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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

#581

Post by BurningFrog »

steego wrote: post #304
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."

Meh. This deal is about expansion, not about tapping into 431 measly location. Amazon knows they can set up satellite warehouses a lot faster and cheaper than they can create a store. Let's be clear. Whole Foods is not a commodity food supplier. They enjoy high margins because they have cultivated quality and consciousness into their products. They did to food what Apple did to computers. They added the right mix of…

I think the stores could become a modern version of the Post Office, where you can pick up and/or return your Amazon packages.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#582

Post by bsder »

busterarm wrote: post #377
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

Shipstone.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#584

Post by hammock »

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

There are actually a number of items in WF that they sell at cost or below

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#585

Post by prewett »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #572
panarky wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 G…

It's worth pointing out that the purchase, as based on today's price action, was effectively "free". Amazon market cap went up 3.5% as of the current tick, roughly $15.5B. The market effectively rewarded AMZN for the transaction far beyond the actual $13.7B tender offer!

No, they are paying in cash, not stock. The company sold the stock a long time ago, so whatever the stock does has no impact on the company. The stockholders, however, benefited 3.5%, assuming they sell now.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#587

Post by mikekij »

Geekette wrote: post #166

You know the race for global trade dominance is heating up and playing out regionally when the same company tries to buy Slack and Whole Foods in the same week. While one is familiar with conglomerates holding a diverse array of businesses, it's fascinating and slightly unnerving (in terms of market power increasingly concentrated in fewer hands) to see it in motion.

Agreed. I love Amazon prime, and also love Slack. But I fear the day when all of the "good companies" end up being owned by one corporate overlord.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#588

Post by wozniacki »

ihnorton wrote: post #459
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.

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).

Could you expand on the Israeli firms?

Are they essentially large family-run houses of commerce much like tradesmen guilds of the past?

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#590

Post by FLUX-YOU »

harrisreynolds wrote: post #334

HUGE news in the grocery delivery space. Groceries are one of the few large markets that require some proximity to customers due to costs and spoilage. Each grocery store is a type of mini-distribution center for grocery products. Shipt and Instacart have succeeded to date because they use existing distribution channels and set up marketplaces for the "last-mile" of delivery. This is in contrast to Webvan in the earl…

> I still believe that Instacart and Shipt can succeed

Amazon could just buy Shipt and/or Instacart as well, barring FTC intervention.

I'm not sure what B2B partners Shipt has, but I know they have a mobile app. Joining the mobile app to Amazon would give Shipt a boost and Amazon a start, I'd imagine.

[I worked with one of Shipt's mobile developers at a previous position. Go Shipt!]

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