Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K people in a single year

Brick & mortar: my fastest route home every day has me driving past a rural Walmart, so even though the selection is not that great, they've become my default grocery store purely through convenience.

Cheap shit that doesn't have to last long: I just bought my 7 year-old three long sleeved shirts for $6 total. He'll wear them through the Spring and by Fall will have outgrown them anyway.

Convenience: when the store is on my way home anyway, and there's tons of easy parking, it's far easier to shop Walmart than go online to look for something.

As a result of this convenience we're now more likely to shop at Walmart.com instead of Amazon.com, I can order online and get free in-store pickup without paying shipping or having a Prime subscription.

With all that, it would be completely unsurprising to find out that Amazon runs their warehouse and goods movement more efficiently than Walmart does, but they still don't own the entire stack like Walmart does.

On top of that, Walmart gets companies to produce entire product lines at prices that they themselves pretty much set. Amazon is just going to take a cut of a lot of sales while Walmart is getting the margin they want.

Technology wise I'd say it's a safe bet that Amazon is light years ahead, but don't sleep on Walmart Labs and their ability to innovate. Just don't expect it to be as useful to us as AWS.

I know everyone likes to bag on Walmart for being 'cheap' and/or 'shit' but at least if I buy a brand from Walmart I can be extremely confident in it being the real thing. Which has been getting to be (at least personally) a huge issue with me for Amazon and has started moving me to buy more things at other stores (including Walmart).

There are tradeoffs between the two, but I think they both run tight ships and are in the best position to be each other's biggest competitor.

I do a lot of doodling boxes-and-arrows stuff, pseudo-UML, half-assed flow-charts, etc., when working on ideas. For some strange (and largely irrelevant) reason, I'm really picky about the pencils I use. And my favorite ones have apparently gone out of production. So last week, I order two new high-end mechanical drafting pencils from Amazon. They show up, I like them right away, so I order 5 more.

The package arrives, and there are only 3 pencils. From what I can tell, they were loosely slopped in along with the book that in the same order and the packaging was loose enough that I'm guessing the other 2 actually fell out.

I login to Amazon.com (this was on Friday), report the 2 missing pencils, and wait to see what happens.

A few hours later I get a notice that a replacement package is 5 pencils is being overnighted to me. Note that only two were lost from the original package.

For all the grief Amazon gets, at times their customer service can be pretty damn good.

Wal-Mart, OTOH, to me, just "feels" like a place to get mostly cheap crap, sold by underpaid employees with surly attitudes. I don't even think of walmart.com as a place to shop online. They're so far off my radar that they might as well not have e-commerce.

The question then, to me, is how many people have a world view like mine? And if the answer is a large number, how does Wal-Mart get people to consider them at all? Leveraging the hybrid "click and mortar" thing sounds like a good start, but I'm wondering if it will be enough.

Walmart at least gives the appearance of curation for quality - It's at least easy to go see the quality of the things walmart is carrying. Amazon seems to be more of a crap shoot.

Doesn't Wal-mart have a pretty good return policy, where you don't even need a receipt? (Things might have changed since I last made a return)

Amazon's site quality seem to have gone down, according to many). How hard would it be for them to fix their brand? How long would that take ?

Source: http://corporate.walmart.com/frequently-asked-questions

Walmart's literally the Fortune One. I wouldn't necessarily count them out quite yet.

Isn't that normal? People who use Internet can easily compare prices in different shops so the price for them is more competitive. And people who have already spent their time to get to the shop are not so picky so they can pay more.

You are such a tough guy!

Tho there are other tradeoffs (mainly expected latency).

I had to read this intro 3 times to wrap my brain around the 2.5 negations, just to find out you DO think Walmart is not capable of competing with Amazon :)

That's sort of like trying to pin down General Electric. At some point, you have to give up with the "they are a $foo company" thinking and accept that they've grown past the boundaries and limitations imposed by a single market.

First, they ship 30% of their orders from their own warehouse.

Second, if jet.com was a "bubble" company, with nothing to back themselves up, i'm not sure Walmart would have ackuired them for $3B.

Wow. No wonder Wal-Mart bought them, they're cut from the same cloth.

Disclaimer: I am probably biased because I used to work for Amazon

I'm not sure I agree with that. Amazon already has such a poor reputation but they don't seem to have any trouble attracting people to work there. Considering the turnover* there, the fact they are able to grow this quickly must mean there are ways to get people to join despite having a poor reputation.

Walmart Labs on the other hand has a good reputation so you could even argue that if Walmart plays its cards right, it actually has an advantage in that aspect of attracting tech talent. I mean they even use Clojure..

* I admit this is anecdotal but I live in Seattle and used to work there and the average tenure is fairly low from what I've seen.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-attempted-sui...

I already have a strong distaste for Amazon and have been using Newegg where possible.

At some point they'll need to spin off AWS.

Walmart did most of the innovation in the back office space 30 years ago.

Walmart has 0.03% net income margins. If you raise the hourly pay for the average Walmart employee, by $3 to $4 per hour, Walmart is bankrupt. Meanwhile Amazon is going to begin substantially digging in to Walmart's sales with their growth. As Walmart's sales begin to contract in the coming years, that will pressure their non-existent margins further. If Walmart raises prices to afford the pay hikes, Amazon will damage Walmart's business that much faster. In the near future, Amazon is likely to rupture Walmart's business in such a fashion as to cause financial losses that cause hundreds of thousands of low skill workers to lose their jobs (with no replacement jobs). Walmart's likely future is to tip over, bleed epic amounts of red ink (they don't even have a large enough cash balance to afford one year in that condition), close hundreds of stores, and fire a million workers.

You can either have Walmart employ far too many people as it does now, at low wages (which has the advantage of absorbing vast amounts of low value, low skilled labor). Or you can have Walmart employ far fewer people per dollar of sales, in the model of Costco, and have higher pay. You can't - and will never - have both.

  a Fedex hub in Memphis

Walmart had 4 times the annual sales revenue of Amazon and they store every single transaction as well. They don't have the click data, but they certainly have far more actual purchasing data.

[0] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cashcow.asp

Population has been shifting from rural to urban for decades, Walmart's advantage is in a shrinking market.

Drone delivery is marketing nonsense anyway.

I will take back my comment when I can order something from Walmart online and get it within an hour. In fact, Walmart is BEST positioned to do this BECAUSE every one of their stores is a de facto warehouse and they have a ridiculous headcount

In some respects I believe the re-purposing of humans for other jobs may be worse.

You could make a fairly strong argument that is was the very real threat of Communist revolution in Western Europe (e.g. Germany in the 1930s, or Italy and France post-WW2) that forced governments to adopt socialist programs that moderated many of the excesses of the market, or in the US, the massive government investment in the middle class as well as draconian anti-left measures that prevented a similar threat.

We've so far ended up in a somewhat decent place, but if history is any measure, we're going to have a rocky next few decades if technology does end up destroying or transforming demand for labor. People generally don't go quietly when their livelihoods or place in the social order are threatened.

> "In managing the earth, vegetation and animals, the first priority of medieval men and women was to produce food, but they also expected to receive the benefits of their work in the foreseeable future, so the practised (to use the modern term) 'sustainable' agriculture. They planned for the same land to yield crops regularly, and the appreciated that well-managed resources renewed themselves. They anticipated the changeability of the seasons and the harvests, and hoped that their farming methods would allow them to survive in a year of unusual weather, for example by planting a variety of crops. At no time or place within our period can they be described as 'subsistence farmers' [emphasis added], in the sense that they ate only food that they had grown, or that they produced solely for their own consumption needs. They always expected that their land would yield a surplus, whether for the benefit of the state, the church or their lords, or for exchange for goods and services which they could not obtain from their own land.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that the industrial revolution was obviously bad for most people, but to say it was obviously good is wrong too. It's a complex thing, and it's not clear whether people are happier or even healthier in an industrial economy than an agrarian one.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=82zXFn-EDisC

>The free market isn't some singular entity that figures out problems before they arrive and sends us all an executive summary of its plan.

Obviously, which is why I think it's a good idea to have a few regulations in place so that we, as a society, might figure out our plan and how to make the transition a little less painful for those who have to suffer the consequences. Not that you argued against regulations in the first place but from your comments I assumed you and pm90 were of the libertarian kind.

A lot of that wealth was obtained by unsustainably extracting our planet's natural resources. The past 100 years have been good, relatively speaking, but we did it in part by mortgaging our descendents' futures for many generations to come.

To alleviate the pain of the transition, sometimes we need to slow it down. The tough part is figuring out how much drag to apply so that it slows but doesn't halt.

There was a graph not to long ago that showed the most common job in each state. In a huge swath of them, that job was "Truck Driver". What're those people going to do to put food on the table or a roof over their family's head when those jobs are automated away?

To say this is because of the free market, when most technology development is heavily government funded, even in the USA is just plain wrong.

> Being forced to sell your labour in order to survive

we sell our labor because we live in a complex society where our skills our specialized and our lifestyle is massively interdependent. we need to use the money abstraction to mediate trades because of our specialization and interdependency. thus we sell labor. selling labor for profit, for providing specialized services to your community, or for the pure joy of it is one thing. selling labor from a position of alienation and need for subsistence is another.

an advanced industrial economy has much more productive capacity than is needed for pure subsistence levels of existence. we could supply survival essentials to everyone in the U.S. and still be hugely in the surplus. UBI is a popular idea among economists for exactly this reason. it's a proposed solution to a major problem of distribution of wealth.

I don't have an answer to be honest though and I am not sure [m]any people do right now. It is a difficult problem but one we need to discuss and work on a solution for. I don't feel a universal basic income is the answer like some have suggested. Not that I am against UBI as part of a bigger solution but it is my personal opinion that a mind wasted is a tragic thing.

Not all "work" in life should be based around mercantilism.

An explicit part of their business plan is maximizing free cash flow (not profits).

I'm not sure what funding you think the company is getting from investors. Amazon's stock price could drop through the floor and the biggest issue the company itself would face is the departure of a workforce who take a significant chunk of their compensation in AMZN shares. Unless they're hoping to do another public stock offering the share price is mostly useful as a gauge on Jeff Bezos's net worth.

When the company does want outside funding, it hasn't turned to public stock offerings in recent years. Instead they've secured it by issuing corporate bonds[0]. THERE is somewhere they might have to worry, but as long as their credit rating stays high, they'll find plenty of institutional buyers. Their credit rating is maintained by people who understand that profitability has little to do with how well a large business is doing, and is sometimes an indication of failure to manage funds well (failing to employ depreciation appropriately to minimize tax liability in very successful years, etc.).

[0]:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-02/amazon-se...

If the business does not believe that it has growth opportunities that beat the market, then it should try to generate a profit and return that to investors so that they can look for better opportunities. Conversely if it does believe that it has such growth opportunities, the business should take any free cash that it generates and reinvest that inside of the business. If they are right, they will grow faster than the market. If they are wrong, they will at least acquire resources that can be sold later to recoup at least some of that money.

Amazon in particular pushes a tremendous amount of flexibility to individual business units to pursue growth strategies. As a result they always believe that they have better internal growth opportunities than the market in general. Their rapid growth is a demonstration that they have been right more often than not.

They can switch to generating profit at any time that they want. Just shut down unnecessary areas of the business that are losing money. (Something that they do all of the time whenever they conclude that an idea hasn't worked out.)

However when they take that decision, that will be evidence that senior management has lost confidence in the organization. Which will be a sign of internal problems.

In fact, a few quarters ago, Amazon actually made a profit by accident, because they could not reinvest the money fast enough.

For example, Apple did not pay a dividend until a few years ago and continues to have $200B stockpiled. Is it a failure?

Like it or not, in the last 30-ish years stocks have become just as much for trading as they were for profit sharing/dividend income.

If a stock does not pay a dividend, who cares if it makes a profit?