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Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017 faced numerous challenges in line with
cultural and significant strategy differences that mostly affected the Whole Food customer
and employees. This is because shortly after the merger, Whole Foods customers were angry
as they encountered empty shelves with their favorite retailers. Consequently, Whole Foods
employees started complaining about their new performance-oriented working environment
imposed by Amazon.
The cause of the clash was aligned with the limits that existed in the merger, in which
one culture and management style was forced on another organization. In this case, Amazon
was trying to force its management style and organizational culture on Whole Foods. It is
important to note that from the very beginning, Amazon centered its name on being efficient,
cheap and fast and on attaining this; it decided to use data to drive its product mix while
enforcing firm employee discipline in squeezing out cost savings to pass to its clients
(Cusumano, 2017). On the other hand, Whole Foods focused on making its name based on
its personal touch by empowering the individual stores and employees to make decisions
about products that emphasize on local, healthy and quality foods. This emerging discrepancy
led to huge inefficiencies that make the prices of the products shoot up to the extent that
critics started to refer to the stores as "Whole Paycheck. The merger was initially thought
would allow Whole Foods to scale up and add more stores while enhancing its employees
empowered culture amid the application of the Amazon’s data-driven strategies. However,
this never took place considering that a lot of the clash emerged from culture clash, being that
Whole Foods had a very high-empowered kind of culture which was in line with
Deuteronomy 24:14, which says that “You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and
needy, whether he is one of your brothers or one of the sojourners who are in your land
within your towns. You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets (for he
is poor and counts on it), lest he cry against you to the Lord, and you be guilty of sin”
(Thomas 1982). The merger violated this considering that Amazon introduced policies that
made the employees lose their autonomy and failed to perform their roles diligently as they
were frustrated about having to do paperwork instead of assisting customers. They were also
frustrated about the performance metrics with demerits if they failed to meet them (Kroeger,
Thuesen, & Rutledge, 2002).
For this merger to be effective and realize its potential, Amazon should focus on
perusing a management concept called structured empowerment in which a firm standardizes
operations but permits flexibility for workers to make their individual decisions on vital areas
in which having a high-touch contact with customers is of uttermost importance.
Consequently, Amazon's leadership should focus on changing its performance measures to
emphasize more on results rather than processes and hold workers responsible for goals, but
offering them more leeway on how they attain them. Amazon's leadership can also decide to
allow employees to develop some tradeoffs and incorporate their own knowledge instead of
following a recipe, which would offer them more incentive to utilize the data being served by
Amazon to drive results further.
References
Cusumano, M. A. (2017). Amazon and whole foods: follow the strategy (and the
money). Communications of the ACM, 60(10), 24-26.
Kroeger, O., Thuesen, J. M., & Rutledge, H. (2002). Type talk at work: How the 16
personality types determine your success on the job (Revised and Updated ed.). New
York, NY: Dell Publishing
Thomas Nelson. (1982). The new King James Bible. Nashville.
