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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

I'm willing to pay extra to eat ethical meats/dairy/eggs and products that generally avoid factory farming. And otherwise eat vegan. By the look of things, Amazon will eventually get rid of most of these things that Whole Foods made very easy for us.

Yes it's more expensive. That's because the cheapest foods that you buy at the cheapest supermarkets are fucking terrible for the livelihoods of animals.

Not a fan of this corporate buyout. Amazon clearly has a much different direction in mind for this chain. I wish they bought Kroger instead.

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First, you might be interested to know that a lot of Whole Foods' products are not particularly ethical or organic. They carry that stuff, true, but they don't have any kind of total commitment to it store-wide.

Second, everyone I know who has ever worked at whole foods could talk for hours about their internal inefficiencies, food waste being a huge one. Their pricing was also almost whimsical, the most extreme example being their $4.99 "asparagus water".

My guess is that Amazon took one look at the books and saw that they could easily lower prices without suffering much in the way of profit loss. This doesn't necessarily imply there will be sweeping changes in quality.

> My guess is that Amazon took one look at the books and saw that they could easily lower prices without suffering much in the way of profit loss.

Well, I hope you're right, but I think you're wrong. Here's why:

Amazon wants to dominate the world of retail, and Whole Foods currently targets a specific and smaller demographic than "The World". Amazon needs to expand the demographic to reach everyone else. The way they do that is by removing most of the expensive things Whole Foods carries, and replacing them with cheap, less ethical alternatives.

This means we'll eventually lose a lot of the things Whole Foods carries. For a lot of vegan and ethical suppliers, Whole Foods is the vast majority of their sales, and they'll just be shut down.

Amazon paid 13.7 billion for Whole Foods, which has 470 stores.

If their interest was in low quality, inexpensive supermarket locations, why wouldn't they purchase something like Publix, with its 1,154 stores, for a much cheaper price?

Furthermore, if you want guaranteed ethical, organic and fair trade goods, Whole Foods was always more about branding than reality on that front, anyways. Their stuff is better than most supermarket chains, but the independent stores still have them beat by a far margin.

Publix is actually employee-owned, so it may not have been possible to broker such a deal. (Your general point still stands though; there are lots of large chains out there, and many would likely welcome a large buyer.)

Publix, while it has over 1,100 stores, operates them all in only seven states in the southeast US. Whole Foods, although relatively small, has a nearly national footprint.

I don't know Amazon's plans but what you're saying don't make much sense to me.

If Amazon wants to target low end grocery retail, why do they acquire Whole Foods?

It makes business sense for them to let WFM stay high end, and start a Amazon Basics store to go down market.

Whole Foods has a gross margin around 35%

https://ycharts.com/companies/WFM/gross_profit_margin

Bezos is famous for his mantra around "your margin is my opportunity" Amazon has a lot of margin available here for price reductions.

The economic signaling of WF's higher prices is a different topic entirely.

Gross profit margin is not an appropriate indicator, you need to look at actual profit margin here: https://ycharts.com/companies/WFM/profit_margin

It's closer to ~3%.

When Amazon cuts costs, something about the way Whole Foods does business has to give.

Now you won't have to pay extra? What's your indication that the quality or sourcing of the food is changing?

> "Everybody should be able to eat Whole Foods Market quality -- we will lower prices without compromising Whole Foods Market's long-held commitment to the highest standards," Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, said in a statement.

Do you have a source for that? Hopefully they'll lower prices by introducing operational efficiencies, and not by lowering ethical standards.

ethical meats and dairy?

That's what the label says, so it must be true.

Your sarcasm implies that you prefer we just abandon any attempt to do right by the animals (or their products) that we eat.

Is that what you want?

> Your sarcasm implies that you prefer

His sarcasm does nothing of the sort, nor does his statement imply anything similar. I would really check that nerve he seemed to touch.

The only interpretation is about the weakness of labeling laws and ethical gerrymandering of commercial interests in the ethical treatment of animals (ie Lip Service).

There's a continuum. You could raise animals where you actively torture them, raise them in ways that are torturous but unintended and not maximize the torture, take steps to mitigate / reduce torture, avoid torture altogether, go beyond non-torture to actually have them live fulfilled lives as far as their species goes…

And then there's ethical issues like the pollution involved in raising animals and how that's handled…

It's one thing to insist that all animal products are inherently unethical or that ethics are irrelevant to the topic (most people would not agree with either of those dogmatic views) and another to draw some sort of fuzzy line where you think the efforts at ethics are adequate to call the production "ethical".

FWIW, I'm convinced we should be eating insects https://www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects

And then there's cultured meat which is coming soon and truly bypasses most of the really unethical aspects of meat production…

Do you eat insects? I personally find the idea repulsive, but that was just how I was brought up.

Yeah, they're great. The idea of them being repulsive is as good an example as we can find of culturally-biased nonsense. (I grew up in the same way you did, but I'm pretty practiced at sincerely rejecting culturally-inherited nonsense once I recognize it).

I've only had a few occasions, had some cricket-flour chocolate-chip cookies, some roasted ants, crickets, and grasshoppers. Mealworms sauteed with veggies is great. I'm not crazy going out of my way to get weird stuff though. I'm waiting for the day we can just go to the supermarket and buy grasshopper burgers or something. Like any food, there's ways to do it well or do it badly, and just like you don't want to eat rotten apples, it's not good food just because it's insects; insects are good food when they're good (the right type, healthy condition, prepared well).

Don't know why you're being downvoted.

I try not to think about the topic too much because I like the occasional spot of cheese, but the number of calves that get slaughtered each year to enable milk production is mildly disturbing. Even worse, some countries have regulations against selling animals under a certain age, and the milk's worth more to a farmer than the month-old calf, so you end up getting piles of male calf carcasses thrown into pits for composting.

> mildly disturbing

That's if you merely think about the concept for a moment. If you bother considering it any further or make any effort to consider the cow's (mother's) experience, you should (if you're not a sociopath) find it far beyond mild disturbance.

Death itself is wasteful but isn't as tragically unethical as the specific aspect of taking a mother's offspring away, which hits perhaps the most powerful low-level aspect of mammalian experience. That we then go kill them is appalling in a human principle (in that we understand the whole picture). Killing them in front of the mother would be a further level of horror that I assume doesn't typically happen (Aside from the gratuitous torture, I bet that would increase cortisol levels in the milk).

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