Amazon announces 4th quarter sales | Hacker News Reader

Amazon announces 4th quarter sales

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47 pointsrising-sky47 comments

They earned it.

Polar vortex is here. I'm going to be outside at a customer site working on some equipment.

Need a hat. Something thick and furry.

We have an actual "indie millinery shop" in my city. Yay! Support your local merchant!

No winter hats. If I wanted a $399 Super Duper Hats Albino Fedora 100% rabbit fur felt fedora I could get it in an hour but no winter hats.

So then I went to Bass Pro, JCPenney, Sears, Nordstrom, Dick's, Macy's, Eddie Bauer, Burlington, Target, and finally REI.

Only a handful of them had any winter hats and none of them had any men's adult-sized hats in stock. Not even a beanie.

On Tuesday, January 29th at 6:57pm I left REI after having wasted over three hours going to 11 retailers and I got into my car. While in the REI parking lot I ordered a winter hat and gloves from Amazon for $45 with Prime next day delivery.

They were delivered at 3:03pm the next day. Before the sub-zero temperatures.

This keeps happening over and over again, I stopped being a "grazing" shopper over a decade ago and only buy specific items after research.

No retailers seem to be adapting, just racing to the bottom.

Burlington looked like a nightmarish blindingly brightly-lit hellscape with garbage that had already failed to sell at Target being strewn about as old ladies picked through it.

As far as I'm concerned, brick and mortar is dead.

edit: to be fair, if I wanted a SWAT-team/bank robber balaclava that covered my entire face, the sporting goods stores had me covered. I prefer that people I'm interacting with at work see my face.

Walmart is adapting fairly well. It's just that they have a stigma among wealthier folks, so we don't know about it. Walmart's online selection is often competitive with Amazon, or even cheaper. They have free 2 day shipping, you can ship to the stores, and Walmart is very good at having the right things in stock. I bet they would have had hats if you checked there.

Among Walmart's many stigmas is that they are associated with questionable conservative political causes, carried out now by the current generations that inherited the founder's money.

Paying millions to name a school arena after your daughter who was attending that school, then having no shame when it turns out said daughter was paying her roommate to do her school work - they did that. Bezos' kids are too young to have yet had their chance. I'm from the state where discount city was founded, I've seen this and much more. Before amazon, walmart was the mighty killer or all other retail. Now amazon is mightier.

I ran into a similar case with umbrellas- there weren't any local stores selling them on the day before a major rainstorm that ended up causing a significant amount of flooding around the state. Instead I'd decided to pay the premium and pick a reasonably sturdy one from Amazon with next-day pickup.

FWIW REI will let you browse ahead of time by what's in stock at your local store, and can often get an item for pickup if they don't have it at your local location in a day or two for free.

(Granted, other choices might ship a bit faster or cost a bit less, but that's never been REI's niche)

1000x this! I needed to buy golf balls for a Christmas gift. I went to 4 sports stores; “sorry we only sell hockey stuff”, “sorry that’s not in season right now”, “sorry we don’t sell golf stuff”, “umm let me check in the back... sorry not in stock”.

This is in a wealthy suburb where many homes back on to golf courses. So yep, I had to order them off Amazon.

> brick and mortar is dead.

Honestly, partnering with Amazon and basically giving you a product instantly would make brick and mortar thrive.

You want to buy this thing? If it's available at Best Buy, you can pick up within minutes at the counter and Amazon can ship a replacement to Best Buy in the next few days.

I already do this with Best Buy, with the added benefit of knowing that the product I'm buying isn't a cheap ripoff that was flipped from Alibaba.com, but fulfilled by Amazon.com.

Best buy currently buys stuff at wholesale prices.

Amazon sells at retail prices.

Not sure they can meet in the middle economically.

Especially with Amazon closing in on stores, with in city distribution centers and pick up lockers.

I wonder of retailers getting slightly different model numbers has anything to do with preventing this from ever being possible. I know they do it on black Friday to avoid price matching but I seem to run across wierd almost-exactly-the-same electronics at the local electronic stores more often than just black Friday.

John Lewis in the UK do this all the time, mostly because they loudly promise to match the price on any product in their store. It just so happens that the product in their store is a shade of green which is exclusive to them.

I can already do this with Best Buy, no Amazon necessary.

> "Alexa was very busy during her holiday season. Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “The number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, and the results of the team’s hard work are clear. In 2018, we improved Alexa’s ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20% through advances in machine learning, we added billions of facts making Alexa more knowledgeable than ever, developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000, and customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared to 2017"

I have a HomePod and Echo Dot. I trust the HomePod more in terms of privacy, build quality, customer service, warranty, etc. The Echo Dot is way better at finding my voice and doing what I want it to do. The HomePod goes off randomly when the TV is on, and it costs 10x more.

Do either of them actually provide any value (apart from homepod audio quality)? For the life of me I can't find a reason to have one of these in my house and I really am not concerned about the privacy issues.

My friends make fun of me because I have three HomePods. One says that I'm probably the only person in the country with 3 who doesn't work on the HomePod team.

I bought them for the audio quality primarily. I do use Siri with it daily, and it's fine/passable. I have it read me the weather, my calendar events, reminders, and play the news.

This is a weird #LifeHack, but I have one in my bathroom, and a bathroom HomePod/Alexa is the best place to put one. Each morning in the shower, I can ask it about my day, then I usually have it play NPR, Bloomberg, or read the news. At doing that, it definitely is more than serviceable for me.

Really depends on the individual. For my family, Alexa is almost indispensable, especially with a baby.

Controlling lights, fans, HVAC, TV (shield, amp, etc), Todo and shopping lists, cooking/laundry timers, reminders, tracking baby (diapers, bottles, nursing), weather.

Being able to turn on a light and track baby events while you're up to your elbows in poop is really invaluable.

Definitely won't add smart locks anywhere in the mix.

Limited music since we use Google music.

Also, Celery Man.

> Celery Man

Had to Google that. Clearly I've been missing out by not having cable.

For my family it is probably the best thing I have bought.

Wife and even mother-in-law can just say "Hey Siri Play Disney Radio" or whatever and it always just works and the baby can dance around to music.

If they are watching Netflix or Hulu or Disney Jr or HBO or etc they just just say "Hey Siri Volume Up" or "Hey Siri Pause" even if the Apple TV remote has made its way under the couch.

When we walk downstairs in the morning we can just whisper (so to not wake the baby) "hey siri turn the downstairs lights on" and it always just works.

"Hey Siri what's the temperate in [the baby's name]'s room?" "Hey Siri raise the temperate a couple degrees"

It would be a BIG deal to remove this from our life right now as we use it for so many things.

I've scanned all these replies and I have to say they do not resonate for me. Especially when I think of the privacy I'd have to give up to have a device change the volume on the tv or to dim the lights in my house.

What privacy would you be giving up? Amazon will know that you have light bulbs in your home?

Well, that and being one bug or secret govt court order from revealing real time audio of his entire family.

> Well, that and being one bug or secret govt court order from revealing real time audio of his entire family.

That doesn't happen. They may ask for the requests you have made to the device, but they won't simply listen to your conversations. These things are not sending realtime audio to AWS servers 24/7. We would know.

It seems to be more useful if you have kids. Most everything I use it for relates to the children.

Timers (for both cooking and reminding the kids to do something)

Asking for music when I'm rocking a baby

Using the intercom function to remind my daughter to pee without getting up.

Using the announce function to tell the whole house that the water heater is broken while I'm in the shower (this happens about once a week because I'm too cheap to replace the controller board on the heater and it can only be reset by pushing a physical button).

Also they tell me when someone is at the door because I have a ring doorbell.

> Also they tell me when someone is at the door because I have a ring doorbell.

I don't get this. My doorbell just rings a chime that I can hear and know someone is at the door.

The advantage is that I have multiple Alexa devices so I get the notification in multiple places instead of just one in the middle of the house. Also the wire was cut five years ago so that chime doesn't work anyway.

You might not be interested in the functionality, but ring tells you someone is at the door, they don't have to ring the bell for it.

I can hear them clumping on the porch.

Much of the functionality seems like it'd be great for a disabled person. But I'm not, and none of it seems like it would improve my life any.

By themselves?

They can do basically what Siri/'Ok Google' already do, except on a stationary location. For Echo in particular, there's a bunch of skills you can enable, from fart jokes to re-ordering your last Pizza on Domino's. If you have the full device (Echo, not the dot), it's also a pretty decent speaker. During the california fires I was constantly asking it about the air quality.

Kids love it. For jokes, to simple math problems, and wikipedia-like answers.

If you have more than one, they can call each other. Poor man's intercom. They can also play music together.

If you have a FireTV, it can control that. Good when you have misplaced the remote.

If you have smart devices, then things get more interesting. They can control groups of devices. When I say "Alexa, goodnight", lights are turned off, bedroom air filter is turned on, as are the security cameras (would be even better with thermostats and whatnot).

If you can program, you can also build skills for them. Then they will do whatever you want them to do.

My primary uses: play music (connected to Spotify), set timers and alarms (one Dot is in the kitchen), and turning lights on and off (we have Hue smart bulbs). I certainly could do all those things without it, but it is nice and does feel Jetsons-esque to be able to say and have it done, especially the lights -- no more awkwardly reaching over a couch.

I've also recently created a few routines which are fun -- "Good morning" triggers a good morning response, lights on, the weather and news, and some light music. It really does feel like the future scifi promised us...

I have an echo dot hooked up to my living room sound system which allows me to use my phone to play music wirelessly over bluetooth and Spotify connect. My TV also has a terrible sound board so instead of plugging an aux cable directly into the TV, I connect my Apple TV to the dot over bluetooth, which has much better sound quality. It's a big convenience over switching the aux cord between the various devices.

I have a gHome Mini and an Echo Dot. Both are fine for turning on bulbs, answering random trivia questions etc., but the gHome is especially nice for "Hey Google, please play BBC Worldservice on Chromecast Audio". I remember when I had to string a 30ft shortwave antenna for that... (you can do it in a browser, too, but running a 1000W power supply to listen to the news seems a bit wasteful).

Timers, alarms, and turning on and off the lights (nearly all of my switches and plugs are wifi enabled).

Having read all the other responses here I still am with you. Can't imagine living with devices like these.

Maybe because IT'S LISTENING TO ALL OF YOUR CONVERSATIONS

$10B in net income in 2018. I guess it’s not an investor-run charity for consumers anymore [1].

[1] https://slate.com/business/2013/01/amazon-q4-profits-fall-45...

Also intesting: AMZN’s net income was 4.3% of sales. For AMZN to reach AAPL’s valuation of 13.5 P/E, AMZN would need to do $1.5 trillion in sales.

But if it continues to grow sales at 31%, it should get there by 2025.

That's a crazy pair of facts. Interesting to compare Walmart on this front - its revenue is $500B with growth at 2%, whereas Amazon has sales on the same order of magnitude but growth an order of magnitude higher. I wonder how long this rate of growth is sustainable, both for Amazon and the rest of FAANG. Have there ever been companies this big growing this fast?

I noticed that margins are down compared to the previous quarter in the three segments (US, International, AWS). Maybe there is some seasonal explanation for that, but in 2017 margins improved in the three segments.

dang, if you read this, I think you should seriously consider banning earnings report articles. They always come and clutter up the feed, hiding the substantive information and technical news I come to Hacker News specifically for.

Because I feel like if I really wanted a feed of quarterly earnings, I’d be on Google Finance or something, not HN. The name is Hacker News, or has that been forgotten at this point?

These happen to be some of my favorite threads.

YCombinator is a technology business accelerator after all, so there's a lot of interest in this stuff here.

> I think you should seriously consider banning earnings report articles. They always come and clutter up the feed, hiding the substantive information and technical news I come to Hacker News specifically for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Personally, these are some of my favorite threads.

HN has, since the 2016 Presidential election, become a dumping ground for low-quality pieces from various popular media outlets (you know the ones I'm talking about), as well as all kinds of generally-interesting-but-not-related-to-tech-in-any-way stories. My guess is that since the very idea of a "startup" has waned in recent years, the readership has shifted from a technical one to a political one. There isn't much any one of us can do to correct this. The people who want this kind of content apparently now outnumber folks like us who wish that content would stay on Reddit.

People have been saying that for a long time now:

2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561

2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380

2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485

There has always been a mix of general-interest and technical articles on HN, and a certain portion of politics. I wrote more about this if anyone wants more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511923

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

No mention of Audible?

I don’t think Audible is a significant portion of Amazon revenue.

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