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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

#721

Post by alasdair_ »

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 continues to do well with non-perishable items.

I've tried a bunch of different grocery delivery services (Seattle area) and Amazon Fresh is far and away the best of them. I stuck with Safeway for four months and literally every single time they delivered an order, there was a problem with the order. Every single week! There was always something missing (not even obscure stuff - once they claimed to be out of bananas, for example) and the packaging was terrible - just getting the bags from my front door to the kitchen often let to something falling out and breaking.

Amazon Fresh does things very, very well. They show up on time, almost never have a stocking issue and the packaging is very well designed - the frozen stuff is packed with dry ice, the cold stuff with an ice pack and the rest are packed into reinforced paper bags that are sealed to prevent stuff falling out en-route. It takes only moment to move everything into my kitchen and I've never had something break en-route.

Customer support is much better too - every time my order was missing an item, I'd have to call Safeway and often I simply couldn't reach someone (especially outside of 9-5).

Grocery stores need to up their game quickly or they will go the way of Sears and K-Mart.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#722

Post by sqeaky »

Retra wrote: post #628
jacobsenscott wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The population of the US is 100x more than Iceland. There are a lot of well run small cities in the US. Iceland's policies would never scale up.

Why not?

"It wouldn't scale up" is common conservative response to progressive or liberal comparisons that involve suggestions of doing it (anything) some other way.

So while the EU plugs away making incremental improvements each year we keep jumping around in fits and spurts forward and backward. There is still a strong belief of American Exceptionalism even in fields where we are clearly inferior. Look at Healthcare Europe figured something out that we didn't and their is cheaper and better.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#723

Post by illumin8 »

computerex wrote: post #662
illumin8 wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lu…

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…

Apparently KFC doesn't get challenged on Hacker News because they are "mistreating their workers," yet Amazon does. I'm tired of arguing with people like you. Apparently, there is a huge portion of the HN community that just flat out hates AMZN - fine - next time I'll learn and just not interact. It sucks that this community has gone so far downhill that honest people with 4K+ karma get downvoted and ridiculed just for sharing their honest opinion.

Have a great fucking day.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#725

Post by busterarm »

bsder wrote: post #582
busterarm wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gosh, I need to reread Friday. It's been ages.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#726

Post by illumin8 »

eellpp wrote: post #711
illumin8 wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bullshit. You either take a job, or you don't. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. Nobody forced you to live where you do. Nobody forced you to choose a place to live that doesn't have opportunities. I've moved to half a dozen different states to get a better job, because I realized, like any reasonably decent person, that you can't expect others to improve your own situation. You need to take charge of your own life, and improve it, if you want to.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#727

Post by codecamper »

mikekij wrote: post #587
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.

Also, I cannot think of a software technology that was created & shared by Amazon.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#728

Post by WillPostForFood »

asr wrote: post #185
emodendroket wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Conglomerates have happened in the past. They become very big until they stop making a lot of money and people realise that they could be more efficient if you split them up. Yeah, who could forget when companies like Standard Oil or AT&T decided to split up, entirely through the power of market forces, with no government intervention at all.

Conglomerates are companies that hold unrelated businesses. Berkshire Hathaway is a conglomerate. Railroads and car insurance in the same company! Standard oil and AT&T were not broken up because they were conglomerates. They were broken up because they were monopolies in single (or closely related) markets.

Further, AT&T was a government granted monopoly in the first place.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#729

Post by illumin8 »

computerex wrote: post #668
illumin8 wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a point you are trying to make that's relevant to this discussion? I have read a few of your comments on this thread and I just can't for the life in me figure out what point you're trying to make.

Honestly, forget it. The point I'm trying to make is that nobody owes you a handout or an easy job. The fact that I've worked brutal fast food jobs for $3.35 an hour, yet you don't see KFC, McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc, being trashed here for terrible working conditions, while AMZN is, speaks volumes.

Today has taught me that HN has a pretty fierce anti AMZN bias, and it shows. I have 4K+ karma, and am sharing my honest opinion and experiences working for AMZN for the last year. Next time, I just won't participate. This community has gone downhill pretty seriously in the last few years... No big loss.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#730

Post by Kalium »

alasdair_ wrote: post #715
objclxt wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you think "protecting them from exploitation" means?
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