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Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

I put in an order when Jet launched. No joke, from the best I can tell, they sent someone to a physical Walmart, where they purchased the product at full retail, for more than they charged me, packaged it up, and shipped it to me with free two-day delivery.

But they'll make it up on volume, right?

Smart people have said, "do things that don't scale." I guess Jet took that at face value.

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I ordered a wireless router from Jet. They filled my order by ordering it on Newegg and having it shipped to me. If they don't have stock of something on their website, they'll buy it somewhere else rather than lose the sale.

Subsidized, out-of-stock products for everybody!

To do this for everything, indefinitely is obviously a problem. But to do this for a subset of products, even a very large subset, while building capabilities may be a good idea.

It lets them start winning customers by demonstrating their planned comprehensiveness, much earlier. Any entry to this retail space is going to require big risks, big capital, and a long climb. Amazon needs competitors. Succeed or fail, I applaud Jet for trying.

That's exactly what Marc Lore did to start his previous company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diapers.com

diapers.com sounded like a silly pets.com kind of business - turns out amazon bought it together a few sibling companies like soap.com for $550m. so this guy seems like he could actually make it work.

Except it isn't actually working. Maybe they still have a little bit banked, but from the sounds of it, they have burned about $200M in about a year and a half. Nobody survives that kind of cash flow burn.

There are stories at Amazon from the old timers about the good old days when they would make shopping trips to B&N or Borders to buy books that they listed as in stock but never actually had in stock. When I first started working there, I felt like it was a cool story about how scrappy and hard working they were. In retrospect, I think it was more likely just a terrible waste of time and cash.

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