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Amazon Offers Whole Foods Discounts To Prime Members (reuters.com)
Amazon-owned Whole Foods debuted a loyalty program on Wednesday that offers special discounts to Prime members, including 10 percent off hundreds of sale items and rotating weekly specials. "The new loyalty strategy will test whether Amazon's $13.7 billion deal for Whole Foods brings much-feared disruption and an intensified price war to the $800 billion U.S. grocery industry dominated by Walmart and Kroger," reports Reuters. From the report: Those perks are available now in Florida and will roll out to all other stores starting this summer. Amazon previously announced free two-hour delivery from Whole Foods stores for members of Prime, its subscription club with fast shipping and video streaming. The new perks could make Whole Foods cheaper than conventional grocers for about 8 million of its customers who already subscribe to Amazon Prime, according to Morgan Stanley analysts. Prime members scan an app or input their phone numbers at checkout to receive the discounts.
is cheaper than Whole Foods, has just as much organic produce, and has union workers that aren't treated as disposible tissues to wipe Bezos' butt with. I'd rather support them than a destructive/disruptive company like Amazon...
Inputting the phone number of a prime member at checkout sounds like a big opportunity for fraud, so I have to think that this is a loss leading measure to drive traffic to those stores. I suppose they'll never tell us how much it helps.
... but I come from a union family. Three generations of union members ...
Me too, grandfather and father. Some of the following coming from a dinner table conversation when I asked my dad why he was on strike. I had visited the picket lines earlier in the day.
Most of the post-WWII prosperity and middle-class growth in the US was thanks to the labor movement.
Yes and no. The labor movements great advances had already occurred before WW2. Post-war labor was coasting on old glories, the important stuff was enshrined into law not labor contracts by then. Labor's important battles had been won. Post-war labor became a "racket" according to my 40+ year union member grandfather, working hard to perpetuate its own existence and doing little for the workers. My eventually 40+ year union member father concurred. Both speak highly of the unions in the decades before WW2, but after, a very different thing. The point about the important stuff being law, that union contracts were more about preserving union power and finances and not so much about the workers, that came from these union members.
Unions became weaker not merely due to politicians but because workers recognized that big labor had become a racket that did little for them, they lost worker respect, they lost influence with workers and as a result lost influence among politicians.
And today, left-wing politicians *talk* about unions, but when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is these left-wing politicians go non-union just like the CEOs. For example the California San Francisco bay area buying Chinese steel for bridge projects.
Post WW2 economic success was due to our main economic competitors being wrecked by the war, post-war spending of wartime savings, and the economic stimulus of rebuilding and feeding various devastated parts of the world. It was a time where nearly any idiot manager or CEO could make a buck, its an incredibly poor time to look at for business and economic examples. As you learn in econ 101, comparison require all other things to be equal. And 1950s America was a very unique atypical situation.