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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

#411

Post by bluGill »

chc wrote: post #305
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good old investors, so short sighted, they only care about the next 3 months. Yeah, darn those investors. How dare people with pensions, 401k's, IRAs, and other investments expect some kind of return on their investment? It's disgraceful. /s EDIT: The sentiment against investors is rather ironic considering the amount of equity collectively held by HN readers.

The idea that I can't criticize pathological behaviors by investors because I myself invest in things makes about as much sense as saying I can't criticize bad US policies because I live in the US.

You are the investor causing the pathological behavior. A very large part of wall street is investors like you that just have a little bit in their retirement accounts.

Do you vote the proxy for all the funds in your 401k? Do you understand how your vote affects the above - it all does.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#412

Post by davemel37 »

_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…

I don't know the Amazon executives...but I would give them the benefit of the doubt that they appreciate fundamental differences between a low cost retailer and a high end retailer. Amazon needs to cut costs and find efficiencies every where they can because that is the nature of a business built on low price...I would assume and hope they realize that whole foods is a different type of business that requires happy customers and happy employees to fetch premium prices...I would hope!

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#413

Post by lovich »

sidlls wrote: post #286
eppsilon wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, software developers are exempted from the law requiring 1.5x pay for overtime. Not sure it matters if they're salaried instead of hourly to begin with though.

This is in the US and they're all salaried. Their overtime is computed as a function of the equivalent hourly rate, biweekly pay, etc.

That is a set of regulations that vary state by state. I work in mass and I have never received a dime for overtime

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#414

Post by fivestar »

javiramos wrote: post #303
pc86 wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

I agree. I just heard this [1] podcast about the Oneida company. It was one of the first companies to show that paying and treating the lowest-paid employees very well and being very profitable are not mutually exclusive. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/09/532303452/episo...

Of course it's not--you just have to have leaders who don't want 100X what the average employee makes! It's about greed, it's always been about greed.

And it's so much worse than that, really. A lot of public companies are being strip-mined of their true wealth by the insiders. Pump the stock, gut the company, screw the investors.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#415

Post by uxp100 »

m-j-fox wrote: post #376
irfanka wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the reason why there aren't any Software Developer Unions these days.

You're kidding, right? Programmers are decently paid but should strike for a 40-hour work week.

When I was hired I became the best paid person I knew. I think it would be pretty hard to unionize, but damn if I ain't pissed that that wage fixing scandal wasn't a bigger deal. I work at one of the guilty companies, and I would be happier if I felt like most workers even knew it happened. (even though this was not wage fixing for the average engineer, but for certain high profile roles.)

That's something a worker's organization would help with, even if I don't feel like I need them in wage negotiation.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#416

Post by sidlls »

lovich wrote: post #413
sidlls wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in the US and they're all salaried. Their overtime is computed as a function of the equivalent hourly rate, biweekly pay, etc.

That is a set of regulations that vary state by state. I work in mass and I have never received a dime for overtime

It has nothing to do with regulations, actually. These companies they work at aren't normally obliged to pay overtime by any regulation or contractual obligation. The engineers there are "exempt" employees, classified identically to what a software engineer would be.

In some cases these employers' contracts require them to pay overtime to employees that work on the contract project, but generally that isn't the case. They pay overtime because of the historical evolution of the industry and the expectations and dynamics of the employer/employee relationships.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#417

Post by devmunchies »

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…

> margins are razor-thin

at any other grocery store, yes

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#418

Post by ohyes »

Danihan wrote: post #353
ohyes wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liquor is heavily regulated on a state by state basis. The distributor relationship is often required by law.

So Amazon will create a spin off a distributor company

Yeah, that might work. It appears to be very political/corrupt in Massachusetts at least. It doesn't really matter what liquor store you go to as prices are basically fixed here. They'd have to get the distributor license approved, and a separate retail license... and then (I think) a single company is allowed no more than 3 retail locations in the state.

Anyway, I agree there's a lot of bullshit that adds to the cost of alcohol, and does make it look ripe for disruption, but I suspect there'd also have to be a lobbying effort to get the laws changed on a state by state basis (for it to be scalable), and whoever was trying to get the laws changed would be facing the alcoholic beverage industry lobby, who are also a fairly powerful/entrenched group.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#419

Post by jhall1468 »

m-j-fox wrote: post #376
irfanka wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the reason why there aren't any Software Developer Unions these days.

You're kidding, right? Programmers are decently paid but should strike for a 40-hour work week.

I work 40 hours a week. Sometimes I work 45, and I usually offset it by cutting it shorter the next week. I have no need (or desire) to "strike" just because some businesses/orgs/teams are garbage.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#420

Post by zeteo »

mdasen wrote: post #285
phreeza wrote: post #21

Somewhat off topic, but I have had a weird thought circulating in my head (triggered by reading Red Plenty) that I wanted to put out there: What is the relationship between a centrally planned economy as for example Gosplan was trying to run in the USSR, and the presence of these huge market-like but centralized entities like Amazon and Wal-Mart inside a free-market economy? This becomes particularly interesting beca…

The difference is the ability for new firms to compete. With centralized planning, there's only one source. If that source is inefficient or corrupt, that inefficiency and corruption stays around. You can try to regulate, threaten, and police it, but nothing can really take it down. By contrast, Walmart and Amazon might be very large, but they still have competition. Heck, Amazon started less than 25 years ago. Remem…

> How many companies have been "the unstoppable juggernaut" for 50+ years? AT&T isn't the AT&T from 30 years ago. [...] Microsoft was the unstoppable juggernaut... and then Apple and Google came along.

These are very good examples. However in both cases the decisive action was taken by federal antitrust enforcement. The Bell System was broken up by a consent decree [1] and Microsoft only dropped its aggressive Browser Wars tactics (e.g. giving IE special API access) after a major antitrust case [2]. It makes for a nice story, but in practice big companies are rarely (if ever) defeated by scrappy competitors / market forces.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

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