"Amazon Targets Your Fridge With $13.7 Billion Whole Foods Deal" went the headline. Not quite, since I am not an organic-food person; I neither have the cash flow nor the interest in such stuff.
However, a lot of people do. $13.7 billion dollars worth of people, if Amazon's assessment is correct.
The target audience for the two firms have a non-trivial overlap. Whole Foods targets upscale college grads, who likely are tech-savvy and like to buy books and other media along with their organic, GMO-free salad dressing.
One interesting piece that ran in the Midland paper a few months back noted that Midland was not big enough or rich enough or educated enough for a number of those bobo-magnet firms like Whole Foods, Trader Joes or Costco. However, many of the folks Dow Chemical brings to town do appreciate those things and might well be interested in having Whole Foods stuff sent to them as part of their Amazon Prime account rather than drive to metro Detroit or East Lansing to get them.
It does give Amazon some brick-and-mortar locales in upscale areas, but it also gives them added cache in that well-educated audience that is right up their wheelhouse. I think it is the synergies and overlapping customer bases, as well as elite value-signaling, that is driving this more than store-fronts.
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