Earlier this year, Amazon began offering Whole Foods discounts to Prime members and it has been expanding that program to more states over recent weeks. Today, the company announced that all Whole Foods and Whole Foods 365 stores will offer discounts for Prime members starting Wednesday. Amazon Prime subscribers will get an extra 10 percent off of sale items marked with a special yellow tag and larger discounts on certain products marked with a blue "Prime Member Deal" label. The company says that since starting the program in May, Prime members have collectively saved millions of dollars. Prime VP Cem Sibay said in a statement. Discounts are also applicable to Prime members who order groceries from Whole Foods through Prime Now. Currently, that two-hour delivery service is only available in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Sales Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, feelingcutelol.com Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Richmond, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco and Virginia Beach, but Amazon plans to expand the service to more cities throughout the year. To use your Prime discounts at Whole Foods, you'll need to download the Whole Foods app, sign in with your Amazon account and then scan the app's Prime Code when you check out. Alternatively, you can also opt to use your phone number at checkout.
Internal documents reveal how a former aide to Joe Biden helped the tech giant build a lobbying juggernaut that has gutted legislation in two dozen states seeking to give consumers more control over their data. Filed Nov. 19, 2021, 11 a.m. Amazon executives and staffers detail these lobbying victories in confidential documents reviewed by Reuters. In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted. In California, the company stifled proposed restrictions on the industry’s collection and sharing of consumer voice recordings gathered by tech devices. And in its home state of Washington, Amazon won so many exemptions and amendments to a bill regulating biometric data, such as voice recordings or facial scans, that the resulting 2017 law had "little, if any" impact on its practices, according to an internal Amazon document. The architect of this under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama.
Hired by Amazon in 2015, Carney reported to founder Jeff Bezos and built a lobbying and public-policy juggernaut that has grown from two dozen employees to about 250, according to Amazon documents and two former employees with knowledge of recent staffing. One 2018 document reviewing executives’ goals for the prior year listed privacy regulation as a primary target for Carney. One objective: "Change or block US and EU regulation/legislation that would impede growth for Alexa-powered devices," referring to Amazon’s popular voice-assistant technology. The mission included defeating restrictions on artificial intelligence and biometric technologies, along with blocking efforts to make companies disclose the data they keep on consumers. This story is based on a Reuters review of hundreds of internal Amazon documents and interviews with more than 70 lobbyists, advocates, policymakers and their staffers involved in legislation Amazon Deals targeted, along with 10 former Amazon public-policy and legal employees. It is the third in a series of reports revealing how the company has pursued business practices that harm small businesses or put its own interests above those of consumers.
The previous articles showed how Amazon has circumvented e-commerce regulations meant to protect Indian retailers, and how it copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands over those of other vendors on its India platform. In a statement, Amazon said: "The premise of this story is flawed and includes reporting that relies on early, incomplete drafts of documents to draw incorrect conclusions." The company said it protects consumers’ privacy and doesn’t sell their data. Amazon Deals said the 2018 document listing Carney’s goals to defeat privacy regulation is "out-of-date" and does not reflect the company’s current public-policy objectives. The company said it has opposed "poorly crafted" state privacy bills. Amazon’s lobbying against privacy protections aims to preserve the company’s access to detailed consumer data that has fueled its explosive online-retailing growth and provided an advantage in emerging technologies, according to the Amazon documents and former employees. The data Amazon amasses includes Alexa voice recordings; videos from home-camera systems; personal health data from fitness trackers; and data on consumers’ web-searching and n.i.gh.t.m.a.re.zzro buying habits from its e-commerce business.
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