Gunnar Lovelace on How Grocers Feel about Amazon

When Amazon announced its intention to buy Whole Foods last month, the news shook brick-and-mortar grocery retailers. The deal “confirms that big institutional retailers are in serious trouble,” says Gunnar Lovelace, founder and CEO of Thrive Market. “I think this is Blockbuster vs Netflix. For traditional retailers, there was a lot of fear before… and I think there’s a lot more fear now.” Thrive, on the other hand, might just emerge unscathed from Amazon’s grocery invasion, because Thrive “never set out to out-Amazon Amazon,” Lovelace says. “Amazon has half a billion products on the catalog; we’re a highly curated community of 5,000 products. So we speak to the values of the health-and-wellness consumers in a way that Amazon just can never do.” View the Yahoo! Finance interview.