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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

#701

Post by SaintGhurka »

laretluval wrote: post #655
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…

> 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 popu…

> Efficiency and cheapness would go against the Whole Foods brand.

For their existing customers, yes, but WF has become an aspirational brand.

What if the play is to gain a large number of less affluent customers by WF-labeling lots of inexpensive things?

Search Amazon for some commodity like corn meal, or rolled oats. There's a huge price difference between Quaker brand and Bob's Red Mill. Amazon could insert Whole Foods brand right in the middle and skim customers from both ends while maintaining handsome margins.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#702

Post by dsmithatx »

steego wrote: post #665
petra wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That surely makes a lot of sense. But in theory at least, Amazon's fulfillment platform is supposed to be the solution for retailing the "long tail", and it had worked very well in regular e-commerce. So why did it fail with food ?

I can't emphasize enough how food is a fundamentally different business in so many ways. First, to say the product is evaluated and experienced in a much more visceral way than most other industries is a huge understatement. Our bodies, like most other animals, dedicate so many resources and features to the quality detection and digestion of food and our second largest concentration of nerve cells exists in our gut.…

They are about as different as running an online book store is to running one of the largest clouds on earth.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#703

Post by dsmithatx »

zebrafish wrote: post #245
tuna-piano wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would definitely guess not. Why would Amazon pick and pack from a retail store and not a distribution center? And what does Instacart bring to the table? Amazon already has a website and seems to have no trouble building gigantic on-demand workforces. What else does Instacart have? I would guess close to 100% of Instacart users already use Amazon for things as well. I don't see things ending up well for Instacart a…

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…

60% of US households have a prime membership. I'd say the majority of Instacart's database is already a prime member anyway. Whole Foods customers would just switch to Amazon even if they move away from Instacart.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#704

Post by thinkling »

eric_the_read wrote: post #681
Shivetya wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me I fail to see the value because Aldi is here and expanding and now Lidi is following. while they may be on the opposite end of the market from Whole foods I do think they are where the market will truly end up. The middle to higher end grocery stores are going to face a tough time with the discounters and we have yet to see if the European model of grocery can covert a large number of shoppers. with regards to…

The value is that Aldi is nowhere near here, and Lidi is completely un-heard-of. The only reason I know about Aldi is that I spent a couple of years working in Chicago (and living further out), and even there I had to drive a long ways out of my way to find an Aldi. I think I went once in the 2 years I was there. Whole Foods is everywhere.

FYI Aldi also owns Trader Joe's.

EDIT: apparently I was effectively wrong, different Aldis:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14569051

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#705

Post by sqeaky »

jhall1468 wrote: post #536
andreyf wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No competent programmer I know has to work 40 hours a week to have their needs met. The best ones charge rates would allow them to have their needs met working <10 hours a week.

First of all, what does that have to do with ANYTHING being discussed in this thread? Second, any "programmer" working 10 hours a week and charging enough to live comfortably on that isn't a programmer, they are a consultant.

I am a consultant that writes software, does that mean I am not a programmer.

If wasn't supporting a whole raft of people who aren't my kids I could get by on 10 hours a week. Most of these people will be self sufficient in the fall. Then we will see I can get fewer hours.

Charge hourly, produce good work(actually work those hours you charge) and spend enough time learning to stay proficient in your niche of the craft. This recipe won't make you a millionaire quickly, and it won't get you a house in the bay area, but it has given me great financial freedom in the Midwest.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#706

Post by tigershark »

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.

Italian Coop: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Italy) About the same as whole foods revenue. At this point you have quite a few communes operating at this scale.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#707

Post by sqeaky »

pc86 wrote: post #593
tracker1 wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Exactly. If you're making $35k a year, all that story meant to you was "a bunch of billionaires colluded so someone making 5x what I make couldn't make 5.5x what I make."

It gets worse when you think about how often those "screwed" people that make 5x the median income of an area, make software that replaces 10,000 jobs. This software often comes in an app store and is given away for free with an ad at the bottom.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#708

Post by irinai13 »

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…

Agreed. My first thought was: "Sweet, now prices will come down, WF stores will probably have come out with some innovations we didn't even know we needed but then won't imaging living without and overall customer experience will be awesome." They're going to figure out how to take WF to the next level.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#709

Post by tigershark »

nickbauman wrote: post #409
_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…

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…

It's more than 1 year that Amazon fresh launched in uk, I guess it is even more time it launched in us. And I think is doing pretty well, I have been buying my weekly groceries always in Amazon for a while now.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#710

Post by sqeaky »

s73ver wrote: post #639
wand3r wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 40 hour work week is arbitrary. It was made for railroad workers who had high workplace accident rates and worked 6-7 days a week. Many died because pre-implementation they worked at night w/o sufficient electric lighting as it was not widespread yet. After the war; WWI iirc, the framework was applied to other industries. So if you don't want to work 40 hours, don't. I have much less sympathy for a software engin…

"SE is not IMO a vocation that needs to organize." The games industry disproves your theory.

I think game dev is the way it is because so many romanticize game development. A ton of grads fresh out of college want to get in and are competing for a the limited (but large) amount of work it takes to make a game. The big a-hole studios realize this and charge sub-prime wages because after they burn a dev out there will be another to replace them still starry-eyed from a childhood playing games.

I have read several stories of people leaving game deve for a nice boring job writing insurance software for more money and fewer hours. Many could be doing it the other way around, write software for a lame, but lucrative, insurance company, then make a small lifestyle business writing indie games with a few friends.

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