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Comment by archeantus | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always looked at the Jet deal as $3b to get their CEO Marc Lore to get in there and fix their e-commerce operations. If you look at the online sales performance since Lore joined, as well as the stock price (it has more than doubled), I think $3b was a good deal.

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At the time of the takeover, Jet was doing pretty innovative tech while walmart had a very terrible ecommerce offering. Jet used to have this thing where they would offer you live-calculated discounts on items that were in the same FC as items already in your cart since those items would cost them less to ship. It was kinda gimmicky, but it sure was a cool tech demo. I strongly believe that Jet was a longer-term acquihire, and this kinda confirms that.

Aside: Jet's HQ is in my hometown. I considered interviewing there after a coworker went there, but being bought by walmart really soured me on it. Stodgy company that strongly discourages things like alcohol in the office. Fine, I don't need to drink at work, but weird. I hope they're able to transfer Jet's good tech branding and hiring pipeline to "walmart labs" or whatever they're rebranding jet's org as.

Silly thing to pick on. I like a drink with co-workers, but totally understandable not to at work, especially as a lot of their workers definitely couldn't because it'd be dangerous.

Or do you think it should be one rule for the richly paid programmers, and another for the low paid warehouse workers?

I’ve read that it’s common in Germany to drink a liter of beer or so at work, even in manufacturing.

Besides the drinking thing one of my friends said they were trying to ban swearing as well?

Ya. Walmart is a very “middle American values” company. Fine, but just unpleasant if you’re not used to it.

It’s like companies requiring a tie. Fine. A tie is easy to put on. But if you’re requiring that all of a sudden what other rules do I have to worry about being added? I guarantee you random tech company X would see attrition if they enacted a business-casual dress-code. Same with booze.

Booze is different. Booze is a drug that makes people do silly things.

You can almost guarantee that before they brought in this rule, some guy groped a girl while drunk after drinking at the office. That's the size they're at.

There's a world of legal difference when that happens under your roof, or after work.

This is skewing off-topic, but prohibiting alcohol is not going to stop people from drinking it, nor is it going to stop people from doing silly/gropy things at the office. A ban only conveys contempt and mistrust of employees. Focus on toxic culture that makes people feel like they need to drink or are entitled to grope.

That timing coincided with two pretty big unrelated things. Walmart had been rebuilding their backend systems on this monolithic system called Pangaea that was several years late and drained most of the resources of the engineering org during that period. They finally started emerging from the hole around the end of 2016 and could actually focus on the customer and building the business.

Walmart Grocery had just started taking off. By 2017 it had become a 10 figure business- and by some analysis it was concluded that online grocery sales only eat away at in-store grocery sales by a tiny amount, so this was wholly attributed to e-commerce.

And then there was the direct bolt-on of Jet's revenue streams into the e-commerce results of Walmart as a whole, as well as a lot of other acquisitions. I am not saying Lore didn't have a hand in their growth, but the stage was set well for him.

came on here to see when someone would catch this

Marc Lore was doing a great job with Diapers.com but ran out of money and had to sell to Amazon

that must have been a painful 2 years working for the guys who beat you

now WalMart has him and if they give him the right resources he is going to make a big dent in the whole 'Amazon is going to take over all of retail' narrative

He alone is worth far more than $3 billion

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