Lee McKnight Talks About Amazon’s Whole Foods Strategy

After Amazon’s blockbuster purchase of Whole Foods, iSchool Professor Lee McKnight spoke with NPR about how Amazon will start by gathering more data on its consumers, rather than try to increase sales volume right away.

With a large overlap between Amazon Prime users and Whole Foods customers, McKnight says, “they want to tie those two databases or datasets together, which makes it more valuable, because now you have this more rounded picture of what the person is doing online and offline.” Additionally, he jokes that if he was a retailer without a deal with either Google or Amazon, “I’d be wetting my pants now.”