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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

#771
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering Amazon has been developing technology for walk in, and walk out checkout, and owns a robotics company, there might be a lot less of them.

Indeed, I think this is precisely the point.

I'm sure the point isn't just to get the technology into Whole Foods, but rather to use Whole Foods to advertise the technology to every other retailer.

It's like how Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, except for if he had just bought Harvard.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#772
post #710
post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 seve…

Also, I think it is hard to get product market fit. You pretty much have to release a whole game before you know if it's successful. Unless you are established it is much harder to bootstrap. You can release a level and optimize but games are super hard.

I agree there is the romantic factor in play as well. You have a lot of supply of devs and a random walk of success stories.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please don't let me comments prevent you from participating in good discourse. I just don't understand why you are so hell bent on defending Amazon at the expense of all the "seasonal unskilled laborers". They are humans like you and me and they are not secondary citizens. It seems to me like we should be trying to make other people's lives better. I will trash whatever place that mistreats its employees. But this is Hacker news and the topic is about whole food and amazon. Why you keep bringing the fact that you worked for $3.50 an hour at McDonald's is beyond me. Damn man, just because you suffered from having to do fast food doesn't mean everyone else should too?

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#775

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.

I don't know what this means. The WF experience has nothing to do with these things. The price (cheap or less-than-expensive) and efficiency (I think you mean availability?) aren't really important, other than they are successful in the same way Trader Joes is successful, in fewer locations.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#777

Bezos: "Alexa, buy me something from whole foods" Alexa: "Buying Whole Foods" Bezos: "Shit"

Credit(?): https://twitter.com/ChicagoPhotoSho/status/87570898151116390...

Nice catch. Plagiarizing for upvotes is rather sad.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#778
post #320

I quite like wholefoods. Now that Amazon will own it I feel less likely to support it. Amazon is a cut throat profit making machine at the expense of human exploitation. Wholefoods felt like the little guy who was trying to do things differently from mainstream supermarkets.

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.

Companies that use AWS are not owned by Amazon. WFM is. There is a big difference there.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#779
post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep referring to the 'moneyed' as an alien entity when in reality it is a lot of index funds, pension funds, 401ks and what not. Are you saying there should be less/no return for investing your money? If so, how do you suppose we incentivize investments?

The top 5% own >70% of all stock, so no it mostly isn't grandma's 401k or grandpa's pension. Half of all Americans don't own a single share of anything in any form.

You have to admit, whether or not this was ever anyone's intent, from a social control perspective, tying your retirement to the health of the market is a real masterstroke.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#780
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.

OK, so the vast majority of people are "either stupid or lazy or both." What a cheery worldview. How would we have anything resembling today's businesses if everyone over the age of 30 were running a business?
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