“Amazon’s takeover of Whole Foods begins Monday — and you’ll see lower prices right away”
I don’t believe it.
There will be promotions, sales and loss leaders to get people into the store but over time they need to make a profit.
Amazon overpaid for Whole Foods and they need to get a return on their very expensive investment.
The only way to do that is to reduce quality and/or service and increase prices.
Or, Whole Foods will become a very important tax write-off for Amazon as Amazon doesn’t really care about Whole Foods.
Take a big tax write-off as the brand goes down the tubes. The real value to Amazon, beyond the tax benefit, is reverse engineering the whole food/agricultural distribution process. Whole Foods is Amazon’s lab rat.
Really?! There's nothing Amazon can do on the operations side to improve efficiency and productivity? You're probably right. Amazon doesn't know a thing about low-cost operations.
Or leverage it to increase profitability in other areas. Amazon is a very long view company, they’ll let individual initiative take a long time to reach profitability if they’re moving the company towards goals.