While I fully agree that it's great to see employees treated well, Whole Foods is not an example that you can be a successful capitalist this way. They worked well for a while but the reason they got bought now is because they struggled over the past years. Probably unrelated to their treatment of employees (US groceries is very competitive at the moment) but AMZN didn't buy a hugely successful company.
It's a $13 billion sale. I struggle to see the scenario under which that is considered a failure. Most start-ups that get $120k from YC are considered a success here. Someone selling their struggling CRUD app to Amazon for $13 million would probably be considered a success here.
But the $13 billion sale of a public company is a bunch of hemming and hawing about what the stock was worth a few years ago.
I'm not saying it couldn't have been more successful. I'm not saying Amazon won't completely destroy the culture (they may, they may just let it continue as is and use it as Amazon Fresh logistics hubs as some have speculated).
But I don't see how this isn't a great example of how you can treat your employees well - better than almost anyone else at the same level - and make a lot of money while doing it.
> I struggle to see the scenario under which that is considered a failure.
Wasn't Whole Foods valued at over $20 billion a few years ago? If you bought Whole Foods stock at that point (either as an outside investor or an employee) it might feel like Amazon is buying it for $13 billion because Whole Foods has been having trouble staying competitive in the market.
Of course, if you actually started the company $13 billion may be a very big success if your goal was to sell.
Not if you bought it for $20bn. Wholefoods is publicly owned and the price that Amazon pays is below their price a few years back. It's not about size, $13bn is a lot of money. But Wholefoods needed a strategy or buyer, otherwise they would've faced serious problems in a few years.
This is a great question. Are there any open and fee apis where one can look up a publicly traded stock and get out dividends paid out over a time period? Surely that's at least as interesting as the rise and fall of the stock price.
If I had $20bn to buy it in the first place, or be in the position where I could even raise that kind of capital, I would already be successful (in my mind at least).
OK, but WF stock is held mostly by ordinary people (or by pension funds acting on behalf of ordinary people) and the argument being made above is that there are signs that the reason WF ended up being owned by a company without WF's reputation for good treatment of employees is that selling the company was the only way for WF's management to meet their fiduciary responsibility to those ordinary people who hold WF stock.
I think what they might be talking about is that Whole Foods has had a rocky few quarters and might be forced to sell, where they wouldn't have sold in a different circumstance.
