Amazon Buys Whole Foods for $13.7 Billion (And What Everyone is Saying About It)

Posted by David Cogen

Saturday, June 17th, 2017

In case you missed it, Amazon announced yesterday it planned to buy the popular grocery chain Whole Foods for a cool $13.7 billion and what seemed like a surprise move by the eCommerce giant.

So the big question on everyone’s mind is wondering how that helps Amazon in any way. Amazon is an online marketplace for selling (mainly) non-perishable goods through their own clever distribution chain and prices lower than most brick and mortar stores can achieve. With a model like that, why would you ever want to have physical locations and all that added cost? Doesn’t that feel like going backwards?

Well, according to most sources writing about it, its brilliant.

I’m not going to go into my reasoning for why I think it was a smart move for the online retailer in this article for the sake of brevity (reach out to me on Twitter if you think I should do that full article at some point). But, for those that are curious, there’s already some great takes from places I respect around the web. Here’s the short list if you want to understand it a bit more.