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New market trends, including the recent Amazon acquistion of Whole Foods, are creating opportunites for fleets willing to rethink pickup and last-mile delivery. Photo: Tiger Cool Express
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New market trends, including the recent Amazon acquistion of Whole Foods, are creating opportunites for fleets willing to rethink pickup and last-mile delivery. Photo: Tiger Cool Express
">More than two thousand years ago, merchants in the market square in Pompeii felt an ominous rumbling under their feet and glanced nervously at the smoking volcano off in the distance wondering what, if anything, was going to happen.
Metaphorically speaking, U.S. retailers nationwide felt a similar ominous rumbling last month. While the cause of those shudders is not an active volcano, the acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon is likely to prove as disruptive an economic force in the coming months as Mt. Vesuvius proved to be for those Roman merchants so long ago.
And the shockwaves from this deal will not stop with brick-and-mortar retailers. They could potentially transform almost every aspect of our economy and long-held models of consumer behavior. And certainly, no market segment will be hit harder, or sooner, than logistics and transportation.
With questions swirling about how the Amazon-Whole Foods acquisition will affect trucking and when, transportation and logistics equity research firm Stifel recently tapped Tom Finkbiner and Ted Prince, founders of Kansas City-based Tiger Cool Express, a large-scale, stand-alone, refrigerated intermodal carrier to discuss in an analyst call the timing and degree of changes this move will have on trucking and logistics in the near future.
The bulk of the discussion, which you can read here, focused on the perishable foods market and how this acquisition, technology, regulations, and competitive pressure will affect fleets and intermodal operators today.
“This is a $40 billion market but it's a very sophisticated market and a very complicated market with respect to transportation,” Finkbiner noted. “There is the fresh portion [the produce] and the processed portion [where processed foods are made]. An example of a
