Amazon expands its air cargo fleet | Hacker News Reader

Amazon expands its air cargo fleet

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119 pointsartsandsci116 comments

Here's a scenario that gives me pause: you as a company goes all in to re-engineer your critical apps to use AWS as efficiently as possible. Your apps are now no longer portable away from AWS without a lot of time and work.

Then Amazon enters your business space in direct competition to you. Through your business with AWS you are now funding a large, fierce, and direct competitor.

Anyone else think of this, or am I just being paranoid?

Amazon directly competes with Netflix and they get along fine.

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix/

I thought Netflix has slowly been moving stuff to their own data centers as they grow and has distanced themselves from AWS on more critical stuff?

Netflix still uses AWS for much of their support systems (billing, discovery, etc. etc.) The core business of delivering video is not on AWS and has never been. That runs on their in-house CDN, OpenConnect.

> and has never been

I believe this is inaccurate, Netflix was streaming from AWS in their early years IIRC.

I have worked at Netflix.

The history is that mainly they used well-known CDNs for streaming, followed by their OpenConnect CDN network now. AWS has always been used for metadata.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

I'm not aware of them streaming from AWS, though it's possible a development group there did a test or something temporarily.

This seems unlikely - Netflix just finished their migration to AWS in 2016 after 7 years and has been quite public about it, and always has a major presence at re:invent, etc.

https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net...

They've never used AWS for their CDN.

> distanced themselves from AWS on more critical stuff?

Can someone familiar with Netflix speak to this?

It makes sense that they'll continue to run stuff in AWS due to their existing footprint, but are they mandated to build new stuff outside the cloud? And if so, why?

IIRC it is the other way around. They had much larger data centers but migrate more and more to AWS because of the stereotypical "on-premise vs cloud in large company"-reasons.

It’s not the same thing with Netflix. If five movies from Netflix originals did well this year then what Amazon prime can do about it? It’s not a charger cable that they can right away stock and start selling it :-).

The catalog of successful movies is available publicly anyway :-)

IMDB is also owned by Amazon.

I think it's a stretch to say they directly compete. Amazon's Prime service covers a tiny fraction of their catalogue. And everything else is a per-move/show rental or purchase fee. I technically have both because prime video is just included with the membership, but there's no way I would ever pay Amazon more money for Prime Video vs. something like Netflix.

A stretch? If prime isn't a direct competitor, then no one is. Competitors can have different pricing structures and still be competitors.

So GM and Avis are competitors?

This is what Amazon does. See Amazon Basics? Sellers sell on Amazon, Amazon tracks what sells well, enters market with same cheaper product and puts you out of business.

You are doing a large part of the market research for your competitors by using cloud services and platforms. You just pray they are good actors and ethical.

> See Amazon Basics? Sellers sell on Amazon, Amazon tracks what sells well, enters market with same cheaper product and puts you out of business.

Or they contract with you to sell a private label version of your own product.

For example, Ergotron makes a very nice quality monitor arm:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00358RIRC/

Amazon Basics has a monitor arm that looks just like the Ergotron, except it's all black instead of silver and black.

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00MIBN16O/

I have a couple of the Amazon arms. The reason they look the same is because they are made by Ergotron. It says so right on the box:

Ship From: Ergotron Inc - Private Brands - US

Sure, they partner with you and force you to sell the same thing for less money, with less brand recognition.

All under the implied threat that if you don't partner with them, they will go to a competitor and push that product before yours.

I used to sell something like over 50% of all the HP LTO cleaning tape that got bought in the US through our FBA setup with amazon. The 3rd month in a row we grossed more than 80K in sales, guess who started stocking and selling LTO cleaning tape 'shipped from sold by Amazon'. Thankfully my HP oem pricing had them beat by a mile when it came to cost and we still did pretty well until the market fell out for the product.

Their entire business model at this point seems to charge other business for the right to figure out what a good business for them to get into it.

All retailers, that can, do this though.

Safeway, Fred Meyer, Costco, you name it there is a Select or some other generic offering of their competitor’s goods.

Except many of those stores haven't fostered distrust in their market place with fake products. I found myself buying Amazon basics because I felt like I could trust them in ways I couldn't trust anything else on the site.

Are you saying you got counterfeit Amazon Basics products? I'm pretty sure Amazon Basics items are only stocked and sold by Amazon and not any of their "marketplace" fronts so I don't see how you would have got fakes.

Amazon Basics is just like the grocery store brands that have become popular. They're basically rebranded products by a different company at a cheaper price with some level of quality endorsed by the retailer (Amazon, Costco, Kroger/Publix grocery stores, etc)

He's saying Amazon allows fake selling of product on their store which erases user's trust in other sellers.

Then Amazon comes up with Amazon Basics brand through which you only get genuine products.

And guess what is reinforced in users mind? That Amazon Basics is only true source of legit stuff rest all businesses selling on Amazon are fraudsters.

Who profits from allowing fake on their store? Amazon.

Amazon's problem with fake products means trust in non-Amazon sellers is lessened which gives the Amazon Basic products an advantage.

Like if I was to go to a brick and mortar store and there was a 10% chance that the brand name cereal I bought could be counterfeit but a 0% chance if I bought the store brand.

Interestingly, I think we saw (seeing?) a version of the same playbook being used at AWS - see the debacle around the AWS managed Elasticsearch service.

I don't think is the same case. AWS playbook will to abstract any customer operational cost into manage service ELK, MongoDB, Kafka, Redis, etc

I am sure there are hundreds of companies that were asking AWS to offer a fully managed Kafka service. I asked for it many times to my account manager when they where pitching Kinesis.

I worked at an major insurance company that was evaluating AWS. As soon as Amazon announced they would be getting into the insurance industry[1] the project was immediately terminated.

[1] https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/technology/meas...

This is exactly the scenario I was thinking of.

This has been an issue for a while now. I worked at a retail analytics company that was entirely AWS hosted in 2012, and either Target or Walgreens didn't want us to use AWS because they viewed Amazon as a competitor, and didn't want to feed the beast.

This is also an issue at my current company, and I think a significant driver of the "cloud agnostic" push.

What is the relevance of funding your competitor? Amazon is so huge that the AWS fees you pay them are a drop in the ocean, and will have negligible effect on the (relatively tiny) unit of Amazon that's competing with you.

More concerning would probably be the possibility that your AWS service would be suspended or otherwise purposefully disrupted.

That's not an argument. People say the same thing about voting or polution, it adds up. Also, AWS is not a smart part of Amazon, AFAIK most of their profit comes from it. They sell products for cheap, so they can push competitors out to keep growing and then they balance the loss with AWS profits.

>>> Then Amazon enters your business space in direct competition to you. Through your business with AWS you are now funding a large, fierce, and direct competitor.

>> What is the relevance of funding your competitor?

> That's not an argument.

Sure it is. It's a great argument. Do you somehow think Amazon is limiting itself to copying businesses on the AWS platform only? No: they'll copy any successful business anywhere.

Unless your business is Netflix, you, by yourself, are not contributing enough to their bottom line to boost their efforts to compete with you. And guess what: Netflix doesn't believe that the money they're paying AWS is enough to hurt their competitiveness with Prime Video. The 10 VMs your company is going to run aren't going to matter.

Voting is not a good way to pursue your own self interest, which is the typical context of business decisions (bounded of course by morality and the law). From a standpoint of classical rationality, it only makes sense to vote insofar as you are pursuing collective goals, but what is the collective goal with regard to Amazon?

You can certainly object to Amazon business practices and take a principled stand against doing AWS business with them, but that's something you would presumably do whether or not they were competing with you.

This is called 'market cannibalization', when considered from the opposite perspective where amazon is competing with their customers. It's definitely considered bad for business, for precisely the reason that customers will look for other suppliers.

Having talked to some people at trade shows and tech conferences, there is absolutely that feeling from major retailers. Some people would like to use AWS but they are banned since it would directly fund their competitor (Amazon).

This is already happening to SaaS startups: https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/aws-startups-conflict.html

I doubt any one company's use of AWS makes a bit of difference in their ability to keep the lights on. You "funding" them in some round about way is irrelevant.

I guess you're missing the point. It is not the money that matters more here, it is the collective business intelligence that Amazon gets access to, for free - for example, if one FBA seller leaves Amazon, no big deal. Even if a thousand FBA sellers leave Amazon, it is still no big deal for Amazon, because they have something more important than any money they could've earned from those FBA sellers - data. They did zero work (market research, advertising etc), but they know precisely what is selling well and where. If they keep doing this for a while (which they have), then they are in many more verticals in a few short years.

It is like these FBA sellers are paying Amazon, then giving valuable data to them and helping Amazon put them out of business. It is just a shitty situation

Just dropping this in, Amazon is about to purchase Sizmek which is a major player in online advertising - the main competitor to G's Doubleclick advertiser solutions.

So they'll get even more data on the marketing side.

I think you're just changing "the point" as I replied to this direct quote:

>Through your business with AWS you are now funding a large, fierce, and direct competitor.

No one here is talking about FBA's or the Amazon marketplace; they're talking about using AWS and having Amazon infiltrate your product space down the road.

FBA or AWS, I think the same argument holds - AWS and Amazon in general are so big, that they wouldn't care if a few hundred (or even a few thousand) smaller clients leave them. The data they lose matters more than the money.

That said, you are funding a fierce competitor, even if your AWS bill is just 10 bucks a month...

It's not the same though. If you jump in and start selling merch in Amazon then you are entering _their_ space directly and using their platform to do so. As you said, you're not only handing them money; you're handing them all of your data.

Using AWS to build your back end before finding out that Amazon is now going to enter your market is hardly the same thing. Your handful of VMs make exactly zero difference. AWS or no, Amazon was going to eat your lunch.

I remember TOMS didn't want to host anything on AWS because they considered Amazon a direct competitor when they bought Zappos. That was well over a decade ago.

This was the subtext at Google’s Next conference. Basically 9 of the top 10 retailers are moving to GCP. The last one is Amazon.

Moving away from AWS would be a symbolic gesture in this case, and may make you even less competitive.

Your business is not going to make any difference in Amazon's financial situation, but if you're saving money by using AWS's services, why would you spend even more money by porting to Azure or GCP?

If you did this it was likely the result of a valid cost/benefit analysis, yes? Let’s assume so - and that your cloud journey wasn’t just done to send your CTO to speak at a conference.

So if the savings in time to market/cost/whatever truly justified moving to AWS, does it matter that Amazon comes to town?

In other words, consider: if you did the analysis and saw the potential benefit but decided not to move to AWS due to the risk of feeding the beast, what happens when Amazon still enters your product space? You’re still gonna have to fight them, but you just gave up months or years of cost savings or product features or whatever other positive you identified that could’ve improved your position in the market.

>Through your business with AWS you are now funding a large, fierce, and direct competitor.

other than making you feel bad, is there any practical downside to this?

This is more or less Microsoft Azure's pitch.

It probably works the other way around. Amazon is incentivized to not compete with their customers because they’re already collecting rent on them thru AWS. Why drive your competitor out of business if they already pay you yearly fees?

And more directly to your point, Amazon presumably evaluates each market they enter separately. They have a big enough war chest to run at a loss forever, but they won’t do so because it’s not good business

Increased use of airplanes is one factor in why US greenhouse gas emissions grew last year after years of decline: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/1/11/1817711...

U.S. airlines != Amazon cargo. How do you propose Amazon ship their products? Rail?

Amazon is effectively just replacing UPS / FedEx. In the long run, the net result to society is the same whether UPS, FedEx or Amazon flies the plane (assuming every plane operates at the same capacity and have equal fuel efficiency). The pollution from these planes is a function of how much people shop online, not which company flies the plane.

How do you propose Amazon ship their products? Rail?

Amazon ships by rail already. I see Amazon Prime-branded trailers on flatbed rail cars tearing across the country all the time. And the number of Prime-branded tractor trailers I see on the highways between cities has grown exponentially in the last year or so.

Sure. Honestly, how much utility does 2 day shipping really have? Is it really enough to justify the increased emissions of flying a package across the country instead of using a more efficient method?

Of course that's not really Amazon's problem. We really need more reasonable taxes on fossil fuels that make it cost-prohibitive for Amazon to rely on air shipping.

> Honestly, how much utility does 2 day shipping really have?

Very much so. It's a big factor in enabling "we don't have to own a car at all, because we can get anything we need shipped to us". 2-day shipping is the slow case these days, and if it's in a local warehouse you can expect same-day or next-day. (And in some cities you can get 2-hour delivery of fresh items.)

If you're going to fairly compare the emissions involved in package delivery, you'd need to take increased car usage into account, among many other things.

You can also safely assume that the cost of air freight is amortized across a large number of packages. And in general, Amazon tries to predict what will be needed in advance, so that they can ship it to a local warehouse via slower methods. The planes are, effectively, for the case where they didn't anticipate demand and it's too expensive an item to keep that much distributed inventory of.

> Very much so. It's a big factor in enabling "we don't have to own a car at all, because we can get anything we need shipped to us". 2-day shipping is the slow case these days, and if it's in a local warehouse you can expect same-day or next-day. (And in some cities you can get 2-hour delivery of fresh items.)

Maybe, but my own experience is a counterexample. I'm a bike commuter who doesn't own a car, and I cancelled Prime because I found Prime's shipping to be unreliable at best. (Late deliveries, mostly.) If I need to order something I'll wait until I meet the minimum for free shipping or pay extra for shipping. Online shopping is the game changer, not Prime, as far as I'm concerned.

I have everything delivered to a locker that's 5 minutes away from me, and I work from home. Prime has been a big factor in me not driving 30 miles every time I need to buy a one-off part for some project I'm doing for work.

Since I started using Amazon it's gotten really hard for me to justify driving to a place like Fry's because they almost never have exactly what I need, and usually what they do have is hot garbage. The resellers on Amazon frequently stock exactly what I need at pretty good prices and I can usually get it same day or next day. And if I need a technical book or something I usually buy it off Amazon too because other than maybe the university library(10 miles away) there's nobody who stocks the kind of books I need to do my job.

Most of the stuff I get from Amazon I can probably get from Digikey or Mouser as well. I usually only order from Digikey when I need a very specific part. Amazon is where I order things like bulk LEDs, resistors, solderable breadboards, wire, and other consumables. And usually they have a great selection of tools as well.

> I cancelled Prime because I found Prime's shipping to be unreliable at best. (Late deliveries, mostly.)

I'm curious, are you located near one of Amazon's primary areas (namely, those areas where they offer Prime Now 2-hour delivery)? I get the distinct impression that the service quality is very different depending on if you're in such an area or not.

I live in Austin, which as far as I'm aware has Prime Now.

I've mainly had issues with getting deliveries to the apartments I've lived in. I'm not certain that the problem was Amazon. It could have been that the carriers thought they could get away with claiming I wasn't home when I was, etc. I recall once that UPS or FedEx told me that they didn't want to deliver to my address and I'd have to go to a location in north Austin to pick up my package. I eventually convinced them to do their job and deliver the package. Another time I got a note from USPS telling me to pick it up from a specific post office, which I tried to do, but it wasn't there and was actually out for delivery again then as far as I recall. I decided that I'm not going to play these games.

When I started getting delivery to my work address (which always has a person there to accept packages during business hours), the situation improved, but was not solved. Work doesn't like personal deliveries and this limits the size of items I can get.

I made it clear to Amazon that they need to improve the reliability of their carriers if they want me as a customer. Amazon's statistics suggest my experience is quite rare, though, assuming those numbers are true.

Once, I tried an Amazon locker, but the locker wouldn't open for me and I had to get a human to fetch the package. I would start to think that I'm on some internal Amazon shit list, but I later ordered a $100 electronic item from Amazon with Prime and it didn't come in on time (delivery to my work) so they refunded me fully. I think the problem for that package again wasn't Amazon's fault. I assumed the package was lost and wouldn't be coming in, but after about a week the package appeared. Amazon said keep it for free even though I was willing to pay again. That's nice of them, but I think I've lost more than $100 worth of my time trying to chase various packages over the years so I'm still at a loss as far as I'm concerned.

This wasn't the first time I had issues with Prime's delivery. When I lived in the DC metro area shortly after Prime started, Prime would us a local carrier called "LaserShip" that was so bad that I decided to cancel Prime so I could get a normal carrier instead. Prime was a downgrade as far as I'm concerned. Everything I've read about LaserShip online matches my experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserShip#Package_tossing_and_...

We really need more reasonable taxes on fossil fuels that make it cost-prohibitive

And more awareness among consumers - how often do we need same day/next day delivery? I bet not that often

It would be nice for consumers to support local businesses instead of always buying from mega corporations...

I'm well aware of the environmental costs of these decisions. For a while, I avoided online shopping, for a number of reasons. One day, a few years ago, I drove to four or five different stores in my city to try to find some specific hardware product, where physical fit was important. I did not find it. Then I searched online, and found an answered buyer question that made it clear that the thing would work for me. After this, my online shopping ramped up a lot. What's worse? 45 minutes of driving an old car, or .01% of the freight volume of an 18-wheeler over hundreds of miles?

No, awareness doesn't work. We need to stop pretending that combating climate change on an individual level is meaningful. It's a feelgood measure that will never move the needle. We must institute society-wide changes that systemically remove greenhouse gas creating activities from our lives whether we're aware of them or not.

Us rail freight is amazing. Have seen these low slung cars with two stacked containers. Wheels were at the ends.

That may have more to do with your proximity to a single (newer) warehouse than a true exponential increase. You’re either located somewhere their trucks pass or you aren’t.

Except that I've spent the majority of the last year traveling between cities in seven states.

The paint on the outside of a truck or rail car is not necessarily correlated with the owner or the contents. The livery can and sometimes is sold/transacted independently of the actual cargo.

Content, yes. But there are laws about ownership. That's why they have DOT registration marks on them.

I bet that's just bulk cargo for warehouses. It says "Amazon Prime" because they're also using the rail stock as adverts/billboards.

I propose Amazon and consumers pay for the environmental damage shipping these products using fossil fuels causes.

We actually have a system in place to do exactly this.

The EPA + Taxes (of various kinds) are how companies/individuals pay for environmental damage, and it's also how companies/individuals pay to protect the environment.

Cleanups use tax money, research into potential regulations to minimize impact uses tax money, etc.

So it's not some kind of outlandish idea, but at the moment the EPA is REALLY buddy/buddy with large companies so they're currently effectively neutered.

I think the parent post is talking about something more like a carbon tax, which we don’t have in place.

Good luck calculating that!

If you do, make sure to offset that with: (1) the reduction in retail space use for products, (2) the reduced amount of cars on the road, etc. etc.

If we added a carbon tax to the sale of gas (ideally paid depending on how efficient your car is, but that's a pipe dream), then we wouldn't have to consider the reduced amount of cars on the road because Amazon would save that much money by not paying it when they don't drive.

Not to mention, even after you somehow take into affect all of the various variables at play here, they can easily claim you miscalculated and just wave off the concerns "Oh Amazon is a Green Initiative Company™.... blah blah blah"

Look into carbon tax proposals if you’re interested in learning about it.

Have you never heard of a carbon tax?

> How do you propose Amazon ship their products? Rail?

That would be wonderful.

>> How do you propose Amazon ship their products? Rail?

> That would be wonderful.

Given the number of prime subscribers, most of the US disagrees with you. 2 day shipping is simply not going to happen on rail.

2 day shipping is cost effective to amazon when most goods are near the customer. 2 day shipping cross country is much different than driving the amazon truck to the nearest post office distribution center for local delivery. They need to get those goods that are most common to most of their warehouses.

> 2 day shipping is cost effective to amazon when most goods are near the customer.

This is true.

However, Amazon wants "2 day shipping" to be 2 day shipping, not probably 2 day shipping, which means they need to deal with the long tail of orders.

And for that, you need airplanes.

All of global aviation, passengers and freight, constitute around 2% of humanity's CO2 emissions. I know it's a great pincushion--who can avoid hating airlines?--but it's a staggeringly tiny contributor to climate change.

2% is not "staggeringly tiny". Also, the only source I can find for that is the airlines themselves: https://www.iata.org/pressroom/facts_figures/fact_sheets/Doc...

According to the IPCC, CO2 emissions are only 1/4-1/2 of aviation's impact on climate change. In 1999 they estimated the total impact as 3.5%, and projected out what will happen as aviation use increases, which it has.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...

According to literally the first thing I found on the Internet, the airlines take in about 1% of the world's GDP which doesn't sound like a great deal when they emit twice that much in CO2. However, I'm guessing the businesses they support that wouldn't exist otherwise easily make up the difference. I'd guess ~10% of the GDP (most international tourism, shipping, business meetings).

What are you basing that 10% estimate on?

One explanation: Trump coal.

Plus the conversion to natural gas has flattened out. Methane is 40% less carbon per BTU than coal. But it still creates considerable CO2.

I wonder if Amazon will offer any up any spare freight capacity on their planes? After all if they're not using they can always sell that capacity.

A logical eventual extension of https://freight.amazon.com/

That makes sense. I wonder how much a slot would cost compared to regular airfreight? I'm not even sure how much the regular Amazon freight service costs compared to regular truck freight.

According to recent news, Amazon freight is about 30% cheaper.

Southwest Airlines and United both offer freight services to the public, I'm sure most others do as well. United Freight in particular has a dedicated pet transport service. Other than pets, you just walk up to the freight counter, pay the clerk and your freight arrives at the freight counter other end. Greyhound and Amtrak offer these services as well to the public. I saw a family ship a refrigerator halfway across Colombia via bus back in 2014 for $10 under a passenger bus.

If they're offering it to the public, no reason not to offer it at a corporate rate.

Since they own the planes can they move stock around rather than packaged parcels, doing the boxing at the remote end?

If they could do this then they could pack so much more stuff on the planes than a commercial parcels company could.

I am scared at the scale that a single company can have nowadays. This is astounding!

This isn't much compared to the Korean chaebol - have you seen how much stuff Samsung really make?

You are right. Besides the obvious they do or used to do construction, construction equipment, movie and entertainment, digital agency, fabric, food, military weapons, insurance, amusement park.

lol, samsung is worth a third of what Amazon is worth. Apple could buy Samsung. Samsung is a big company, but Google, Microsoft, amazon, and Apple are in a whole different league

Stuff made, not market cap.

It depends on big and how you define it. For instance Samsung has getting on for three times as many employees as Apple. Plus they actually make stuff rather than just get some other company to do it for them.

The stock market values companies precisely because they don't have the liability of employees that make stuff. Personally I value companies that do.

In the past, single companies have undermined governments and had fleets of ships that would put the navy of large nations to shame, all to sell bananas.

There was a company in the past which, for all intents and purposes was the government of an entire subcontinent. The East India Company rule in India effectively began in 1757 and lasted until 1858.

In some ways companies are like little dictatorships that are super efficient with their "taxes" (income/profit) so it's not that hard to see how they could outgrow and outmaneuver an inefficient democracy.

Actually, I know of airlines that have way more than 70 planes!

Except, Amazon isn't an airline ..

Except, I was making a joke.

The internet is (usually and unfortunately), only text. There are no facial cues, hand gestures, etc. I, like I imagine a lot of people, can't easily detect sarcasm in text unless it's extremely over the top. And even then .. sometimes I have to wonder.

Sarcasm has to be the least effective way to communicate anyone could choose to use. You’re begging to be misunderstood and quoted as an idiot by using sarcasm these days.

You're right for online conversations or around people you don't know. Within friends groups or people that know you well (long-time coworkers) it's an effective tool, at least in my experience.

The hard part is not getting taken out of context by someone that overhears your conversations, so you should still exercise caution.

I'm surprised they're pushing this out so fast considering one of their planes crashed outside of Houston fairly recently.

Techies who dont have Prime and dont buy something every week, please raise your hands.

Five hours later: still waiting for first hand.

drove down from Palo Alto to San Diego up to LA yesterday and I passed so many amazon 18 wheelers. they were by far the most prevelent of a single "trucking company" that I saw (there were a handful of others that I saw more than one truck of, but must have seen at minimum 5-10 amazon trucks)

They're pretty much the new Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart also wants to be the new Amazon

https://wwd.com/business-news/financial/amazon-walmart-top-e...

Omega Co is expanding.

Bet they could get a great deal on lightly used 737-MAX planes available from these sellers. (insert Amazon Marketplace link :-))

Exactly what I was thinking. Similar to how FedEx built its fleet on retired DC-10 aircraft.

MAX doesn't have a freighter conversion program yet though.

Maybe that's how Boeing can salvage their program? We'll buy back all your 737MAXs at a loss, take a tax write-off, rebrand them as 7C-MAX, a brand new plane, with new pilots certification, rip out of the MCAS, and now we only lose a few hundred million instead of a LOT of hundreds of millions.

This is the company that famously turned doors into desks. [1]

1 https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/how-a-door-be...

Well, desks don't fly through the air at 500 mph with ~hundred tons of cargo aboard :/

Well, Steve Ballmer never worked at Amazon.

* Ducks, I'm going to take a karma hit for this

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