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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

#361

Post by sillysaurus3 »

_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…

Here comes store automation and hefty lay-offs?

If it's any consolation, this was just a matter of time. The next 30 years will be "interesting."

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#362

Post by ghaff »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #354
ghaff wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just wait for Market Basket to do it. Everyone will follow. We got a Market Basket in Maine I think 2 years ago - in Biddeford. No joke, you'd think it were Six Flags with the traffic it gets on the weekends.

I mostly like Market Basket. Prices are good and around me they upgraded a couple stores that were smaller and the worse for wear. They carry things other stores don't. On the other hand bread and fish particularly tend to be weak.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#364

Post by blazespin »

j2bax wrote: post #212
loudin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon is a tech and logistics company. I doubt very much that their strategy is "buy random company, lower pay of employees, profit". This was a very strategic move for them and I am sure they intend to use their tech and distribution platform to increase the profit, rather than slice and dice the store experience and quality at the local level. This is what differentiated WF from many other grocery stores that I'm…

" Online delivery of groceries so far has been tough for any company to pull off because of customers' concerns about the quality of meat and produce, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said. But if customers know that what they are getting is the same as what they'd get at the local store, they are more likely to try it out.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#365

Post by YPCrumble »

JackFr wrote: post #97
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…

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.

For this gigantic assumption of a comment to have any merit whatsoever you would have to show that:

1/ Poor people actually shop at amazon in a significant way 2/ The massive job and wage losses Amazon causes in the poor community are insignificant compared to the "wage gains" #1 would imply.

I suspect both assumptions are false. This sounds like a comment from someone in a bubble like SF where lots of people have the disposable income to buy everything online. People in the rest of the country live very differently.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#366

Post by dexterdog »

meritt wrote: post #177
dexterdog wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No idea they had that many employees. Any idea how many actually work on the product from a technical perspective?

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#367

Post by Applejinx »

phreeza wrote: post #98
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?

Not quite the size, but on the same order of magnitude when adjusted for inflation: Enron.

Amazon's not fake. Enron was basically fake: Uber is a closer match to Enron than Amazon will ever be. Amazon is no hype-supported tech unicorn. They are basically a supply network to the Nth power, run by dedicated maniacs willing to destroy themselves to prevail, and executed by a combination of incredible capital utilization (in the form of physical warehouses, robots, automation, systems design) and human exploitation (what jobs can't be automated yet are handled by that more sophisticated robot, the desperate peak-performance human).

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#368

Post by busterarm »

openmosix wrote: post #266
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."

Is it safe to assume Instacart will soon lose one of its strategic partners?

Yeah I'm pretty sure they're f*ed.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#369

Post by hellbanner »

rayiner wrote: post #137
Joakal wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Treating them above market or not, Amazon acquired the company for billions and not because Whole Foods was doing badly.

A lot of time when companies like that get acquired, someone is hoping to profit on the difference between the purchase price, and the value of the company when the management culture switches to wringing every last bit of productivity out of employees. Amazon might have a more strategic goal, but the above strategy is a common one.

"Strategic goal" like grocery delivery? This sounds like a move to strengthen their food delivery programs
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