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Comment by throwaway91111 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if you can call this capitalistic, though. WF as a commune could likely share many of the benefits or exceed them even without requiring shareholders to satisfy. Instead, a devotion to profits will ensure they are given the minimum to execute their job well.

It'll be interesting to see what bezos does with it for sure.

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name a single commune as successful or operating at the scale of Whole Foods or Amazon. in history.

Whole foods is vastly larger than the majority of organizations world wide. Remember the world GDP is only ~80,000 billion so there is a rather small number of Organizations with 10 billion per year in Revenue.

But, if your just mean billion plus dollar orgs then something like : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Farmers_of_Alberta is an interesting comparison. Further, measuring the success of such organizations is hard especially when they are not trying to make a profit. I mean how do you measure something like the US Democratic and Republican parties?

In the U.K. both the Co-op (a consumer owned co-operative) and John Lewis/Waitrose (a worker owned partnership) have similar revenue figures to Whole Foods.

The funniest thing is that John Lewis/Waitrose is an upmarket supermarket.

Mondragon corporation has existed in spain since the 1950s as a worker-owned cooperative and employs about 75,000 people. Whole foods employs about 91,000 but I'd say that puts them in the same ballpark. You could argue in addition that Mondragon has been limited by a) Spain having been a dictatorship until the 1980s, b) the relative youth of the EU single market vs that of the US leading to a more regional business culture and c) the additional language barriers in Europe that make business expansion a bit slower than in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Not exactly a commune, but interesting nonetheless and on the same scale as Whole Foods (12 bln Euro turnover):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Oneida is (was) the closest US analogy I can think of, though much smaller.

There are some very successful Kibbutzim spinoffs in Israel, into 100s of millions US$ (I don't know how ownership was structured).

Could you expand on the Israeli firms?

Are they essentially large family-run houses of commerce much like tradesmen guilds of the past?

I also immediately thought of kibbutzim, just as a counterexample for debate. (Full disclosure: ex-volunteer)

From Agriculture To High-Tech: Meet Five Kibbutzim That Became Global Powerhouses http://nocamels.com/2016/03/successful-israeli-kibbutzim-ind...

Well, Publix is employee owned, does that count?

Comparing the wikipedia sidebar shows Publix with more stores, revenue, and over twice the number of employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Foods_Market

I'm not going near Amazon, though.

Fun fact: Publix is the largest employee-owned grocery chain in the US.

Employee-owned means the owners retired by selling the company through an employee stock purchase plan. Publix, Woodman's etc. are good places to work but they aren't communes or cooperatives.

Switzerland's 2 largest supermarket chains Migros[1] and Coop[2] are structured as cooperatives, generating yearly revenues of ~28 billion CHF, each.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migros [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Switzerland)

Why? What's your point? Just sayig you can't possibly pin the benefits on capitalism—you know very well whole foods would avoid hiring anyone if they didn't have to. That is capitalism: minimize loss of money.

Whole foods is a good employer IN SPITE of being capitalist.

There is a competitive advantage in having real loyalty from employees. Treating people well makes them want to be loyal.

Even Walmart has started realizing this. It turns out that when you hire unmotivated people, pay them as little as possible, screw them on medical benefits, pay them too little to get their own apartment and in general work them harder than everyone else in that job sector that you get people who don't do a good job. In the past several years, Walmart has instituted new wage plans, better medical benefits, productivity goals from corporate that are still unreasonable but not insane and they think it is worth the money.

I don't know if Amazon has learned this expensive lesson, but a business can run with high employee turnover and dissatisfaction for a long time before it catches up to them. Once it becomes apparent it is often too late to fix without losing heavily in the marketplace.

There may be competitive advantages to happy employees, but there's always a cost, and capitalism is about minimizing those costs. Again, if a business could get away with it, they would simply not hire anyone to keep costs down.

Simply put, human welfare is directly in contest with maximization of profits. This occasionally can result in being paid well—it's cheaper than hiring two people at a lower rate.

Seems like the idea was "Whole Foods as a commune" i.e. viewed as a commune. In other words a conceptual lens through which you could view any organization. Amazon itself is a commune in some ways, and so is Whole Foods; therefore my two examples. in history. are Amazon and Whole Foods. So much for that.

And looky there, other commenters supplied a bunch more (actual) examples. I'll throw in: The Catholic Church. The nation of Yugoslavia. What the heck: the Hell's Angels. Far outstripping Amazon's "scale" in terms of heads smacked with wooden fenceposts, that's for sure, or maybe not.

Which is my next point - adjust the "scale" appropriately (and unfortunately you left no indication RE: scale of what, whether it be dollars in sales, people involved, people served, ham sandwiches set aflame, heads smacked, or dogs painted blue) in proportion to the amount of money/wealth existing in the world at that time. in history. or to the number of people alive at that time. in history. and that'll probably turn up a bunch more examples.

There's also the question of "successful at what"? At providing for its employees/members? At serving its customers? At enriching its shareholders? At painting dogs blue?

Also we should really make passing mention of the waxing and waning support for capitalistic enterprises vs. other types of communes in various places and times. in history. Is it a valid comparison between a company like Amazon, operating in one of the most capitalism-friendly sociopolitical environments (post-Reagan America) seen in some time, vs. another type of organization operating in the same environment that doesn't support that organization or even actively suppresses it?

Your comment reflects an overabundance of confidence in things that are by no means simple or certain.

Italian Coop: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Italy) About the same as whole foods revenue. At this point you have quite a few communes operating at this scale.

What's not capitalistic about it? A company can be setup with any number of metrics that determine success besides just pure profit. That most don't is a matter of who is running them, not that capitalism doesn't allow it to take place!

Look at airlines--exec bonuses used to include metrics such as "customer satisfaction" and today those metrics are gone and only profits count. Nothing changed with capitalism, though. It's the asshole MBAs that changed.

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