Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 865 posts

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#501

Post by ZenoArrow »

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…

>"triggered by reading Red Plenty"

>"A central problem faced by Gosplan was the collection of high quality data about supply chains and the estimation of the utility function of consumers."

Red Plenty is a book of fiction, is it not?

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#502

Post by guelo »

_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…

My roommate works at WF and gets paid minimum wage, gets crappy benefits, is never allowed to work 40 hours to avoid being labeled "full time", and her schedule is generated by a computer with no human input allowed.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#503

Post by stale2002 »

bspn wrote: post #37
_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…

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.

Thats what I heard.

Twitch.TV is the same way, after it got acquired. They just leave them alone and let them do their own thing.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#505

Post by jaggi1 »

pc86 wrote: post #19
_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…

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.

> suck every ounce of productivity and profit out of your lowest-paid employees.

Isn't it the same company that comited a fraud by selling products that weighed less than what they were charged for ?

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#506

Post by mickrussom »

_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…

Bezos creates a boiler room. Bezos, to me, is the most Machiavellian man alive and the arms race he started is being emulated by the likes of Jack Ma. This will not lead to happier people. Spying, advertising, fake and low quality products and constant consumption and consumerism is the goal of scamazon. I do like whole foods, a bit expensive, I use co-ops when possible to source food, but Amazon will make sure to gut headcount and compromise on quality anywhere possible to make an extra penny. Bezos farms all this money simply to be the richest and to play with rockets in space while we all suffer from shrinking middle class, lower education standards for most, cancer and an energy crunch. Bezos is dangerously smart, possibly the smartest business man alive or ever, but he is just not a good man. Every one of his successes requires the original to be sacrificed at their hands. using their infrastructure - aws - guarantees that if you are successful there Bezos will steal your model and compete with you.

I knew whole foods was falling at the hands of Costco, organic for cheaper, but whole foods had great variety and did try harder than all the other big-chain food stores.

Every scamazon victory feels like a loss of the world.

Time to bust this trust. Time for regulators to start breaking scamazon up.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#507

Post by gigatexal »

Well this is a huge exit for WholeFoods which was seeing fewer and fewer people enter it's stores and increased competition from value grocers introducing organic foods. A number of articles asked if WholeFoods had a future in this new environment. As for Amazon, I see this more as a real-estate play to help them further their new push into grocery and the no-checkout process.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#508

Post by Symbiote »

fivestar wrote: post #406
irfanka wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Intelligent people capable of negotiating their pay in a market such as that for software development would only be encumbered by unions. Are there warts? Sure there are. Nothing is perfect.

Maybe have a look at the list here: https://www.tuc.org.uk/britains-unions

* Association of Educational Psychologists

* British Air Line Pilots’ Association

* FDA ("The union for senior public sector managers and professionals")

* Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association

* Prospect, the professionals' union

There are a lot more listed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/public-list-of-ac...

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#510

Post by toomuchtodo »

chandler wrote: post #498
wooter wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, Publix is employee owned, does that count? Comparing the wikipedia sidebar shows Publix with more stores, revenue, and over twice the number of employees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Foods_Market I'm not going near Amazon, though.

Fun fact: Publix is the largest employee-owned grocery chain in the US.
Post reply on HN