Amazon's offer to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion sounds pretty great to both parties, but it seems that isn't good enough. The proposal has a lot of people worried about Amazon becoming an indestructible monopoly, and the government is all too happy to step in and settle the issue. But this concern ignores consumers' own preferences as well as business and entrepreneurial history. This week in Words and Numbers, Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan discuss the probable future of the Amazon-Whole Foods merger, what it could mean for us, and what it could mean for another once-equally feared corporation: Wal-Mart.

For more on this, see:

• We Could Have Had Cell Phones 40 Years Earlier
• Should We Worry about Jeff Bezos's Growing Empire?
• Good and Bad Monopoly
• Gov. Wolf's Economic Incompetence and Financial Idiocy
• As the Economy Changes, Hold the Regulations
• Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission Moves to Protect Pittsburgh Taxi Monopoly

And for research, see:

• US Census Bureau: Concentration Ratios
• University of Central Florida: Concentration Ratios