The first sentence in Ben Tarnoff's article pretty much says it all... "What if a cold drink cost more on a hot day?".
So, Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods has gone through. I promise you, Amazon will be a disruptor there, too. It's called "surge pricing". In other words, instant supply and demand determining pricing of what you eat and drink...even better, you have to believe them and trust they all aren't colluding. Because they're just so honest. and it'll spread to other commodities, as well. Wait, when your smart car tells the cloud you need fuel, prices all around you will change, too. Perfect...but not so much for you.
"Amazon isn’t abandoning online retail for brick-and-mortar. Rather, it’s planning to fuse the two. It’s going to digitize our daily lives in ways that make surge-pricing your groceries look primitive by comparison. It’s going to expand Silicon Valley’s surveillance-based business model into physical space, and make money from monitoring everything we do."
It's all about one thing: "Big data", structured and unstructured and a whole new marketplace. You can read about big data here, or search it yourself (I recommend Duckduckgo). It can be used well, and to your benefit (for example) by the NIH. It can be used to your detriment, as well. No matter what you do, you're part of it. And what you don't see is the marketplace for that data - it starts with the browser you use and ends up with what gets presented to that browser. Kind of like what AOL was in the beginning, a portal to a bubble in which sellers pay for a place to peddle and you as the hockey puck getting shuttled around between them. So, the smart people went outside that bubble and used IE or Netscape to search.
Now, the bubble is bigger, but you're contained and constrained. "Surge pricing" has hit Britain, and it's coming here.
So, don't be surprised when "surge pricing" gets to you, too. Ask not for whom the bell tolls...
My pathetic excuse for rebellion was turning off all the tracking in my browser. Yeah, like that's gonna make a difference. Same as my vote.
Sources linked in the article.