Amazon To Acquire Whole Foods

Washington DC is making a pitch for the new Amazon HQ.

They should go to Atlanta. Cheap cost of living, very tech-forward, major transportation hub, lemon pepper wings.

Miserable weather… impossible to find anything because all the roads have the same name… :)

Also Austin, pretty cheap, also very tech-forward, somewhat smaller town but great food and music.

Or Montreal. Reasonably priced but not cheap, tons of tech, european feel and they’ll bend over backwards to help you out on taxes. Amazing food.

I like Austin, but it has already outgrown its existing infrastructure and is not a airline hub.

So very true. It has stopped me from spending $ on clothes from Amazon.

If they really want to do clothes, then look at the zappos internet shopping experience for shoes as a single example.

Amazon owns Zappos.

Lol45

For a few years even. I can’t remember when I got the notice. Seems like forever ago.

8 years ago!

The biggest reasons I haven’t done clothes with Amazon though are one, there were rumors going around that if you returned enough stuff to them they would black list you, and of course when you start buying things you wear, many of those things will go back, the other issue was the counterfeit… how do I know that’s really Michael Kors or Coach or Gucci and not some Chinese knock-off.

Since I don’t really return food, the purchase of Whole Food doesn’t really apply but hell they’re expensive. I’ve only been into a Whole Foods twice since they’re not here.

The Amazon Wardrobe program should solve that issue. It is basically set up with returns in mind.

I’m such a lurpy ogre, I don’t know if shopping for clothes at Amazon will ever really work out well for me. I’m 6’7" with a lot of my height in my legs. I’m not morbidly obese or anything, but I do have some real child bearin’ hips as well.

Needless to say, finding clothes that fit well and are comfortable are a nightmare. It’s like they assume that if you’re my height, you’re either a hipster looking for nothing but skinny jeans or you spend your days driving around electric carts at Wal-Mart. That’s frustrating, because I absolutely loathe spending time in clothing stores or just shopping in general.

Then why is the zappos site easy to find what I want and the amazon site a freaking disaster at shoes and clothes?

Just in case that wasn’t rhetorical; MANY people don’t know all the companies under the Amazon umbrella, and so they feel one may have a certain level of “class” or “coolness” compared to Amazon even though it’s the same people selling them their whooziwhats. So being able to cultivate multiple cultures to fit given customer profiles allows the parent company to reach more customers rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach. This means some sites will be less efficient than you or I would like, because some people/heathens don’t know how to handle sophisticated search criteria or simply don’t want to bother with it. Some also think a more “barebones” approach is indicative of a place where they’d get better savings. The online marketplace is a crazy thing.

I really don’t think they deliberately castrated Amazon.com just to make Zappos.com more attractive via brand differentiation.

Zappos’ search function was good long before Amazon acquired them. To be clear, by search section, what I really mean is browse. If I kind of knew what I was searching but didn’t know the exact item I wanted, I can easily find the right color, size and like style of several options.Searching Amazon for something you kind of want, but you really just want to see what’s out there can be pretty awful, especially in the clothing department

Zappos is a subsidiary of Amazon, so it basically operates independently, but ultimately answers to Bezos.

Having a different system than Amazon’s has a couple key benefits. It establishes Zappos’ own identity (a lot of people don’t realize they’ve been owned by Amazon since 2009) and it allows Amazon to “experiment” with different systems and avoid a monoculture in terms of marketplaces (they can compare how their in-house solutions are doing compared to Zappos).