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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

#651

Post by etjossem »

arzt wrote: post #358
tuna-piano wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thought. People still like food and food things and being social, and the "farmers market" feeling. Even in a future which makes online grocery great for mundane shopping, people still need stuff to do. Whole Foods already has bars, cafes, and restaurants. Maybe Whole Foods locations turn into places where people can hang out, try new things, and buy online grocery delivery (or pickup delivery as well)? Who shoul…

Whole Foods is an instacart equity owner. I would be curious how this is being handled given the new conflict.

Probably factored into the final price, heavily discounted given Amazon's own plans for last-mile.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#652

Post by illumin8 »

j2bax wrote: post #638
illumin8 wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Any job that would cause a good percentage of people to 'burn out and quit within a couple days', would fall into the category of inhumane for me.

Fair enough, but keep in mind that in the 1800s, parents often made their young children work 16 hour days in the sun farming for them. Child labor, under harsh conditions. We've grown accustomed to a much easier life now, but it was not always like this.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#653

Post by 1001101 »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #321
_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 usually is mostly hands off to acquisitions like these. Look at Zappos and Twitch. I think that what will occur is probably some kind of service that they will tie into Prime Membership. Maybe also integrate things from their prototype store. Usually Amazon enhances experience in this acquistion and they are free to do what they want. Nothing will happen to their employee culture.

In my view, the customer base is more important than the actual business, and so it may or may not retain its current form over time - my guess is that it will morph into Amazon's vision for retail. I bet 95% of WF shoppers are prime members already - ie. people with disposable income - and patronage and walletshare from that demographic is what Amazon values.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#654

Post by midwestcode »

timfrietas wrote: post #427
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…

AmazonFresh has been delivering groceries for years training for precisely this moment. This move allows them to very quickly expand that program nationally.

Surprised I scrolled this far to see something about AmazonFresh... it seemed obvious to me when I heard!

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#655

Post by laretluval »

panarky wrote: post #567
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.

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…

> 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?

Efficiency and cheapness would go against the Whole Foods brand.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#656

Post by kevinsundar »

20years wrote: post #463

Does anyone else think that this purchase is largely in part so they can get AmazonFresh in a lot more places quickly? In my area where there is a big college campus, they have been hiring for AmazonFresh devs for over a year. We have no AmazonFresh here but we do have a Whole Foods.

Are we talking about SLO haha?

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#657

Post by erikpukinskis »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #500
rubidium wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the majority of middle class people like somewhere in between. They can't afford premium, but want a little more assistance than ALDI. Basically, there's three market segments, not two.

Going forward, I would bet on the middle market shrinking.

I wouldn't underestimate the number of people whose buying strategy is "cheap, but not the bottom".

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#658

Post by virtuabhi »

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."

In addition to using Whole Foods stores as a locker location, Amazon can also ask Whole Foods employees to deliver packages on their their way home from work. Like Walmart - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/06/01/w...

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#659

Post by good_vibes »

I have a job interview with Amazon next week. Wish me luck, I'll be likely doing entry level work but I hope I can keep working on websites for clients (have 2 currently), keep learning data structures/algorithms, and build a personal project. All this to one day get hired by Amazon for UX or web developer.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#660

Post by tajen »

Applejinx wrote: post #360
AndrewDucker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major difference is that if Amazon stop running well then someone else will come along and replace them. Whereas government is a monopoly, so if it runs badly then it doesn't automatically get replaced. Now, democracy is supposed to fix this, by allowing you to vote for a different supplier of government every few years. But because of the voting system in some countries (like the US and the UK) it's actually rea…

It would be enormously, impossibly wasteful for anything to come around and replace Amazon. It'd be like replacing Google. You're basically talking market chaos and massive supply chain disruption, probably to the point of extensive loss of life: you'd be surprised how much depends on these giant, government-like systems. Personally, I think the poster suggesting that Amazon may start lobbying for basically welfare,…

> It'd be like replacing Google. You're basically talking market chaos and massive supply chain disruption, probably to the point of extensive loss of life

What? Granted an overnight transition could cause disruption, but in a few months, what couldn't be replaced? Gmail? GMaps? Android? Youtube? Search+Adwords+GAnalytics? GCE? their CDN could be the worst, maybe? they all already have big competitors, and since Google's quality is minimal, it wouldn't be that hard to switch over. But you need a motivated company, i.e. just a little more effort than OpenStreetMaps or FastMail.

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