Slashdot Mirror
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.
If only there was a way to prevent customers from checking prices online...
Ezekiel 23:20
I kind of figured Amazon would try to get into the grocery business in a big way but this is not the strategyI would have expected. It's an interesting approach from a business perspective. Whole Foods is struggling with cost and pricing but has a good brand and Amazon is amazing at the back end stuff. Might work brilliantly if they do it right. Might be a catastrophe. It's certainly well outside Amazon's wheelhouse to get into traditional retail in such a big way but it does give them immediate access to a high quality group of supplier relationships in groceries.
"Sure. That will be 47.25"
Wow, that's a great price. Make it 4!.
It'll be interesting to see what comes of this. At one point grocery stores used to be somewhat all-purpose in suburban areas, sometimes they'd have a decent sit-down restaurant, a section with more housewares, sometimes clothing or a limited amount of furniture, etc. We even had a chain around here that folded-into Smiths, then Fred Meyer, and ultimately Kroger that had a garden section similar to what you'd find at a Home Depot or Lowes. At some point most of the stores did-away with these extra features except for a few that retained "Marketplace" tacked-on after the name of the store, but even those usually limited themselves to a little bit of interior decor and some housewares like you'd find at a Bed Bath and Beyond. Everyone basically pushed to the bottom, basically going to mostly food.
Now that trend seems to be reversing. Local grocery stores are even opening wine bars inside, plus restaurants and the like. The amount of non-food stuff hasn't grown yet but I'm curious if it will, if grocers expect people to get tired of making multiple stops. With Target and Walmart having increased the size of their grocery departments this sort of expansion within grocery stores might be a way of fighting-back against Target and Walmart.
It'll be curious if Amazon uses the grocery stores as a means to receive Amazon purchases quickly without having to have a Prime membership; if ship-to-store for next-day pickup on things that normally would require several days becomes a thing. That might be one of the ways to appeal to customers that might be able to afford Whole Foods pricing.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Amazon's no checkout will be stopped by liquor laws unless they have an person on staff to check id's also city's / states may try to pass laws like the ones that say you can't pump your own gas just to keep people working.
a kombucha dash button. Thank god! Someday we'll all wonder what life was like before that.
You evidently have never shopped Whole Paycheck if you think profit margins are thin. It's ripe for home delivery since the people who shop there have more money than time what with all the Hot-room Yoga and Reki to get done. But home delivery is a serious logistic problem, at least if you plan to make money at it and not just burn your Angel investor's stash before auctioning off your sock puppet mascot. Amazon has that figured out. And it works both directions. As long as you are going the the Store, why not pick up your amazon order there a day earlier. Finally if you are going to deliver things by drone they need to be small, lightweight, and expensive as a $22/oz lavender oil douche.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
It's not better quality food anyways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_IoNQHMFLk
Captcha: amateurs
That video is about the difference between organic and non-organic. I agree there's no difference in taste.
Whole Foods isn't just about organic food. Sure they market it like that. There's a ton of bullshit in their marketing: natural = healthy, organic = healthy, additives = unhealthy and a whole host of other bullcrap. They sell homeopathic "medicine" FFS, of course they're full of bullshit!
The simple, gullible people of this world are easily sold on the fact that it's "natural" and "organic". They'll happily part with their money for suce nonsense. However, just because Whole Foods are pushing bullshit marketing doesn't necessarily mean the food isn't genuinely of a better quality.
Bbehind all the bullshit, the food is genuinely better quality. I only know the flagship store in Kensigton, London, so I don't know how that differes from US stores or "regular" London stores, but the quality to me seems undoubtably better.
Most of it seems down to freshness. The most well known "upmarket" food store over here is Waitrose, and the difference is unbelievable. I buy quail eggs from Waitrose and more often than not they are rubbery and have clearly been sitting on the shelf for too long. The air sac is larger which means they've been in storage for longer as the amount of air let inside the shell is directly proportionate to the time they've been exposed to air since hatching.
The differenct varieties of a single food item is much better in Whole Foods. In the south-east of England, fruit is the main food crop. If you go into a regular food store, you'll see the same old varieties sold over and over again. For apples, you get things like Royal Gala, Pink Lady, Golden Delicious, etc, etc. These are chosen because they are varieties that produce large fruit in abundance and make more produce per acre of land. The varieties that taste better aren't such abundant producers so they don't get stocked by food stores that focus on cheap prices.
The meats are better tasting, because they've been aged for longer in the right conditions. This costs more but produces a better product.
The fish is fresh. It's not been sitting around on a boat off-sea for weeks, it's often caught in dayboats which means it was caught within the last 48 hours. This costs more, but improves the product.
The wine is better because it's from smaller vinyards that focus on quality rather than mass production. The large food store chains can't do this because they need to reduce the number of suppliers they have to reduce overheads.
The fruit and veg is better because it's been picked wen ripe and transported quickly. Most food stores buy the food when it's unripe and have it ripen in slower means of transit.
None of this has to do with whether it's organic or not and in fact I ratrely buy organic from Whole Foods if I have the choice.
One of the last big union strongholds was grocery, with Kroger and Safeway/Albertsons employees being unionized. They've been facing stiff competition from non-union Walmart, Trader Joe's, Costco, and Target and some new non-union entrants like Aldi.
Now with Amazon 's big push into the grocery business, unions are setup for even bigger losses.
I think there's a bit more to the Whole Foods business model. The high prices keep traffic low.
There's a local chain here called "Market Basket". It's a family run chain that was in the news a few years back when the employees went on strike to defend the ousted CEO. The customer service is excellent, the meat and produce good, and the prices are the lowest of any of the local chains. The problem is that it's always *packed* with shoppers. The aisles are congested, and sometimes I can't even find parking. Every day is Apocalypse preparation day there. At times I've had to wait twenty minutes for deli service, even though they've got five guys behind the counter working like sled dogs.
So if I need one or two things in a hurry I can't at the convenience store, I'll breeze into my local Whole Foods. I'll park withing fifty feet of the front door, walk right up to the meat counter and then right out to checkout, and there's seldom anyone in front of me. An expedition that would take over half an hour at Market Basket is done and dusted in five minutes at Whole Foods, and I pay for the privilege.
By any objective standard, Market Basket is a more sensible place to buy groceries; Consumer Reports ranks it second out of sixty American chains in their most recent evaluation; Whole Foods comes in #27, largely because of their obscene prices. But it's almost like they're in different businesses because they provide different customer experiences.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Is it at least free range salt? The thought of those crystals stuck in tiny cave all day...shudder.
How does a good Christian virgin boy like you know about lady boys?
I work with a lot of ex-military folks. Most of the Vietnam vets have gone through Bankok at one time or another during the war. I've heard quite a few stories about the prostitutes.
All Natural = Healthy
GMO = Poison
Fake news
The high prices are part of the appeal. Keeps the riff-raff out so you don't have to spend time in line with peasants.
It's what happens when we let alcoholics write the liquor laws.
It's not the GMO part of GMO that's the problem, it's the fact that it's been genetically modified to be resistant to herbicide, and the fact that crops are drenched in glyphosate herbicide just before harvest in a process called 'dessication', which leaves detectable amounts of glyphosate residue in those crops, which ends up in your body, fucking up your metabolic processes that's the problem.
Whole Foods staff appear to be giving a man a beat-down at the entrance to their Union Square store in NYC [Image stabilized version]
Whole Foods chain faces NYC probe after investigators found 'worst case of overcharges'
Whole Foods drops security firm after Calif. store attack
Whole Foods goes 'full mafia' on 70-year-old woman
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.
I would expect the margins are thin enough that they need an extreme amount of sales per store to keep things running.
Just because a women rejects your advances, doesn't mean she is a lesbian.
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.
Sound just like the EM sickness and the anti-vaxxers. Oddly enough, those people can be found in clusters around Whole Foods locations. Clearly they know their market!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Damnit.. I have more questions than I have answers when it comes to eating wheat and what it does to me and I get shouted down and name-called when I even BOTHER to try to find answers to those questions. Worse, I get people telling me "LOL it's all in your head, eat your wheat and STFU" when I've proven over and over again that it's not the case. I've even accidentally eaten something with wheat in it, for weeks on end, only discovering it had wheat in it after wondering why I was having problems again. It's not gluten because I can eat other grains that contain gluten (spelt, oats) and I have no problems, so it's clearly something else in wheat. Having read all that, are you going to sit there, having been a 'medicinal chemist for 20 years', and tell me it's all in my head? If you're going to mock or ridicule me don't even bother responding, I've had quite enough of that over this subject over the last 15 or so years, but if you want to have a rational, intelligent conversation about it, then please do.
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.
Wait, why would they drench a plant in herbicide just before harvesting? You use the herbicide to kill off the weeds while the plant is growing, to reduce competition for resources. I can't think of a reason you'd need to really, really kill new weeds just before collecting the food from plants that are already fully grown and ripened.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Bezos: "Alexa, buy me something from Whole Foods" Alexa: "Buying Whole Foods" Bezos: Shit Jeff Lewis @ChicagoPhotoSho https://twitter.com/ChicagoPho...
organic = healthy,
And they're totally right about that! I used to only eat inorganic foods because they were cheap. I had almost no energy, was getting thin, and incredibly constipated. The doctor told me to start eating organic foods and I started feeling better in hours./P.
Exactly. Anyone who wakes up at 6am or before on weekends knows that before 10am all shopping is luxurious! I realized that after I had kids and never ever shop after 10am anymore.
Week nights after 9pm are also nice, but lots of single people at that time. At 7am there are lots of old people who move slow, but they aren't on their phones and absentminded like the singles in the evenings.
Its all about timing.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy