Good old investors, so short sighted, they only care about the next 3 months. Whole Foods probably would have been better off as private company, especially with the culture they were trying to create.
They had their chance, the culture did not help keep the company above water.
Noted by a friend who used to work there:
- They treat each store (and each department within each store) like its own separate business, which is great for teaching individual managers about waste, efficiency, profit/loss. However they can't bother to get together on a corporate level and combine purchasing power on most things. Every store has to work on making a deal on their own merchandise, separately.
- In a show of solidarity, all employees, whether floor workers or corporate IT, must work holidays and instead have floating holidays for time off. Then predictably there is a seniority effect where the long-term workers get to have their holidays and the recent hires have to come in on a completely useless day and stay till 3 or 4 when the management "lets" them leave.
Also I recently shopped at their 365 store and it's a great store with better prices, but their website sucks and my name comes up as "firstname lastname" on their computers. If Amazon can knock some sense into their IT, that would be a huge win.
> Good old investors, so short sighted, they only care about the next 3 months.
Yeah, darn those investors. How dare people with pensions, 401k's, IRAs, and other investments expect some kind of return on their investment? It's disgraceful. /s
EDIT: The sentiment against investors is rather ironic considering the amount of equity collectively held by HN readers.
The idea that I can't criticize pathological behaviors by investors because I myself invest in things makes about as much sense as saying I can't criticize bad US policies because I live in the US.
You are the investor causing the pathological behavior. A very large part of wall street is investors like you that just have a little bit in their retirement accounts.
Do you vote the proxy for all the funds in your 401k? Do you understand how your vote affects the above - it all does.
But you are because you own the fund that in turns owns the company.
It might not be your intent, and you might not have enough of a vote to stop it, but you are still doing it. (sort of like Americans opposed to the current foreign policy are still at fault for it)
There is always a need to balance both the short term and the long term. I rather doubt anyone who has retired and is drawing on their retirement investments will be thinking long term since, to be morbid, they simply aren't going to be around in the long term.
You know at some point the 401k is supposed to be paying your bills, yes? That's its raison d'être. When you have investments paying your bills, you might understandably be focused on those investments yielding some immediate returns. Maybe to pay for that leaky roof, or broken down AC...
Any short term returns from the market should be remarkably small per individual managed by a firm. It's the long term growth that you're banking on when you prepare for retirement years in advance.
I think your comment is a non-sequitur. I am highly invested in my 401K and IRA but I would much rather have returns over the next 10 years than the next 3 months.
If your retirement is 3 months away, then sure you should be thinking short term, which actually means you should be moving away from stocks entirely. Investors that are really that short term should be in bonds or cash.
Your comment rests on the implicit premise that investors were getting no return worth talking about. There's a big space between not getting and adequate return and squeezing out every last bit of profit.
Noted by a friend who used to work there:
- They treat each store (and each department within each store) like its own separate business, which is great for teaching individual managers about waste, efficiency, profit/loss. However they can't bother to get together on a corporate level and combine purchasing power on most things. Every store has to work on making a deal on their own merchandise, separately.
- In a show of solidarity, all employees, whether floor workers or corporate IT, must work holidays and instead have floating holidays for time off. Then predictably there is a seniority effect where the long-term workers get to have their holidays and the recent hires have to come in on a completely useless day and stay till 3 or 4 when the management "lets" them leave.
Also I recently shopped at their 365 store and it's a great store with better prices, but their website sucks and my name comes up as "firstname lastname" on their computers. If Amazon can knock some sense into their IT, that would be a huge win.