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Amazon To Buy Whole Foods Market For $13.7 Billion (usatoday.com)
Amazon said Friday it would buy Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion as the giant internet retailer makes a deeper push into the grocery space. From a report: Amazon has dabbled in brick-and-mortar operations, experimenting with a bookstore that opened in New York last month and plans to open "no-checkout" convenience stores. But the Whole Foods acquisition represents a dramatic departure from its early business model founded on online retailing and related technology. Grocery retail is a notoriously thin-profit-margin business. And Whole Foods -- often derided as "Whole Paycheck" -- has struggled in recent years to keep up with emerging competitors that are expanding nationwide with cheaper items. Traditional grocery stores have also widened their organic food selections in hopes of retaining customers who are increasingly looking to eat healthily.
You've obviously never been to a Whole Foods :)
Seriously though, I'm mad at Whole Foods for buying out and shuttering all of the other chains of "Health Food" stores.
They're really stores that just sell high quality foods that are more pricy than the usual factory farm product. And some feel-good hippy branding to go with it. Oh, they also have really fucking good deli foods.
Point is Whole Foods is a bunch of dicks, run by a bunch of dicks.. We'll see if Amazon does them better.
Whole Foods are also a national chain which might have been tempting. To get nationwide coverage in high income zip codes would otherwise have required multiple purchases.
That said, their stores are often pretty small compared to the bigger supermarkets which isn't great if you want to use them as local warehouses for Amazon Fresh, and they're also located in prime (read high-cost) locations, also unnecessary.
Whole Foods is in a lot of markets especially higher end ones. It allows Prime Pantry to expand fast. WF has also been struggling as of late. It has been re-evaluating its "buy local" because it is getting squeezed by Wegmans. So an easy buy from that angle.
It's not just that Amazon is good at the back end stuff like managing a supply chain. They've also been working on that "Amazon Go" thing where you have a store without cashiers or checkout lines. If they can bring a lot of automation and efficiency to Whole Foods, they could bring prices down quite a lot, which has been one of the principle complaints about Whole Foods.
Of course, that wouldn't necessarily be good for the people who work at Whole Foods...
They are also cashing in on people who equate:
All Natural = Healthy
GMO = Poison
Preservatives = Part of big food.
Now the food quality is probably rather good, because they are not competing on price, so they can pick the quality products. And if it doesn't have all this "bad stuff" listed above then the food is probably fresh, as it will probably spoil soon.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In an economic downturn Whole Foods would be a boat anchor.
Grocery stores are practically recession proof. Everyone has to eat even when times are hard.
True, but as disposable income shrinks, most people start to reconsider whether $6 a dozen cage free, no-stress, gluten free-fed, artisan handmade coop housed eggs are really worth the price premium over the $2 a dozen regular eggs.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Home delivery is not expensive.
Once SDCs are available, home delivery will likely be cheaper than going shopping. Amazon is getting ready for the future. They can sacrifice profit in the short run, so they have the infrastructure in place to profit in the long run.
Since they have an astronomically high P/E of over 500, their investors seem to agree that this is a smart strategy.
Oh STFU. We're not talking about 'falling over dead from glyphosate poisoning' here, we're talking about strange chronic health problems that doctors can't figure out WHY you have them, but that started showing up in countries that use Roundup shortly after Roundup use started to skyrocket.
I'm not even going to bother debating this. Nobody will know the truth about any of it until long after we're all dead from old age, or Monsanto goes out of business, whichever comes first. Believe whatever the fuck you want.
You sound much like my ex-wife. She had a problem with gluten for a long time and for most of the time, doctors told her it was "all in her head" since tests for Celiac disease all came back negative. We finally figured out while we were married that she was gluten-sensitive (all gluten, not just wheat like you), and if she avoided eating it she did much better and didn't get migraines and have CFS like she did with gluten.
But the long-term fallout was that ended up distrusting the medical profession greatly, and believes in just about any "alternative medicine" BS that promises to make her feel better. It was a significant factor in our divorce--that quackery costs a lot of money, and she simply couldn't be convinced that it was BS, despite the fact that she visited these quacks for years until *I* came along and figured out for her that her problem was gluten, and I'm an engineer, not a doctor (or quack-doctor); none of the quacks, despite all their talk about "holistic health" and all the various fads they jump on, could figure it out, and just fed her with a bunch of expensive "supplements" based on some stupid arm test.
So be careful not to go the other way. The medical profession does (did?) seem to have a problem in not acknowledging that there's a whole lot about human biology they don't understand yet, and ascribing symptoms they can't explain with existing tests to psychosomatic illness, but just because the medical profession is flawed doesn't mean the alternatives are any better--they're not.
It's really too bad that doctors aren't trained to be more like engineers. I can point to a bunch of things where the medical profession was lacking, or outright wrong, and it took a long time for them to come around. Phrenology is a famous example in the far past, but gut bacteria is a very current one: they're only now acknowledging how much of a role it has in our health, and how different it can be person-to-person. It wasn't very long ago that they thought the appendix was completely useless, and only now are they finally acknowledging its true purpose. So unfortunately, there's really not enough scientific thinking in medicine, and too many assumptions about the completeness of their knowledge. Personally, I think part of the problem is the lack of scientific background on the part of the practitioners; many of them tend to be religious after all, so they have a hard time accepting the role of evolution in our biology, and how that makes us all rather different from each other in very small but important ways. When you believe the "God created us in his image", that mindset isn't very compatible with how biology really works.