Good old investors, so short sighted, they only care about the next 3 months. Whole Foods probably would have been better off as private company, especially with the culture they were trying to create.
Noted by a friend who used to work there:
- They treat each store (and each department within each store) like its own separate business, which is great for teaching individual managers about waste, efficiency, profit/loss. However they can't bother to get together on a corporate level and combine purchasing power on most things. Every store has to work on making a deal on their own merchandise, separately.
- In a show of solidarity, all employees, whether floor workers or corporate IT, must work holidays and instead have floating holidays for time off. Then predictably there is a seniority effect where the long-term workers get to have their holidays and the recent hires have to come in on a completely useless day and stay till 3 or 4 when the management "lets" them leave.
Also I recently shopped at their 365 store and it's a great store with better prices, but their website sucks and my name comes up as "firstname lastname" on their computers. If Amazon can knock some sense into their IT, that would be a huge win.
Yeah, darn those investors. How dare people with pensions, 401k's, IRAs, and other investments expect some kind of return on their investment? It's disgraceful. /s
EDIT: The sentiment against investors is rather ironic considering the amount of equity collectively held by HN readers.
Do you vote the proxy for all the funds in your 401k? Do you understand how your vote affects the above - it all does.
It might not be your intent, and you might not have enough of a vote to stop it, but you are still doing it. (sort of like Americans opposed to the current foreign policy are still at fault for it)
This might not be an option for everyone, of course.
If your retirement is 3 months away, then sure you should be thinking short term, which actually means you should be moving away from stocks entirely. Investors that are really that short term should be in bonds or cash.