As you may have noticed, I’ve started paying a lot more attention to Amazon in the last two months. With the breadth of things the company does, it just seemed wise to pay more attention than to the things that are only retail related. This is especially true as companies like Walmart start looking at the relationships between all of Amazon’s services – like when Walmart demanded that its own service providers get off of Amazon Web Services.

What I’ve learned is that there is an incredible amount of news related to Amazon. On the one hand, a lot of it is hype or people trying to make a few pennies off of click-bait headlines related to the company. On the other hand, Amazon is doing an incredible number of things, and most if not all of them are important to retail, and will certainly have an impact on the retail industry.

But there are also things that get reported about Amazon that either get way ahead of the game or are just actually not true. Sometimes those are as telling about the things Amazon actually does. Here are three that cropped up that stood out to me in just the last couple of weeks.

1. Amazon Does Not Own Whole Foods – Yet

Don’t count your free range chickens before they hatch. Pretty much as soon as people stopped declaring that retail was over and Amazon had won, as a result of the announced acquisition, they started talking about how it may not go through. Here are the latest developments:

• A Whole Foods Market shareholder has filed suit to stop the acquisition, claiming that the bid is too low and that there wasn’t enough transparency around the deal for shareholders.
• The leading Democrat on the House of Representatives’ antitrust committee has asked for a hearing on the Amazon/Whole Foods deal.
• The criteria for an antitrust review really centers on market dominance, and whether you look at it by bricks & mortar as a category, or food sales as a category, the combination of Amazon and Whole Foods is barely a blip on the radar. Instead, those who feel Amazon is getting too big for its britches are focusing on other things:
• oThe potential for deflationary pressure on wages, not just at Whole Foods but potentially across the grocery industry
• §My take: Whole Foods was paying a bit of a premium compared to other grocers and that didn’t put inflationary pressure on wages, so that’s a little hard to see how it could be. Plus, grocery has a lot of union presence still, and that tends to protect against deflationary pressures. So I’m not sure this argument will go very far.
• oAmazon may not have dominance in food sales, but they do have a certain dominance in eCommerce distribution. So what if they just bought Whole Foods, not for the retail storefronts, but for the fresh and cold chain distribution capacity? And pickup locations for consumers? Is there a market dominance argument if that’s what they intend for Whole Foods?
• §My take: It’s still mostly food sales, where Amazon has very small penetration. I don’t think this will be a strong enough argument to derail the acquisition.
• oWill Whole Foods’ customer privacy be violated if Amazon gets their mitts on purchase history information? Will Amazon have too much of a competitive advantage by having all this data?
• §My take: It depends on what it says in Whole Foods’ privacy policy. And I foresee a lot of consumers opting into said policy without realizing that anyone who acquires Whole Foods will likely have access to all that data without it being a violation of the policy. If lawyers wrote the policy, you should feel pretty confident that they protected the opportunity to make that data part of the acquisition. So, like it or not, that’s too bad for Whole Foods shoppers. In general in retail, the customer privacy ship has sailed. It’s over the horizon, not even in sight from the beach. Gone.
• §And as for the competitive advantage argument, Safeway has been collecting my shopper history since I moved out for college. What have they done with it? Pretty much nothing valuable to me. So, little sympathy from me that Amazon can “weaponize ” shopper data to the detriment of the retail industry. It’s the industry’s own fault that happened – it’s not like they couldn’t have done more with the data they have years ago.

Whether any of this is enough to derail the deal (which it most likely is not), will it change the way government considers anti-trust? One of the most interesting arguments from U.S. Representative David Cicilline, the House member who requested the anti-trust review, is that platforms, once they gain dominance, stifle innovation. This isn’t a retail industry argument, but a technology one. THAT might gain some traction, especially on the heels of Google’s big EU fine.

And at the least, Amazon’s move has invited more government attention, as the Federal Trade Commission is now looking into complaints about Amazon’s discounting practices. Retailers, like it or not, run into these kinds of complaints all the time – Macy’s and Best Buy have both been caught up in discounting practice investigations in the past, among many other retailers. Heck, Whole Foods got in trouble in 2015 for controversy with its scales, which led to the retailer overcharging customers. But whether Amazon has or has not tried to stay under the radar in the past, they’ve never tried to chum the waters. They may find that the Whole Foods bid has now commanded a lot of attention they don’t really want.

Ultimately, Amazon has had to refile paperwork surrounding the bid (paywall) to give regulators more time to review the acquisition. I guess at the least, this gives other retailers a chance to stop panicking and start formulating a coherent response. We’ll see what they come up with.

2. Alexa Can’t Actually Dial 911 For You

Alexa was credited with calling the cops in a domestic abuse case based on an argument that happened in the home. The reports initially focused on the idea that the suspect demanded to know if the victim had called 911 in a room where Alexa was listening.

Theoretically, the voice service wouldn’t respond to that without a wake word, most usually “Alexa “. But if you have an Echo or Dot anywhere in your house, you’ve had weird Alexa moments where she thought she heard something even when you didn’t say it. In my house, where the Echo sits next to the TV, we get “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you ” out of Alexa at least once a week, when no one was trying to wake her.

Also theoretically, now that Amazon has enabled calling via Alexa, it would be possible to place a call like that, except that it requires the receiving end to also be set up. That means someone somewhere at the 911 facility would’ve had to set up receiving calls from Alexa in that way.

So Amazon had to come out and confirm: it’s not really possible to dial 911 via Alexa.

The most interesting part of this whole story, though, was the sheriff department’s response to the news that Alexa probably didn’t call them. They said it didn’t really matter whether the voice service made the call or not, only that the idea that it could possibly do so likely saved the woman’s life.

So remember, kids, it doesn’t matter what Alexa can really do. It only matters what people THINK it can do. Which means retailers aren’t just fighting an enormous amount of capability in the voice arena, which expands every day. They’re fighting a growing mythology around those capabilities too. Good luck with that.

3. Amazon Is Not Out To Kill Zillow – Yet

Some even more fanatical Amazon watchers noticed that Amazon had created a page implying that it was maybe targeting Zillow’s sweet spot in the real estate market. As this news came but weeks after everyone freaked out over Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, of course the market reacted with Zillow’s shares down 4% on the news.

The company has neither confirmed nor denied, though the page that sparked the rumors was taken down. The Seattle Times reported that it was “fake news ” – that an unnamed source “familiar with the company’s thinking ” said this was just wild speculation.

It turns out Amazon had its hands full launching a whole slew of other services. Between Amazon Wardrobe, the meal kits, Spark, Anywhere, Pay Places, Inspire, Sears, Treasure Trucks, and some investments in smart home installation consultants, real estate referrals seem like chump change. At least for now.