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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

#451

Post by k-mcgrady »

andrewprock wrote: post #382
k-mcgrady wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I have never worked as a cashier, but I can't imagine it's a very fun job. Automating out those jobs seems like a win-win, as long as the former cashiers can find a job doing something else. Stacking the shelves isn't anymore fun that working the checkout. As someone who has done both I'd say checkout is the preferred role as it's much less physical (stacking shelves gets tiring after 8 hours) and you get chat to…

Having done both, I prefer stocking. But that comes with a caveat that I've never worked more than a four hour shift. I can imagine that an eight hour shift of stocking would be brutal.

Coming back after mid-shift break for another 4 hours was always pretty hard. With stocking there was always something to do as well (staves off bordedom but also tiring). Checkouts often have peak times so you often get long periods where you're really just chilling with your co-workers.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#452

Post by anigbrowl »

wooter wrote: post #400
throwaway91111 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you can call this capitalistic, though. WF as a commune could likely share many of the benefits or exceed them even without requiring shareholders to satisfy. Instead, a devotion to profits will ensure they are given the minimum to execute their job well. It'll be interesting to see what bezos does with it for sure.

name a single commune as successful or operating at the scale of Whole Foods or Amazon. in history.

Mondragon corporation has existed in spain since the 1950s as a worker-owned cooperative and employs about 75,000 people. Whole foods employs about 91,000 but I'd say that puts them in the same ballpark. You could argue in addition that Mondragon has been limited by a) Spain having been a dictatorship until the 1980s, b) the relative youth of the EU single market vs that of the US leading to a more regional business culture and c) the additional language barriers in Europe that make business expansion a bit slower than in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#453

Post by k-mcgrady »

novia wrote: post #390
k-mcgrady wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I have never worked as a cashier, but I can't imagine it's a very fun job. Automating out those jobs seems like a win-win, as long as the former cashiers can find a job doing something else. Stacking the shelves isn't anymore fun that working the checkout. As someone who has done both I'd say checkout is the preferred role as it's much less physical (stacking shelves gets tiring after 8 hours) and you get chat to…

Good point. I'm an introvert so talking to people for 8 hours wouldn't be my favorite thing in the world, but sometimes I forget not everyone is like me. When I was talking about the other jobs at WF I was thinking about like.. the ice cream scooper, and the smoothie maker, and the customer service rep at the front for when people want to return items. That's not to mention all the the chefs that make the food for th…

Never been to a WF (we don't have many here) so didn't know those other jobs existed. Seems like they do have a lot of work to go around then instead of just stock work/checkout work.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#454

Post by nickbauman »

devmunchies wrote: post #417
nickbauman wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked for a retail software company that was purchased by Oracle, I can assure you Grocery retail is the most difficult retail supply chain to execute well. The margins are razor-thin. The products have myriads of stubborn problems: short life checking, long life checking, mix of delivery types (direct, warehouse, corporate and 3rd party), very complex planograms, composite units of measure, challenging shrin…

> margins are razor-thin at any other grocery store, yes

The most you could say is WF's margins are "thin" instead of "razor thin". They're not writing US student loans here.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#455

Post by antisthenes »

adventured wrote: post #112
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…

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).

The limitation of studying history is that 2 people can look at the same event and make 2 diametrically opposed conclusions about it.

Where someone sees juggernaut corporations being broken up and outmaneuvered by nimble competitors, someone else will see a temporary effect that eventually leads to re-consolidation, regulatory capture, and settling back into an oligopolistic market without any innovation.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#456

Post by bpodgursky »

aerovistae wrote: post #421
aerovistae wrote: post #188

If Hacker News had gold I would give it to you.

I don't understand why I got 10 downvotes on this one. What is the matter with this comment? What am I missing here?

HN will heavily downvote anything that (1) is a short, cheap joke, or (2) smells like reddit.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#457

Post by anigbrowl »

wooter wrote: post #401
m-j-fox wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

no thanks. look at what collective/forced/politicized bickering over hours has done to the job market everywhere its been tried. look at the corruption. i enjoy my freedom to negotiate my terms as I, as an individual, and my employer see fit.

Sure you do...now. You might find yourself in very different circumstances in the future.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#458

Post by snowman311 »

AmazonFresh is an expensive service. The team is searching for routes to dominate the high-end grocery market (worth billions) before launching into the worldwide grocery market (worth hundreds of billions). AmazonFresh customers and Whole Foods customers value convenience and quality. They are much less price sensitive than most.

Whole Foods has millions of customers. Amazon will surely be advertising AmazonFresh or some re-branded form of it - such as "Whole Foods Direct" - to Whole Foods customers. Do Whole Foods turn into AmazonFresh warehouses? Possibly, but it's unclear how the two business will eventually integrate. It's also possible that Instacart gets acquired by Amazon, but for the most part I see them getting screwed in this deal. Instacart's business development deal is like bringing a knife to a bomb-fight.

The other major value this deal brings to Amazon is the industry-specific knowledge that the Whole Foods team brings. As a frequent East Coast, Whole Foods shopper, I am always amazed to see how much of their food comes from the West Coast/all over the world. I think the execs of AmazonFresh, who are mainly HomeGrocer/Webvan execs, appreciate the complicated logistics of doing the businesses. Amazon will be able to combine its software engineering knowledge/logistics knowledge with Whole Foods' expertise at creating an amazing grocery-shopping experience.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#459

Post by ihnorton »

wooter wrote: post #400
throwaway91111 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you can call this capitalistic, though. WF as a commune could likely share many of the benefits or exceed them even without requiring shareholders to satisfy. Instead, a devotion to profits will ensure they are given the minimum to execute their job well. It'll be interesting to see what bezos does with it for sure.

name a single commune as successful or operating at the scale of Whole Foods or Amazon. in history.

Not exactly a commune, but interesting nonetheless and on the same scale as Whole Foods (12 bln Euro turnover):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Oneida is (was) the closest US analogy I can think of, though much smaller.

There are some very successful Kibbutzim spinoffs in Israel, into 100s of millions US$ (I don't know how ownership was structured).

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#460

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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.

Ya, that EA spouse thing totally didn't happen: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
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