What are you buying when you go to the grocery store? Organic bananas?
Not if you’re Amazon.
“Big Prize for Amazon: Shopper Data,” The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2017 B5. Amazon seeks to buy Whole Foods, but for what? Its hard assets such as stores and locations? Its customer base? Its purchasing and distribution network? More likely: information on how shoppers shop.
If you’re the government agency in charge of approving or disapproving this deal, how do you analyze the impact on competition? What is the “market” that needs to be analyzed? Is this a vertical or horizontal deal? Or something else?
Is most of the value (to Amazon) in this deal the information that it gets? Where’s that on the Whole Foods balance sheet?
infogovnuggets 