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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bezos: "Alexa, buy me something from Whole Foods" Alexa: "Buying Whole Foods" Bezos: Shit Jeff Lewis @ChicagoPhotoSho https://twitter.com/ChicagoPho...