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Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
751–760 of 865 posts
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#752I don't mean to be a naysayer, I don't really know what this means. But with all of the euphoria I'm hearing regarding Amazon and the doom-and-gloom regarding "traditional" grocers, I can't help but remind myself how horribly bad people are at predicting the future. Most of the people I'm hearing make predictions about what this means have been wrong about everything to this point. Not saying it won't be a game-chang…
Scott Galloway predicted AMZN buying WFM last month: http://www.businessinsider.com/scott-galloway-explains-exact...
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#753Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's nice to see non-union employees treated well and paid well, not because of any negative feelings toward unions or unionization, but because I think it shows that you can be a successful capitalist without trying to suck every ounce of productivity and profit out of your lowest-paid employees.
Maybe, but the fact that they were just acquired by a company notorious for abusing its low-level employees shows the limitations of this model (as did the pressure they began to face from investors to tighten up on that front when they started to become less profitable).
Well, Amazon doesn't have any low level employees. They all work for Integrity Staffing.
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#754$13.7B is quite a satisfying amount. That's $1 for every year since the Big Bang.
Or $30M per Whole Foods (rented) stores.
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#755Oof. 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…
I think Zappos is a probably a pretty good proxy. They too had a very different culture to Amazon at the time of acquisition, but I believe it has largely remained intact many years post-acquisition. Amazon as a company has many flaws in its culture (if we are to believe the reports), but they seem to do acquisitions pretty well and know when to leave things alone and let them do their thing.
The value of Zappos is integrating the procurement and warehousing with the Amazon operation. The front end can remain distinct. The same applies to the WF distribution network. That is the hardest thing to get right in the supermarket business.
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#756Oof. 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…
I don't think there's a significant incentive for Amazon to change Whole Foods. The real gains will be from automating the supply chain, including applying machine learning to quality control. Amazon already grades strawberries that way.
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#757HUGE 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…
I'm just sad that true disruption isn't happening in the grocery/food sectors; buying WF, or throwing tech at food isn't a solution that will reduce food costs or feed more people... I'd rather see someone create a business that makes it so that anyone on minimum wage can support and healthily feed a family.
There are people like myself working on that. Not an easy problem but one that deserves attention for sure.
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#758Earlier quoted context omitted.
How long till somebody develops the UBER of groceries? Your neighbour could do your shopping for you.
Like a decentralized Instacart, interesting.
Why isn't there a total decentralized on demand platform? The bulk of the value is in the people performing the services, not the app technology to connect them.
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#759Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth pointing out that the purchase, as based on today's price action, was effectively "free". Amazon market cap went up 3.5% as of the current tick, roughly $15.5B. The market effectively rewarded AMZN for the transaction far beyond the actual $13.7B tender offer!
This is synergy. The market thinks that WFM + AMZN together as one is worth more than the sum of their parts. I should hope so. "effectively free" is a strange label to give this.
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Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#760https://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."
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…
> Having a leg and data from a real grocery store will help them figure out what they need to do to improve.
This. I've worked for Whole Foods and my wife currently does. They find small, local companies that make natural products. They work with them to market their products and test them in their stores. They collect a lot of data on how customers respond to the products, improve them, and then distribute them nationally.
The reason Whole Foods has been suffering is because they're not big enough. Once these companies have a valuable product, they want to sell them at Walmart, Kroger, HEB, etc.
But Amazon is big enough that they could make deals with these companies. I believe Amazon wants Whole Foods so that it can generate new, popular, high-margin food products that can only be bought in a Whole Foods store or on Amazon.