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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

#711

Post by eellpp »

illumin8 wrote: post #679
computerex wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell is your point? That amazon treats unskilled labor in fulfillment centers less badly than KFC? Amazon has earned itself a reputation for being frugal/fostering a poor work life balance. You countered by saying that those stories only apply to seasonal "unskilled labor" in fulfillment centers. I am of the opinion that amazon should treat all of their employees well. OP is concerned about the impact amazon…

I'm not going to argue with you. I'm just pointing out that many of us have relatively easy white-collar jobs that pale in comparison to the hard, manual labor that our grandparents did. Expecting a warehouse job to coddle you is ridiculous. You're working in a warehouse - you know you're going to be standing on your feet, walking about 10 miles a day, your entire shift (outside of breaks). If you can't handle that,…

> Nobody is forcing you to.

The economic/social situation of people force them into these jobs. Just ignoring this and accepting it as reality is ridiculous. This can be said of any of such social behaviours. In some cultures, the violence on women is countered by the logic that they were wearing certain kind of dress and nobody is forcing them to do this etc ..

There are certain values in society that we should try to fight for. They may seem idealistic in current perspective, but nevertheless we should strive for them to make progress inch by inch. Brushing them off under the pretext of "nobody forced them" is not right.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#712

Post by s73ver »

mee_too wrote: post #684
s73ver wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reject that notion entirely. The employees are the reason why the store was able to do so well. They should get the bulk of the reward for that. I flat out reject this idea that people should get the bulk of reward simply for already having money.

IMHO if a person is over 30 yo and an employee, he's either stupid or lazy or both. Investing and not loosing a lot of money is not simple, it takes intelligence and effort.

No. This take is completely wrong, and is quite tone deaf.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#713

Post by chrisper »

aylmao wrote: post #634
chrisper wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that reasoning you would also have to stop visiting any website that uses AWS. I think that would mean you'd have to stop using the Internet entirely.

Are you implying that it's unreasonable for him to dislike Amazon for its labour practices if he's an internet user? That doesn't make any sense.

No. I tried to say that if he wants to avoid things to stop supporting Amazon, then he will have a hard time. A similar case would be Nestle, since they own so many products.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#714

Post by tigershark »

sidlls wrote: post #180
dx034 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? The important part is commute. 50hr work week in a job you like with a reasonable commute is no problem for your health. 30hr/week in a job you don't like with 2.5hr in traffic each day is much less healthy.

Unless all 50 hours are compensated, 10 of them at 1.5-2x base pay, the person working them is getting ripped off. Every one of my friends in engineering (actual engineering, e.g. civil, aerospace, etc.) positions get at least 1.5x for any hour over 40 they work in a week. In fact "unpaid overtime" is something I hadn't heard of for an engineering position prior to working in software. It's almost like workers in thi…

I guess you are speaking about juniors/graduates? Senior engineers in my experience in two different European countries have always contracts with unpaid overtime exactly as management contracts.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#715

Post by alasdair_ »

objclxt wrote: post #550
wooter wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no thanks. look at what collective/forced/politicized bickering over hours has done to the job market everywhere its been tried. look at the corruption. i enjoy my freedom to negotiate my terms as I, as an individual, and my employer see fit.

You are mixing up blue collar and white collar unions. Go look at the film industry, and the Writers / Directors / Screen Actors Guilds. The WGA doesn't stop screenwriters from negotiating their own terms. Do you think someone like JJ Abrams is getting paid the WGA set fees? That Tom Cruise works SAG and Equity rates? Of course not. The point of the guilds in these industries is to set minimum standards for pay and b…

>It is designed to stop studios from exploiting people desperate to work in the industry.

Would you say that it works?

My understanding is that these unions make it more difficult for new people "desperate to work in the industry" to actually break into the industry.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#716

Post by thinkling »

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…

Your point about grocery logistics being difficult is a good one. However, Amazon is not new to this.

- Amazon has been shipping tens of thousands of non-perishable grocery SKUs from their main site for about 10 years. They've had to deal with expiration dates, chocolate that can melt, bundling multiples, highly variable shipping cost vs margin, etc. That organic cereal you buy at WFM is available on Amazon too.

- They have relationships with all the large packaged-goods companies.

- They've been operating a small-scale local grocery business (Amazon Fresh) for about 10 years, now in 14 cities.

- A lot of this direct-to-consumer business is complementary to Whole Foods' experience.

Whole Foods is stable as a company and (afaict) has higher operating margin's than Amazon's retail business. So they could largely leave them alone but still gain a more-or-less national perishable foods supply chain that lets them open Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go in many more cities much faster than if they had to do it from scratch.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#717

Post by rollingpebbles »

WF has been struggling because they helped paved the way for mainstreaming of organic, sustainable, etc. They couldn't pivot really and everyone else was undercutting their high prices and they've been unable to increase profitable foot-traffic to stay alive. Amazon could basically use WF as a laboratory for deploying Amazon Go without having to build grocery logistics from scratch. Hope it works out.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#718

Post by thinkling »

kesselvon wrote: post #200
emodendroket wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's a completely different environment than full time employees work in. But probably more similar to most jobs in a grocery store than a software engineering position.

I mean keeping an ambulance outside the doors to a warehouse because its cheaper than cooling it is a tad inhumane.

I believe HQ staff was very unhappy about that situation and that (some of?) the warehouses in hotter places have A/C now. (Source: live in Seattle, know a number of Amzn employees.)

I haven't seen any articles about the working conditions at warehouses in years, have you? In the mean time, they've opened dozens more warehouses.

(The latest was the NYT article which was about office jobs and which is a whole discussion in its own right.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#719

Post by styfle »

BurningFrog wrote: post #581
steego wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or to use the Apple analogy, Whole Foods is basically the Apple Store. Maybe they'll just call it the Amazon tore?

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#720

Post by ferentchak »

lorenzhs wrote: post #191
dx034 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small stores, mostly own labels and fewer employees. They buy only packages that don't need unpacking, saving a lot of time getting products on the shelf. Employees work all positions in the store so that shelves are filled when it's less busy and everyone is at the checkout when needed. That way no employee is idle, saving salaries. In the UK they also profit from their European footprint. If you go somewhere else i…

They also have barcodes on just about every side of the packaging. The cashiers don't have to figure out which side is the one with the barcode, they can just slide it across the scanner in whichever orientation it's on the belt. This makes checkout super efficient.

This is only possible because they make their own products too. If you are Coke and need to compete with Pepsi you need to use the surface of your product to help with branding. If you are the only game in town you can have a white can covered in bar codes that says beer on the side.
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