The Amazon-Whole Foods merger in 2017 was a vertical integration that would allow Amazon to grow
beyond the e-commerce space and sell groceries in hundreds of stores that belonged to Whole Foods.
Amazon wanted to capture online grocery space. As per a market study, online grocery shopping will
take around 20% market by 2025 but still a long way to go where physical stores are still relevant for
the sales. The core incompatibility of the cultures of Amazon and Whole Foods led to the suboptimal
results from the merged organization.
Analyze the above example and state 4 reasons why do you think that mergers are not very
successful?