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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

#371

Post by ghaff »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #318
hosh wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, but hearing about how Amazon is running into trouble with their grocery stores, they might want to learn something from Whole Foods (similar to Zappos). There was also an article that talked about the brilliance of Amazon biz organization. Business units are set up like API interfaces, ones that serve both internal needs as well as external customers. The author's claim is that it helps trim the fat, with w…

WF most likely will fail under Amazon (if WF must adapt to Amazon's business methods), opening the market for local competitors and similar national chains to absorb that market share. Great opportunity for Aldi on the low end and Trader Joe's on the high end. Groceries are not APIs.

I don't really see TJ as a WF competitor beyond the earthy crunchy vibe. TJ is mostly pretty weak in the produce, meat, cheese, and fish sections which are exactly the areas where WF is often worth the premium. I suppose they compete in the frozenprepared food that pretends to be Artisanal.

TJ is a good deal for some things but it only somewhat overlaps.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#372

Post by jdmichal »

airza wrote: post #336
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.

who the fuck has a 401K and is interested in short term returns?

You know at some point the 401k is supposed to be paying your bills, yes? That's its raison d'être. When you have investments paying your bills, you might understandably be focused on those investments yielding some immediate returns. Maybe to pay for that leaky roof, or broken down AC...

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#373

Post by ghaff »

airza wrote: post #336
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.

who the fuck has a 401K and is interested in short term returns?

The fund managers for the funds in that 401k.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#374

Post by guiomie »

"The transaction also may help Amazon sideline Instacart Inc., a startup that has delivered grocery orders from Whole Foods stores in more than 20 states and Washington, D.C."

... I wonder how this will play. Is Instacart's business threaten by losing Whole Food as a client?

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#375

Post by triangleman »

VT_Drew wrote: post #133
emodendroket wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says right in this article (and in others that have been published recently) that they were under pressure from investors.

Good old investors, so short sighted, they only care about the next 3 months. Whole Foods probably would have been better off as private company, especially with the culture they were trying to create.

They had their chance, the culture did not help keep the company above water.

Noted by a friend who used to work there:

- They treat each store (and each department within each store) like its own separate business, which is great for teaching individual managers about waste, efficiency, profit/loss. However they can't bother to get together on a corporate level and combine purchasing power on most things. Every store has to work on making a deal on their own merchandise, separately.

- In a show of solidarity, all employees, whether floor workers or corporate IT, must work holidays and instead have floating holidays for time off. Then predictably there is a seniority effect where the long-term workers get to have their holidays and the recent hires have to come in on a completely useless day and stay till 3 or 4 when the management "lets" them leave.

Also I recently shopped at their 365 store and it's a great store with better prices, but their website sucks and my name comes up as "firstname lastname" on their computers. If Amazon can knock some sense into their IT, that would be a huge win.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#376

Post by m-j-fox »

irfanka wrote: post #356
rmc wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly the reason why there aren't any Software Developer Unions these days.

You're kidding, right? Programmers are decently paid but should strike for a 40-hour work week.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#377

Post by busterarm »

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…

I was thinking more like the megacorporations in Shadowrun...where you're a citizen of the corporation and they provide virtually everything in your life.

Given their location, I guess they're Telestrian? lol

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#378

Post by Applejinx »

phreeza wrote: post #146
adventured wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like Alcoa, IBM, Standard Oil, the Pennsylvania Railroad, American Tobacco, AT&T, Sears, General Motors, Ford, Kodak, Pan-Am, US Steel, etc? I'd suggest studying US economic history, as there isn't a single example of a juggernaut corporation that sustained said dominance very long-term (either due to competition / changing technology or government anti-trust actions).

I'm not suggesting Amazon will never fail, I was rather talking about that they seem to be essentially solving the socialist planning problem, for a limited but ever-expanding section of the economy.

This. I think there's much value to be had in using a thing like Amazon for what it's good at: an efficient distribution network, and to some extent a captive market that controls its own terms, inputs and outputs and optimizes for that efficiency.

Apart from labor abuses (and some are entered into willingly: see higher level Amazon true believers putting in 90 hours a week to provide half a cent cheaper toilet paper), what Amazon is, is not the problem.

The problem is the idea that all such toilet paper consumers must work to get paid the money to buy that toilet paper, in an Amazon-ified world. And that all the providers of goods feeding the Amazon supply chain must earn their own profits to survive so that they can keep feeding Amazon, on Amazon's terms.

And most of all the problem is that the penalty for failing to earn these wages/supplier profits is death, because there's no alternate system pumping capital down to where consumers do their choosing. Amazon is TOO efficient and a world based on that ethos can't maintain a consumer class at all. The solution isn't necessarily to make Amazon inefficient so it can provide 'jobs', the solution is to decouple job wages from continued existence as a human.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#380

Post by jhatax »

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."

This. I have started using Prime Now a lot over the last few months because the prices for non-perishable groceries are cheaper than Target/Safeway consistently. The gap has been fresh food, and to fill this gap, Prime Now partners with local stores (Sprouts in Oakland, for example).

The acquisition makes WF an instant partner of Prime Now (unintended pun). The demographic that uses the app and wants groceries now has a reliable and recognized source for said needs. This will only increase the use of Prime Now, thereby making Prime a more entrenched and indispensable service for a certain demographic. Better yet, the benefits will be symbiotic: WF can benefit from Amazon's advanced logistics capabilities. These efficiencies might help the brand shake off its reputation for super high prices.

Strategically, this is a slam dunk for Amazon and certain segments of its customers.

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