1. The official Whole Foods Instagram page appears to be having problems. In the last 24 hours, @wholefoods purged all of the more than 4,000 accounts it was following and is now only following five: Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Bon Jovi, Cardi B, Sting and Beyonce. The account no longer has photos of the grocery chain’s products and recipes; instead it has five blank posts. So far, Whole Foods has not responded to media questions, but the social media responses have been entertaining. — BILLBOARD 

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2. Roku is reportedly on the verge of making the requirement to constantly log into different video subscriptions go away to stay competitive with Amazon Channels. Roku plans to launch a video subscription marketplace that can handle payments for different channels and services, according to Variety. The feature will allow multiple subscription channels to run within a single app on Roku. — VARIETY 

1. Amazon is killing its popular Mayday video customer support feature for Kindle Fire users. “The Mayday video calling service will be discontinued in June 2018,” the company says on a customer support page. The use of live video chat with a human representative—rolled out just five years ago by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—was a notable departure from the trend toward automated support. “In the early 21st Century, our devices have gotten sophisticated enough, we’re not always sure, ‘Am I controlling the device or is the device controlling me?’ So we’re hopeful that Mayday will be a much-loved feature,” Bezos said at the time. — GEEKWIRE

2. President Donald Trump took a swipe at Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos over the weekend by encouraging Washington Post employees to go on strike. “Washington Post employees want to go on strike because Bezos isn’t paying them enough. I think a really long strike would be a great idea,” Trump tweeted, referencing Bezos, who owns the paper. “Employees would get more money and we would get rid of Fake News for an extended period of time!” He also renewed his previous false claim that the Post is a “registered lobbyist.” Trump’s tweet follows an open letter from Washington Post employees to Bezos regarding ongoing negotiations for raises that have lasted a year. — DAILY BEAST

3. One of the reasons Amazon is viewed as so disruptive is because consumers believe they are getting something for free when it’s actually covered with their paid Prime subscriptions. Research by the consulting firm Kantar Millward Brown shows that Prime customers are the online giant’s most loyal customers who often forget they contribute more than $10 billion to the company before they even make a purchase. According to Doreen Wang, a senior executive at Kantar, the consulting firm “monitors data and finds that [Prime customers] are nine times more loyal to Amazon and spend around 50 percent of their personal care budgets on Amazon [for example], so they are super loyal. They tend to forget they have paid for Prime because of free delivery and returns for free." — CNBC

3. Amazon shareholders are calling for the halt of sales of facial recognition technology to law enforcement. In a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos, nearly 20 groups of Amazon shareholders wrote that they are concerned about the privacy threat of government surveillance from the tool. Amazon's technology, called Rekognition, detects objects and faces in images and videos. “We are concerned the technology would be used to unfairly and disproportionately target and surveil people of color, immigrants, and civil society organizations," the shareholders wrote. "We are concerned sales may be expanded to foreign governments, including authoritarian regimes." — CNN 

4. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Amazon officials “really like” two of the city’s sites in its bid for the company’s second headquarters. Emanuel has been evading questions about Chicago’s position in competing for Amazon’s bid that could add as many as 50,000 employees from the area. “I don’t want to violate anything with Amazon, so I think when you — know this, let me do it this way so I’m not (violating), I want to be careful,” Emanuel said. “On our original proposal to Amazon we had 10 sites. When they came, they saw five sites. It is our understanding they like, really like, two sites. So let me say that.” — CHICAGO TRIBUNE 

5. Google is taking on Amazon in China by investing $550 million in JD.com, the Chinese e-commerce giant. Officials from the company said the agreement initially would not involve any major new Google initiatives in China, where many of the company’s main services are blocked over its refusal to censor search results in line with local laws. Earlier this year, Google began partnering with retailers like Walmart, allowing them to list their products in Google search to better compete with Amazon. — REUTERS

6. Local suppliers to Whole Foods are struggling under Amazon’s “order-to-shelf” system since the online retailer bought the grocery chain a year ago. The system involves supplying in smaller batches to potentially reduce labor and inventories, but the short notice isn’t enough time for smaller, local producers of items like hair products, desserts and hot sauces. “A larger supplier that’s selling across the country can spread those losses, but for a smaller, local supplier like myself, there’s really nowhere to spread that out,” LaForce Baker, one small Chicago supplier, told the Chicago Sun Times. “You end up having to eat that cost and what that ends up being for the supplier is you have to lay off people, you might shrink your selection.” — CHICAGO SUN TIMES 

7. In a race to stay ahead of Amazon, CVS has introduced a prescription drug delivery service. The drug store chain introduced same-day delivery in New York last year and is now expanding the program to Boston, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Customers can place their orders online, through the drugstore's app or over the phone, and can add over-the-counter products like cold and flu medicines, vitamins and baby or feminine care products. Amazon does not currently offer prescription delivery services, but the company has signaled it will soon enter healthcare. — CNBC

8. Amazon has announced a partnership with Marriott hotels that will put Amazon Echo smart speakers with Alexa into select rooms. Guests will be able to use the device to order room service, turn on the lights, set alarms, notify housekeeping, ask for hotel information, call the front desk, play music and other typical Alexa functions. — CNN

9. The Federal Trade Commission has cracked down on a group of people who ran a get-rich-quick scheme on Amazon with a settlement to pay $102 million. — INC.

10. Amazon says it offers Hub lockers to more than 500,000 U.S. residents with the hope of making delivery to urban and apartment dwellers less stressful. — CNET

4. A London-based startup has raised $3.2 million to develop the first board game powered by Alexa. The company, Sensible Object, graduated from the inaugural Amazon Alexa accelerator in 2016 and claimed this new round of funding from the Amazon Alexa Fund. “By using Alexa as a driver of a new kind of connected play experience, we are driving down the price of connected play products to the point where we can compete directly with analogue counterparts,” said Alex Fleetwood, the startup’s CEO. — GEEKWIRE

5. Amazon will add more than 1,000 jobs in Ireland over the next two years, the online retailer said on Monday. The company said the new Dublin-based positions will include software engineers, online security experts and data specialists. “Amazon’s decision to bring another 1,000 jobs to Ireland underpins our mission to make this country an innovative, digital economy and a global leader for the tech sector,” Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said in a statement. — REUTERS

6. Amazon’s deal with Whole Foods last year forced Google and other technology giants to create more partnerships. Caught somewhat flat-footed, the search giant and retailers alike began looking for ways to become more competitive with Amazon, making way for new business models and alliances. "It was a real wake-up call," Joe Rosenberg, a former strategic partnership specialist at Google, who left Google to launch an e-commerce consulting firm, told CNBC. "Deals we'd been discussing for years were suddenly fast-tracked to retailers' C-suites." — CNBC 

1. More than 400 Washington Post staffers have written an open letter to Jeff Bezos over his “shocking” pay practices. The letter and an accompanying video uploaded to YouTube call for fair pay, benefits, and job security following a year of negotiations between their union and top Washington Post management. "All we are asking for is fairness for each and every employee who contributed to this company's success," the petition states. "Fair wages; fair benefits for retirement, family leave and health care; and a fair amount of job security." — BUSINESS INSIDER 

2. Jeff Bezos is soon expected to make an announcement about his philanthropy plans. Bezos took to Twitter to update followers, saying, “I wanted to take this opportunity to let those of you who made suggestions know that I have settled on two areas that I’m very excited about and that I’ll announce the two areas before the end of the summer.” Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man, has been criticized for not being a major player in the world of philanthropy, but others say that’s an unfair judgment. "You have to imagine he will be every bit as philanthropic as Gates,” Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, told Bloomberg in October. “Nobody has any right to make demands, and they have to give the guy time.” — CNET 

3. Whole Foods is becoming more secretive under Amazon’s ownership, according to corporate staffers at the grocery chain. The company is keeping more projects hush-hush, even asking employees to leave meetings so only small numbers of people are in the know. "I've been in meetings where I've been asked to leave," one corporate employee at the global headquarters in Austin, Texas, told Business Insider. "They will tell some of us to step out before they continue conversations." The change is a bit of culture shock for Whole Foods employees who had become accustomed to the priorities of openness and transparency. — BUSINESS INSIDER

4. Death Cab for Cutie slams Amazon in a new song about the company, the tech boom and Seattle. "They're digging for gold in my neighborhood, for what they say is the greater good / But all I see is a long goodbye, a requiem for a skyline." In an interview with NPR, Death Cab for Cutie singer-songwriter Ben Gibbard, a native of the Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill, said, "Seattle has been transformed into an almost unrecognizable city over the past 15 to 20 years with the tech boom and specifically with the rise of Amazon." — CNET

5. Two senators tasked with investigating consumer privacy have sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding answers on Echo’s snooping problem. The inquiry comes after a Portland woman told news outlets that her Echo device sent a recording of a private conversation to somebody on her contact list on its own. Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Senator Chris Coons (D-CT), who serve respectively as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, want to know, among other things, "any and all purposes for which Amazon uses, stores, and retains consumer information, including voice data, collected and transmitted by an Echo device." — WIRED