, they only care about the next 3 months. Yeah, darn those investors. How dare people with pensions, 401k's, IRAs, and other investments expect some kind of return on their investment? It's disgraceful. /s EDIT: The sentiment against investors is rather ironic considering the amount of equity collectively held by HN readers.

I don't think you can really equate "activist investors" with workaday people with IRAs.

Take a look at how much of a company's stock is owned by institutional investors. A lot of that money comes from people's pensions, 401Ks, IRAs, etc.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#326

Post by schiffern »

mdasen wrote: post #285
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…

The difference is the ability for new firms to compete. With centralized planning, there's only one source. If that source is inefficient or corrupt, that inefficiency and corruption stays around. You can try to regulate, threaten, and police it, but nothing can really take it down. By contrast, Walmart and Amazon might be very large, but they still have competition. Heck, Amazon started less than 25 years ago. Remem…

>It's certainly not easy to unseat a powerful company, but it also seems difficult to stay at the top. Whether it's inefficiency, inability to pivot to new ways of doing things, or just markets that dry up as they're replaced by something else, companies have a hard time staying in such powerful positions in our society for long.

Geoffrey West makes a compelling argument that it's due to the scaling laws around growth itself. The capitalist system demands exponential growth, but companies eventually reach a size where all their resources are devoted to maintaining existing "biomass." The exact scaling depends on the scaling properties of the networks that "feed" each "cell" of the system — circulatory/respiratory networks for animals, infrastructural networks for civilizations, social network for companies/cities.

Quite frankly most of the articles on Geoffrey West's work are hand-wavey bullshit, but he outlines it in this talk (including addressing this very question). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#327

Post by ghaff »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #313
ghaff wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hannafords has a place an order and pick it up model. Anecdotally, based on my local store, hardly anyone uses it. I suspect it's a narrow niche where people are happy to order on their computer but want to save a few $$ on delivery.

Mainers checking in? I haven't used it yet, but I just went to their website. I picked the store that I pass on my way home from work. Next available pickup is tomorrow at noon. They gotta go same day if they want people to use it. That or it's popular at this particular store, who knows.

They're pretty common in Massachusetts as well. Agreed. Need to be able to place order at lunchtime and pick up on the way home.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#328

Post by dx034 »

tuna-piano wrote: post #222
cercatrova wrote: post #202

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA2-iMz479o I watched this video a while ago about what Amazon Go is a precursor for. In summary, if AWS is renting out server infrastructure for people, then you can imagine that Amazon can make the infrastructure to lease out Amazon Go to other stores. They first integrate it with Whole Foods, then as customers expect no more checkout areas, they will only go to Whole Foods because i…

Counterpoint... is Amazon Go really that difficult to build? If given three years, do you not think a different software company can build a similar system as well? Is this type of system really a winner-take-all market?

Same with AWS. First they were the only ones, now they seem to lose market share to Google and Microsoft.

Amazon doesn't have a monopoly in any of their businesses, they're just very successful in a lot of them.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#330

Post by ghaff »

tedmiston wrote: post #235
ghaff wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in an urban organic-ish grocer last weekend and I saw they had meal kits. I'm surprised more places don't do this.

Kroger, which is probably the biggest grocery chain accounting for all of the chains under their umbrella, just started rolling out their own last month. Their price point is $14–18 for two, or just under the price of meal kit delivery services but probably still with better margins given their supply chain. I haven't tried them yet but I plan to. http://www.produceretailer.com/article/videos-article/watch-...

Of course you can also buy a lot of pre-prepped food these days if you're so inclined. That said, I expect the main market here is people who are OK with cooking but just don't want to put a lot of thought into planning, making a shopping list, etc.
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