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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

#601

Post by rangersanger »

novia wrote: post #309
sebmarion wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I think this is precisely the point.

As a loyal Whole Foods shopper I am EXTREMELY excited by this development. The worst part about grocery shopping anywhere is waiting in line. There are a ton of jobs at Whole Foods that have nothing to do with running the cash register, and as long as Amazon keeps those jobs intact I am all for the automation revolution. I have never worked as a cashier, but I can't imagine it's a very fun job. Automating out those j…

Having done both, and having once been an otherwise unemployable 15 year old, I'm saddened by this development. I learned some valuable skills at that job. I'm not sure there are many other entry points to the job market for young people that want to or need to work.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#602

Post by illumin8 »

nebula wrote: post #150
illumin8 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 know that there are some stories about bad experiences in the fulfillment centers, but keep in mind that those positions are temporary seasonal work by unskilled labor. The tone of your writing suggests that you are OK with treating these people badly. If a company treats some set of its workers badly, what stops them from treating other employees the same way? In this case, they may treat SW engineers well because…

Have you ever worked a minimum wage food service or warehouse job before? I have, and believe me, it's hell. I spent my high school years working as a cook at KFC. Hot summer days spent making $3.35 an hour standing over pressure cookers full of 400 degree hot oil and lifting 50 pound baskets of deep fried chicken out of them. You get a 15 minute paid break every 4 hours, and a mandatory 30 minute unpaid break for lunch.

I'm not saying its ok to be inhumane or break laws and treat your workers like cattle. I'm just saying that if you've never worked at a minimum wage unskilled job before, you probably don't realize how much it can be hell, just due to the nature of the work. The same thing can be said for lots of labor like farming, construction work, mining, etc.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#603

Post by landryraccoon »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #159
VT_Drew wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I think your comment is a non-sequitur. I am highly invested in my 401K and IRA but I would much rather have returns over the next 10 years than the next 3 months.

If your retirement is 3 months away, then sure you should be thinking short term, which actually means you should be moving away from stocks entirely. Investors that are really that short term should be in bonds or cash.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#604

Post by polymeris »

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.

Switzerland's 2 largest supermarket chains Migros[1] and Coop[2] are structured as cooperatives, generating yearly revenues of ~28 billion CHF, each.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migros [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Switzerland)

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#605

Post by Bulkington »

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).

I also immediately thought of kibbutzim, just as a counterexample for debate. (Full disclosure: ex-volunteer)

From Agriculture To High-Tech: Meet Five Kibbutzim That Became Global Powerhouses http://nocamels.com/2016/03/successful-israeli-kibbutzim-ind...

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#606

Post by ProAm »

s73ver wrote: post #487
markshead wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason they would get a different amount per share than other shareholders? I'd assume it would only depend on how much stock they have obtained either by purchasing it from the market, using the stock purchase plan (where they can buy it for 85% of market price if they agreed to keep it for 2 years), or the stock-grants that were given to employees.

Well, for one, the employees are a huge part of why those shareholders get any returns in the first place.

And the employee's get a paycheck in return...

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#607

Post by s73ver »

bluGill wrote: post #537
s73ver wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. I am not telling any company to treat their employees like crap to squeeze an extra penny of profit out of them.

But you are because you own the fund that in turns owns the company. It might not be your intent, and you might not have enough of a vote to stop it, but you are still doing it. (sort of like Americans opposed to the current foreign policy are still at fault for it)

No. I reject your idea in its entirety.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#608

Post by rosser »

_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…

Amazon didn't terribly Amazon-ize the culture at Zappo's, AFAIK; that's at least an existence proof that they don't always do that.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#609

Post by illumin8 »

j2bax wrote: post #231
illumin8 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 know that there are some stories about bad experiences in the fulfillment centers, but keep in mind that those positions are temporary seasonal work by unskilled labor. This might be one of the more tone deaf things I've read on HN in recent memory.

Please see my other comment. I've worked a $3.35/hr. minimum wage food service job before and it's hell. If you took 1,000 average citizens and threw them into minimum wage food service, factory, or warehouse work, I would completely expect a good percentage of them to burn out and quit within a couple days. Unskilled jobs are just too hard and require too much effort for too little salary to make them acceptable to a lot of people. This doesn't mean they are inhumane; it means we've grown accustomed to easy, white-collar jobs and are fairly divorced from the reality of hard, physical labor these days.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#610

Post by [deleted] »

maxerickson wrote: post #56
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."

I don't think that is right, Whole Foods stores are already full of...food. They don't have room for hundreds of additional products, never mind tens of thousands.

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