There's also Woot.com - a company who's culture was a strange counterpoint.

Amazon thought they understood it, messed it all around and now it's a sad parody of the former site.

https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2014/july/...

That particular bit about Bezos and the octopus sells it - You'll be fine if Amazon "gets" your company and it's culture. If not, well...

It's pretty well known internally to Amazon that the woot acquisition was handled terribly and that the food was strangled. It's held up as a what not to do now. Source I know some of the og woot folks and I work for a recently acquired subsidiary in the "strangle don't strangle" department. We're very cognizant of keeping what's good about our subsidiary and using what's good about super mega co and they let us. We're very much on the don't strangle side. It'll be interesting to see how this aquisition "GOes"

It looks like the original Woot folks want to try again:

https://meh.com/forum/topics/faq#q-whats-the-story-here-53a3...

I was going to mention Meh. Their stuff is hilarious. And yep, it's the original Woot staff, long after they sold their baby to Amazon.

I remember Woot's founder, Matt Ruttledge, mentioning how he didn't get along with Bezos at all.

I think this is a different beast. I personally loved shopping at Whole Foods because the food is high quality and their employees are treated well. These tenets are totally incompatible with Amazon's culture. Sure, now they say they will run it independently, but if Amazon were to struggle with Whole Foods, the first thing they do will be to lower labor costs and food costs.

Unions to protect workers are now more important than ever in this new age of monopolies.

Or, Amazon + Whole Foods can afford to run less profitably than Whole Foods alone... in WF's core in-store grocery business.

Because Amazon can better monetize WF: backing with Amazon's logistics chain, expanding grocery delivery, cross-marketing with customer's existing Amazon purchases, and using WF's real estate for warehousing stock closer to affluent customers for one hour deliveries.

I absolutely agree they'll be tempted to squeeze costs, but I think there's a viable financial option to run WF as-is and still accrue benefits to the greater-Amazon.

Amazon is a tech and logistics company. I doubt very much that their strategy is "buy random company, lower pay of employees, profit". This was a very strategic move for them and I am sure they intend to use their tech and distribution platform to increase the profit, rather than slice and dice the store experience and quality at the local level. This is what differentiated WF from many other grocery stores that I'm sure Amazon could have bid on, why would they want to ruin the one thing it had going for it?

" Online delivery of groceries so far has been tough for any company to pull off because of customers' concerns about the quality of meat and produce, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said. But if customers know that what they are getting is the same as what they'd get at the local store, they are more likely to try it out.

Pure speculation but I'm guessing their strategy here has a few elements: - they need to get to meaningful scale on the buy side of the grocery business which they weren't able to do on their own - Whole Foods is already a "tech friendly" grocery brand (Instacart, Apple Pay) - Whole Foods has a lot of premium/value add and non-grocery products (prepared food and organic underpants and such) that offer more profit margin than just groceries

It probably also doesn't hurt that Whole Foods is the only grocery store within walking distance of Amazon HQ and about 1000 employees eat lunch there every day.

Interesting

And what would Whole Foods do if things were turning bad? IMO the exact same thing.

> Amazon were to struggle with Whole Foods, the first thing they do will be to lower labor costs and food costs.

They'd do what any company that doesn't want to end up bankrupt to do. Attack the easy parts first (overly expensive infrastructure, etc) then hit the two major cost centers: labor and food costs.

If it comes down to two options: lower wages/quality of food or a company that no longer exists, the former is probably the better alternative, no?

On the other hand, Kiva Systems which is now Amazon Robotics is apparently now a terrible place to work. :(

As an aside, the creation of both Zappos and WF was told on NPR's How I Built This. Very interesting podcast if you like company culture and how it's designed/maintained.

http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this

I think something similar happened with IMDB and Twitch.

The value of Zappos is integrating the procurement and warehousing with the Amazon operation. The front end can remain distinct. The same applies to the WF distribution network. That is the hardest thing to get right in the supermarket business.

Thats what I heard.

Twitch.TV is the same way, after it got acquired. They just leave them alone and let them do their own thing.