The market for goods and services in the U.S. is a wide open space. No one forces customers to buy from Amazon. Customers choose to buy from Amazon because Amazon provides value. I see nothing anti-competitive about Amazon or its purchase of Whole Foods. The groups who scream about anti-competitive issues are the weak operators.

The grocery industry is ripe for disruption. With the exception of a few great operators, most grocery stores do not understand their core customer. They achieve success by real estate acquisition.

What Amazon understands are consumers. They will bring value through automation and streamline a broken supply chain to better service customers. Grocers have had technology to make better consumer offerings and experiences for years. If they were focused on learning everything about their customers, then they too would have many of the same tools Amazon uses. Instead, they made decisions by RDAs and slotting fees. It will be interesting when Amazon has more than 1,000 stores.

Walmart is a half-trillion dollar company. Half — or more — of that business is in grocery. In order to become a trillion-dollar company themselves, Amazon literally HAS to dig into that. So yeah, they will become a dominant force in grocery. Undoubtedly that has been the goal for years. It’s just not that easy, and Walmart gets that. Why do you think Walmart has accelerated BOPIS, self checkout and e-commerce? They’re protecting their house. Big stakes or, more succinctly put, all the stakes.

I wouldn’t worry about anti-trust and Amazon for some time to come. But if they bite into that big chunk of Walmart’s business pie, I’d bet the Feds will come calling sooner than later.

I don’t think anyone knows what the new Whole Foods will be like under the control of Amazon. Do they turn the stores into the first fully-automated grocery chain with amazing technology? Do they change their products? Do they concentrate on opening many more locations? The truth is that no one knows and what we have mostly is speculation and to some degree rumors.

Amazon has built an amazing company. Have they been profitable? Not really. Have they caused damage to many other competitors? Yes. But they’re also continuing to push the envelope forcing competitors like Walmart to be creative with ideas for competing, and that’s building a new retail world. I see the purchase of Whole Foods continuing that process, and in five years we’ll see many “never have been seen before” concepts in both grocery stores as well as other brick-and-mortar places because of Amazon and how they make the competition react.

Amazon will bring its expertise in automation and distribution technology to the grocery industry. This will dramatically modernize and, hence, change for the better the broader food distribution sector.

I do believe Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides an unparalleled funding source from the very companies that it competes with. There are retailers who will avoid doing business with any cloud services providers that leverage AWS. There are alternatives but retailers and brands need to be open to innovate and leverage new resources and explore new business models instead of simply trying to digitize status quo analog processes.

Amazon is already a force in the grocery industry and is likely to become a dominant force, but not because of the Whole Foods acquisition. Amazon is already a major competitor to supermarkets, with Amazon Pantry (a day doesn’t go by that I don’t see multiple Amazon Pantry boxes in my building) but also with regular Amazon. (Are there any traditional CPG brands you can’t get on Amazon?)

The Whole Foods acquisition gives Amazon access to a unique niche and access to a different customer than those who buy the traditional CPG brands on Amazon and Amazon Pantry. The acquisition just extends Amazon’s reach.

YES. Good grief! Food drives global retail, period. It creates traffic for anything else a retailer might sell. It is THE single factor that drove Walmart to its number one position, beginning in the ’80s.

Amazon is becoming a force in the grocery industry. They are making traditional retailers rethink their business strategy. This is all good for the consumer. Amazon has loyal customers that are waiting to see how the acquisition of Whole Foods will enhance their Amazon experience. All this leads to the changing of the industry as it evolves from being based around a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer where customers come in and shop to other models that include digital, subscription, delivery and more.

No one knows what Amazon plans to do with Whole Foods — but it won’t be the status quo. Retailers who sell groceries will want to focus on creating their own path to customer engagement and satisfaction or risk chasing the new kid on the block. There is no leading from behind here.

Overall, Amazon is emerging as a dominant force in grocery. There are two side effects: One, it is bringing lower-priced organics to new customers who would not shop at Whole Foods because it costs too much or because there is no Whole Foods near them; and two, it is increasing the popularity and sales of private label products.

FTC concerns are premature, but having the growing power and influence of the entire Amazon empire in the hands of one person — CEO Jeff Bezos — is not a good thing.

No, it won’t become a dominant force overnight. The combined grocery market shares of both organizations will be less than 2 percent of all food and grocery spend, and Whole Foods will remain a niche player — in the short term at least. What is clear, however, is the trajectory. Amazon will use Whole Foods as a springboard for growth in grocery, perhaps using the 365 brand in its own online offering, perhaps increasing its delivery capabilities, perhaps adjusting the Whole Foods pricing model. Over time it will likely succeed.

Anti-trust frameworks will be hard to consistently apply for technology companies and have been left too long.

Amazon has all the ingredients to become a leading national grocery supplier and I give it around five years before they get a majority of grocery shopping from households with Amazon Prime.

Amazon has already become a major force in the industry by its recognized disruptive impact on grocery shopping. Technology, customer intimacy, convenience and value pricing are forcing “brick & mortar” retailers to adapt or suffer loss of market share. The recently announced Walmart/Google partnership is further evidence of the impact of Amazon. As I have said before, “Don’t bet against Amazon.”

For all its popularity, Whole Foods remains a non-essential niche grocer and the noise regarding the merger appears to be influenced by political posturing. At a glance, It appears that the current process for determining anticompetitive activity doesn’t apply to an Amazon-Whole Foods merger and the FTC “okay” appears to confirm it.

Technology aside, I believe the merger will help expand the Whole Foods franchise to Amazon’s consumers who don’t have the geographical proximity or are intimidated by the brand.

I don’t see Amazon becoming a dominant force in the grocery business. Whole Foods’s 1.4% of the grocery business does not position them to be disruptor in the grocery category and since they own their sub-category (or niche), all they can do is evolve it. And evolution takes time.

I have no idea how Amazon is going to do this. But I have no doubt they will. They always seem to find a way to make things happen that no one else thinks will work. Look at them now and one can’t help but believe they will do anything they set their sights on accomplishing.

I’d suggest we separate “influence” from “market share.”

Amazon brilliantly controls the discussion after they get involved in a market. So their influence on the grocery biz will likely be quite large. We’ll see them do some very interesting things. But, also, we’ll get really tired of articles like “The 10 Things to Learn from Amazon’s Whole Foods…”.

But market share? I don’t think they’ll establish a large national market share with their Whole Foods involvement. They don’t need the acquisition to do that in order to have a major impact on their bottom line — a bottom line which needs help.