Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#561

Post by tracker1 » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 6:18 PM UTC

throwaway40483 wrote: post #551

uxp100 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was hired I became the best paid person I knew. I think it would be pretty hard to unionize, but damn if I ain't pissed that that wage fixing scandal wasn't a bigger deal. I work at one of the guilty companies, and I would be happier if I felt like most workers even knew it happened. (even though this was not wage fixing for the average engineer, but for certain high profile roles.) That's something a worker's…

To this day, I'm still puzzled by the fact that the wage fixing incident didn't blow up in the press. Amazing..

"Some massively rich companies colluded to keep their 5%-er employees from making even more..."

Not that I disagree that it was a huge deal, it's hard to gather greater sympathy/empathy from people that tend to make less than half of those aggrieved.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#562

Post by femto113 » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 6:18 PM UTC

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…

Pure speculation but I'm guessing their strategy here has a few elements: - they need to get to meaningful scale on the buy side of the grocery business which they weren't able to do on their own - Whole Foods is already a "tech friendly" grocery brand (Instacart, Apple Pay) - Whole Foods has a lot of premium/value add and non-grocery products (prepared food and organic underpants and such) that offer more profit margin than just groceries

It probably also doesn't hurt that Whole Foods is the only grocery store within walking distance of Amazon HQ and about 1000 employees eat lunch there every day.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#563

Post by dba7dba » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 6:19 PM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #55

_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…

Disclaimer: I work for AWS, but my opinions are my own. I don't think you have much to worry about if you're a WF employee. Amazon actually treats their employees very well. In my experience here, I've never seen any of the things the NY times article talked about, either on my team or any other team I've interacted with. People have a healthy work/life balance (40-50 hours a week), get paid very well (definitely abo…

I surely hope you are correct for the sake of the workers of WF, but...

If you work for AWS, you are either software engineer or linux/network admin. And that means you bring high value to Amazon. So yes, Amazon would treat you well.

But as you go further down the value chain, your treatment will get exponentially worse. And I can't imagine cashiers and stockers being viewed as high value makers by Amazon.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#564

Post by tedmiston » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

dceddia wrote: post #470

tedmiston wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You get free same day delivery. Amazon just greatly saved on last mile delivery costs. I'm under the impression this is something they're really trying to optimize right now. Not sure if it's everywhere but where I live in Cincinnati, Amazon is now operating their own courier service for normal Prime deliveries piggybacking on top of Prime Now drivers. When you place an order (on regular Amazon.com) you don't neces…

I'm seeing this where I live too, near Boston. Many of my Amazon deliveries have been coming in white Amazon vans for a little while now. I still get things from UPS occasionally but it's increasingly those white Amazon vans.

I haven't seen official Amazon vans -- they're using normal people's cars here.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#565

Post by jhall1468 » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 6:22 PM UTC

alphonsegaston wrote: post #553

jhall1468 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you have a documented record of mistreating you're employees, both white Yes, the infamous NYT story. It's funny, because I've yet to see all the ugly that story implied was wide-spread across the company. AWS can be notoriously difficult (particularly the not-so-fun S3 on-calls). But there's an enormous difference between a wide-spread problem, and a problem that seems to be focused, very narrowly, on a few t…

If I seem to "have an agenda" based on widespread media reports that are far beyond that one NY Times piece, how exactly would you categorize your own stance? What's your relationship to Amazon? I'm only one of their occasional customers. Anyway, here's reporting about how their warehouses used Neo-Nazis to intimidate immigrant laborers and worked a temp to death. If you have evidence of the drastic measures that wou…

The first article is about a temp worker dying. One guy. The second article is about Amazon Germany, specifically that the security company they hired, allegedly hired neo-nazis.

You don't seem to have an agenda, you absolutely have one. What happened to that temp is tragic, but you can't get more isolated than 1.

> Anyway, here's reporting about how their warehouses used Neo-Nazis

You mean the company they hired that then hired some shitty people? I don't get why Amazon is now responsible for that.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#566

Post by octernion » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 6:24 PM UTC

foobarbazetc wrote: post #407

zebrafish wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking that the grocery store would be the distribution center. I don't know what their transportation lanes look like but most produce just goes from the field to the grocery store. If you're already storing it there, why put it in a distro center when these stores are in the same locations. Instacart brings a userbase. Heck, maybe Amazon just buys Instacart as well. Not sure if amazon's FCs are currently equi…

Amazon has no need for Instacart. None. They already have the infrastructure in place to replace Instacart overnight. Every Instacart shopper currently working for Instacart hates Instacart. Amazon can just hire them all away, run their own logistics, profit. That's not to say it won't be worse than Instacart. It most definitely will be.

  Every Instacart shopper currently working for Instacart hates Instacart.

citation needed

As the engineering manager actually looking at our NPS scores from our shoppers it's disheartening to see this kind of blatantly wrong trolling on HN... if you actually have any insight (other than outdated and wrong news articles from last year), I'd love to see it.

I'm personally excited for the opportunity this affords us -- completely validating this space and market.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#567

Post by panarky » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 6:26 PM UTC

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.

This is a great discussion of company culture, treatment of employees, worker cooperatives, etc., but I hoped HN would go deeper into the business and technology implications.

What is the strategic logic behind this move?

NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Bloomberg all take the same line: this is about Amazon's expansion into brick-and-mortar retail. They need a physical footprint, knock out Instacart for delivery, accelerate Amazon Go, and so on.

But is this really Amazon's play here? Seems to me this is just the superficial and obvious rationale, and these analysts completely missed the bigger implications.

Since Amazon said they're not renaming the stores, how can this be about Amazon's brick-and-mortar expansion?

Seems more likely that Amazon's strategy is actually the opposite of this.

Instead, maybe the bigger opportunity is to "Amazonify" a good brand, good people, good merchandising and thousands of relationships with good suppliers.

Customers already trust Whole Foods and they like the assortment, but (1) only a small percentage of the population has access to a store, and (2) an even smaller percentage of the population can afford it.

What if this is about taking the Whole Foods concept online in a big way ... make it dramatically more efficient, aggressively lower prices, and deliver all this goodness to a far larger percentage of the population?

Whole Foods market share is less than 2%. Amazon could turn this $13 billion business into a $130 billion business by plugging WF into Amazon's existing apparatus for merchandising, pricing, inventory control, online sales, logistics, and direct-to-consumer delivery.

Taking WF market share up from 2% to 20% is a much bigger opportunity than going the other direction, and just using WF stores to sell Amazon's grocery assortment.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#568

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 6:30 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#569

Post by emodendroket » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 6:31 PM UTC

yomly wrote: post #448

Chaebixi wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took literally two seconds to find: https://www.google.com/#q=amazon+ambulance+warehouse https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-ver... > In a lengthy and heavily reported article, The Call said a warehouse employee contacted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on June 2 to report that the heat index in the warehouse had reached 102 degrees, and that 15 workers had collapsed. The emp…

I suspect keeping ambulance at standby was more of a hotfix for a bug, than a feature. Yes Amazon is frugal, but I think it is a bit of a stretch to assume there was malicious intent in not cooling their FCs. In a giant warehouse managed by a company with > 100k employees, things are not changed that quickly...

They're not malicious, so much as indifferent.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#570

Post by naravara » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 6:32 PM UTC

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.

Prussia was also a highly militaristic state, so it had the side benefit of keeping the young men fit and hearty enough to get conscripted for the next time they needed to bloody France's nose. It would also have the young women fit enough to bear many much young men that they could conscript into future wars.

The logic of trench warfare era militarism is even more depressing than the normal logic of war. It's mind-boggling to think leaders figured it was appropriate to just throw demographically significant numbers of 16-20 year old boys into a meat-grinder just to keep the machinery of colonialist industry well greased.