Aiming to top the food chain

For a couple of millennia, Alexander the Great has been the man to beat for overweening ambition. And while devotees of stoic philosophy might have a few words to say about him turning on the waterworks because he had no more worlds to conquer, his undefeated record in battle and ability to conquer and colonise every place he went cemented his reputation in posterity. So it is a little surprising that a challenge to his position as conqueror-inchief appears to be coming in the shape of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos.

In the beginning, Amazon was content merely to lay waste to the traditional model of bookselling. But once Bezos started to enjoy the taste of blood, the company started looking for further areas to disrupt.

It wasn’t long before Bezos started rolling out his vision of Amazon as

“the everything store”, crushing its traditional competitors in every field with an invincible combination of superfast delivery at super-low prices. It chucked in movies and cloud computing as part of its desire to be the natural choice for pretty much every purchase you could want to make.

One of the few areas it struggled to crack was grocery delivery, which had limped along since the launch of Amazon Fresh in 2007. This is a key area, given that groceries make up approximately half of retail sales in the US. That division has been given a mighty kick into gear with the announcement that Amazon is buying Whole Foods Market for a cheeky Us$13.7bn. The combination of Whole Foods’ quality and Amazon’s convenience and pricing makes for a compelling proposition.

It would seem that everybody’s favourite aviation expert, SAA chair Dudu Myeni, has gone into stealth mode