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Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

>It is unbelievable to me how little challenge Amazon has faced as all their competitors just quietly lie down and die.

The company best positioned to handle Amazon, Sears, was parted out and gutted by its chairman and CEO Eddie Lampert. Toys "R" Us had a working business model and were gutted by VC's. So I wouldn't say they were quietly laying down, they were actively raided for their accumulated wealth and this left them unable to compete.

Best Buy is probably best example of a company that figured out how to pivot and survive. They basically turned into consumer electronics consultants that tell people what to buy to solve their problem (at a gigantic markup). Amazon.com can't compete with that model as it's not built for the consumer that doesn't know what they want/need to solve a problem (or are afraid of knockoffs).

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There was recently an article on HN [0] that really opened my eyes to just how well Best Buy has done with that model.

This section in particular:

> Based on their feedback, Joly (the new CEO):

> - fixed broken systems, like an internal search engine that gave bad data about which products were in stock;

> - restored a beloved employee discount program; and

> - invested heavily into regular employee training.

I would bet money that fixing the search engine cost in the order of <$100Ks of engineer time and led to $1M+ in revenue. That's why the whole argument of "well, the profit margins are tiny so that's why retailers are dying" doesn't hold water with me. Just like every company there are critical systems that are obviously broken and are relatively easy to fix but are not correctly prioritized.

If they are prioritized, they tend to have ripple effects through the rest of the company.

0 - https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/amazon-almost-killed-best-...

best buy has also greatly improved their selection in inventory. about 10 years ago when i was building a pc the best buy store by me in NJ would only have a couple options for RAM, hard drive, gpu, and they would generally be no-name or low end brands marked up.

fast forward to this year and when one of my ram modules died, i was able to get the specific model i needed next day pickup in store, and their return policy is excellent. they also have basically been the exclusive seller of nvidia 3070/3080/3090's in the US. really impressed by their turnaround

I went to Best Buy several times and was in and out in several minutes. It improved a lot.

fixed broken systems, like an internal search engine that gave bad data about which products were in stock;

I doubt (with complete speculation) that this was just an engineering problem (ie, the tech was why the product inventory data was wrong).

Inventory management is the biggest competitive advantage retailers can have, and often when it's wrong and messy, a full rework is needed to implement best practices and change the operational processes of the business. The unsexy logistics part of the business is the real cash cow, once the demand question has been solved.

I'd be interested to learn more about what Best Buy did to rework their processes, but I doubt it will become public because operational improvements like this can be a real advantage over competitors.

I work with fast moving inventory. One big trick is easy, optimized handhelds. Any employee can quickly do shelf-count or tag strays which keeps the house-count tight. And simple means BPA workflow is very refined (eg: big iterate the UX six times in three mo on just one or two flows).

Optimizing where items are stored to facilitate ease of access while also not overwhelming an aisle is also key. fast moving merchandise can change across a year. besides the handhelds using light to indicate where an item is has benefits over some systems which rely on audio clues

>I'd be interested to learn more about what Best Buy did to rework their processes, but I doubt it will become public because operational improvements like this can be a real advantage over competitors.

It might be simpler than you think. I've noticed that Best Buy's product listings consistently offer more product information (weight, dimensions, model numbers, and especially UPC) than the counterparts at Amazon, Target, and Walmart. All searchable, too; Amazon has the data but a) as mentioned, doesn't always make it visible, and b) doesn't always make it searchable.

I would love someone knowledgeable to take examples like this (and counterexamples) and create some discourse on how to defend a company against private equity takeovers.

Private equity firms don’t buy companies that are doing well. So don’t fuck up and you’ll be fine.

I wouldn't be surprised if PE bros know some "fucking up" entry points that regular people don't, which leave even doing-well companies vulnerable.

The business model of PE is to buy distressed assets cheap. You can look at a company’s financials and determine if they are cheap. The magic pixie dust of PE is to look at those financials, the state of the company and the sector, and determine if it’s something that will possibly offer a return.

What most people fail to recognize is that when PE is in the picture, the company is already circling the drain. If it was a sure thing to fix, then the company wouldn’t be cheap. Generally speaking, PE doesn’t kill a company: Management did, but PE is the triage doc with bloody hands. They make for a nice comic book villain, but it comes down to “don’t fuck up”

There’s another class of PE activity, which is “my company is only mildly fucked but I can’t fix it while answering to shareholders.” So PE helps the owner go private to fix it. Examples are Dell and TIBCO. I don’t care enough about the latter to even look, but I think we can agree that Dell isn’t being stripped by PE bandits.

I read the article and it seems to be a PR piece. It’s sort of like when a company asks a reporter to come in and take a look. It then tells them all the things they did and that made a difference.

It’s an article glorifying the CEO. Fake. The real reasons for their success or failure is much deeper.

Search engine is definitely a critical factor in why I avoid using Amazon, and it's just as terrible now as it was 10 years ago!

It's also worth mentioning that Eddie Lampert's roomate in college was Steve Mnuchin, who he put on the board to assist in the looting of Sears'.

Both are currently being sued due to their role in the downfall of the company.

Toys "R" Us also made the mistake of crawling into bed with Amazon rather than build out their own website for a couple years and let Amazon harvest all the toy sales data and then decided not to renew the contract between the two.

To be fair, this worked out for some companies (Target.com was originally Amazon run)

To be even fairer, it's not helping them in the COVID-19 era.

In my region, Target is dead last in maintaining inventory and their supply chain. I have given up on them completely for paper products, as they never had any for months and months and...I'm not even sure if they've ever gotten any by this point.

It's been a real eye-opener about the Goliaths among us, that however Target is organized, operationally, there's something about them that has absolutely failed over the past 9 months. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, but Walmart is their main competition and they've become, regrettably, my go-to for household supplies. Because they have some.

Apologies if this is irrelevant, I've been champing to spell out this rant for a long time.

Huh, is that why target.com is so bad? I can’t think of any other e-commerce site that will tell you that, sorry, you can’t order those two items in the same transaction because they use incompatible fulfillment systems.

The target.com partnership ended more than 9 years ago. That being said, the replacement for Amazon fulfillment seems to be a laundry list of older companies;

> Prior to the announcement, Target and Amazon had extended their partnership until 2011.[41] In January 2010, Target announced their vendor partners for the re-platforming project. These partners include Sapient, IBM, Oracle, Endeca, Autonomy, Sterling Commerce and Huge, among others.

Best Buy has become my go-to retailer for electronics and even some appliances. Just tonight I picked up an open-box samsung galaxy tablet from the store down the street from me. Discounted by nearly half, in like-new condition, and if there's anything wrong with it I can return it back to the store, instead of having to ship it back to an online retailer.

I have likewise been impressed with the blue-shirts in the stores. They seem generally on par with Microcenter employees nowadays, with more than enough technical knowledge to help me make buying decisions.

It’s nitpicking but retailers like Toys ‘r US got killed by PE, not VC.

The VC model is invest in a ton of growth companies in the hope of getting a 100X winner.

The PE model is to buy stable cash flows using mostly debt. That works until the cash flows aren’t stable any more. That’s why so many PE funded retailers are going under.

Service Merchandise was also a (regional) giant that would have been very well positioned to compete with Amazon (their model was already warehouse-focused with "showrooms" ala the Ikea model, just somewhat more electronics/toys/consumer goods than furniture focused), but it too was raided and gutted (just before Sears and in some ways the test bed for what eventually happened to Sears).

I would have thought Walmart was the company best positioned to handle Amazon. They already had stores and warehouses throughout the country. I would think they could have leveraged and expanded what they already had. Instead they have been very late to the game and don't seem to be trying very hard to compete.

I know what I want and avoid Amazon like the plague for important electronics - Best Buy is where I head as I trust em

Back 20 years ago I was working on a product that went into consumer electronics. The big deal back then was product development, including the first big prototype runs, had to be done before September and really beginning of August. The reason is that's when the buyers evaluated products and distributors then placed orders.

Amazon doesn't have buyers. Which worked out okay because they were under cutting the products the brick mortar stores buyers vetted. Except now 30-90% of the stuff on Amazon is crap. That's an opportunity for Best Buy.

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