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Comment by disown | Hacker News Reader

How can walmart compete without the ecosystem tie-in that amazon prime has? Amazon prime has movies, music, twitch, etc. What does walmart plus offer?

It's incredible that amazon's market cap is now 4X walmart's. Amazon is well on its way to becoming the 2nd 2 trillion dollar company after Apple. Bezos and his ex-wife's shares are now worth $260 billion. Bezos is the world's wealthiest person and his wife is the world's wealthiest woman. Of course it's mostly all on paper at the moment, but the run the big tech companies had in the past 5 years is breathtaking. Is it substantive or a gigantic bubble?

What's interesting is that it took AAPL and AMZN decades to become a trillion dollar company. It took AAPL a few months to add another trillion to their market cap. AMZN is on track to do the same.

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How much gravity does their ecosystem really have? I know some people clearly use it, but anecdotally, most people I know bought prime for the shipping.

It's all anecdotal on my end to, but video seems to be the biggest sticking point in my circle of people. I don't really keep Prime for free shipping, especially when you can still get free shipping on $25+ orders, and their performance during covid has made it even less appealing.

I keep Prime for Video mostly (kids titles), but We use the free Prime music (not unlimited) quite a bit.

I recently discovered Prime books with kids titles which end up being convenient for car rides or times when carrying many books is inconvenient, but libraries have plenty of assortment for kids ebooks these days so that's not really a selling point.

Amazon movies and music are junk. You can use twitch without prime. Photo storage is probably good but I dont trust them enough to spend the effort. I'm regularly surprised how many people pay the Amazon Prime tax. Its easy to live without.

I mean $100/yr to get faster shipping and not have to batch orders in groups of $25 for an entire household is pretty okay value.

I don't listen to music but Amazon Prime video is not junk. They make high quality tv shows and have good international content. It's comparable to Netflix.

We must somehow have completely different Amazon Prime video services because the one I have only has 1 or 2 ok original programming shows and a limited selection of mostly at best B tier movies.

> We must somehow have completely different Amazon Prime video services

Or different tastes.

Hey I like B grade movies, but most of the ones on Prime dont make that cut. :)

The service I have has a couple highly enjoyable original series, a pile of random stuff arguably worth watching, and an unfathomably endless tail of truly surprising garbage.

I don't think they can compete on ecosystem. However they can win on not having a problem with fakes and actually handling all of the orders themselves instead of being a marketplace for third party sellers.

I hate to disappoint but Walmart.com has the same 3rd party seller problem.

Walmart+ only applies to in store items as far as I can tell.

If I want to buy items where the origin or authenticity doesn't matter and pay rock bottom prices, I can go to eBay which makes no pretense about what they have to offer.

Amazon continues to pay lip service to the fakes problem but it's a major reason I only buy items there when there aren't other good options now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...

Walmart is a behemoth. Also Walmart has the advantage of local stores to deal with returns etc

That's a pretty weak advantage. My closest walmart is much further than my local ups/usps/amazon drop off. Also, don't forget that Amazon grew 30-40% last quarter y/y.

walmart is the only retailer in some areas

I'm lucky to live near one of those Amazon locker stores and the process has been pretty good. Just show up with the item, print out your return label at the koisk, put it into one of their bags, and drop it in the slot. Very little hassle.

I don't really use movies, music, or twitch, yet I've been on this site for a long time. Amazon's prime movie/TV content hasn't ever been anything that I've felt the need to click on. I've enjoyed the shipping and the ease of purchases.

I'll most likely switch.

> Is it substantive or a gigantic bubble?

It's both IMO. The whole market is in a giant bubble due to various fiscal policies and decisions, but the big tech companies have substantive/reasonably solid businesses within the bubble.

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