Amazon-Whole Foods: ’The war for retail will be won in groceries’ - Aug. 25, 2017
►http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/25/technology/business/amazon-whole-foods-strategy/index.html
Amazon believes the future of grocery shopping is online.
So why is the retail giant spending $13.7 billion to acquire 460 brick-and-mortar Whole Foods stores and lower prices on “organic bananas” and “responsibly-farmed salmon?”
Answer: To dominate the grocery business like it has many others by increasing the number of customers while undercutting the competition.
Amazon will make Whole Foods more accessible to more consumers. And it will turn them into Amazon customers and advance its bid to become the dominant player in all of retail — the so-called everything store.
“The pot of gold at the end of the road for Amazon is groceries,” said Cooper Smith, an Amazon analyst at L2 Inc. “The war for retail will be won in groceries. It’s the largest category of consumer retail, and the largest untapped opportunity for Amazon.”
[…]
Amazon’s competitors are already taking steps to react. Earlier this week, WalMart said that it would start offering its products on Google Express, the search company’s online shopping mall.
But industry experts say the Google-WalMart deal has little chance of getting in the way of Amazon’s ambitions.
