Similarly, Amazon is succeeding because it is genuinely a much better experience than going into a store. You order things, they show up at your door. If there is a problem Amazon refunds your money.
If the government should do anything its invest in a same-day/next-day shipping infrastructure that can be used by any business (say, via the post office or maybe a new package logistics agency).
(I like your idea about USPS parcel service though :))
I see this all over HN, news articles, and reddit ... yet I've never experienced it. Nor has anyone in friend/family circle. I don't doubt it happens, but it makes me wonder what kind of purchase bubble I'm in that prevents such an observance. Is this more prevalent with certain types of goods?
That being said, there is a lot of stuff on amazon I'm honestly surprised is worth the space it takes up in their warehouses. And I have knowingly bought some low-quality stuff on amazon. But perhaps with the critical caveat of knowingly, I have yet to have a counterfeit foisted upon me.
Fires from bootleg phone chargers and the like. (Google for "phone charger fire" to see how often this happens.)
Explosions from bootleg batteries.
Sickness from bootleg water filters and food.
What if you bought CO/ALR receptacles to bring a home with Aluminum wiring up to code, but the terminals weren't made from Indium?
What if you bought a marine battery for your sump pump backup, but it failed to perform and/or failed to notify you of its impending death?
I can continue from here, but I think you get the point.
I live in a city that is stereotyped with rusting factories and falling down houses. We don't really have a petty theft problem because there's still political will to not tolerate petty theft. The police resources to proactively go after it don't really exist but they come if called. The thieves here are really clumsy and tend to break ribs and get black eyes slipping on ice in June or falling down one stair so that tends to dissuade people from making a regular income stream out of it so you're just left with opportunistic theft. When the police do happen to catch a thief they prosecute.
Yeah, it sucks that you may have to go through this process one or more times, but at least it's there.
Trend for half a decade has been to push private companies to fill the gaps and why the rise of DHL etc a few decades back. For any goverment to go against that grain would be a very expensive nightmare, even without the social and buisness politics.
Besides, if any western goverment had a service that good, the push to break it up would be emence and that's even presuming that such a service could be run cost effective to make it appealing.
I'm struggling to think of any country that has anything comparable and drawing a blank. Though mindful that the costs of shipping from china, sure do seem to be a huge factor in helping buisness's operate there. I've had items that have shipped from China to the UK at a price in which would just cover the packaging and to ship the same item using the UK postal service, just across the road would of cost me more than the item and postage.
In many ways Amazon do open their services to others, though to do that you have to operate from their sales store and as we have seen with mobile app stores - you can drag things on for ages, even with blatant issues.
This isn't about quality. It's about competition.
When Walmart or Amazon is an effective monopoly, even in a given region, they have massively outsized power to affect the way things are done there.
It doesn't matter if you're the best retailer in the world; that doesn't mean we, as a society do or should give you license to take over from every other retailer.
We're already halfway there.
Where I lived until recently, Amazon rented/contracted to use USPS trucks for last mile deliveries after Postal Service hours.
It was always amusing to see one of those little USPS trucklings roll up to my house, stuffed with Amazon packages, late at night, on a Sunday, or on a Postal Service holiday.
I search in vain a memory of mom and pop store, where I did not have to spend inordinate amount of time to resolve any issue.
Amazon was successful, because it filled a need that Bezos noticed that it could be better.
Heed my words. Aliexpress was faster, more pleasant experience back in 2010 than it is now, both as a website, and a service.
A lot of their features were copied almost 1-to-1 by Amazon, just for them to later be deleted on Aliexpress.
Most famous, being the inventoryless fulfilment (vs. inventory carrying fulfilment used at the time by Amazon.) They dropped it around 2013-2014 in most markets, and Amazons started rolling it out at around 2015.
I notice that everyone puts all product details in the title of their product because the filters are next to useless. It's like going into a supermarket where all of the products are now on one giant shelf and you have to manually search through the entire shelf because the store doesn't put any effort into putting them into effective aisles, or mandate that the sellers put them in the appropriate aisle.
I'd rather see more competition here, not government-subsidized systematic elimination of all competition.
That said, in my area usps is great, but FedEx not so much.
Sort of. People just shopped differently in those days. If your local stores didn't have what you wanted, you ordered from a catalog.
But the difference is that today, people don't bother checking their local stores first. They just go straight to Amazon and put their neighbors or of business.
Walmart was the pioneer of long term hassle free returns
Not really. High end department stores were doing it for generations. Six months later and no receipt? No problem. My mom used to do this all the time.
Walmart just brought it to the masses.
People aren't obligated to shop anywhere, and it isn't their fault if their neighbours' businesses aren't viable. You can't say the customers who have nothing to do with your business and no desire to go there are the ones who 'put you out of business'.
Amazon didn't become dominant because of their low prices. They became dominant because they are the everything store. It's a single place to buy disparate items rather than needing to check out at seven different marginally-cheaper speciality shops.
Buying from Amazon just shunts money to Seattle. Not everyone lives in Seattle.
In the Earnings Call in July of this year, they said they now employe 950,000 warehouse workers. They're probably over the 1 MM mark right now due to the holidays. Yes, there are plenty of people working there that are overqualified, but that is the beauty of what Amazon is doing. Their onboarding and recruiting for this is incredibly smooth, fast, and will give virtually everyone a chance. And it pays above minimum wage. There's not many places that provide that sort of service in the United States.
> According to data analysed by the Times, Amazon was losing “about 3% of its hourly associates each week”, translating to an annual employee turnover of roughly 150% per year.
They already re-employ people who had previously left. Eventually they’ll run out of people willing to take the jobs if they just focus on on-boarding efficiency rather than working conditions people don’t hate.
I know guys that driver Uber/Lyft and do delivery and work at Amazon occasionally for extra money. So long as you remain in good standing they will hire you back quickly with the mutual understanding you’re just doing a quick thing.
That said, the idea that countries/government perpetually need companies to invest and "make jobs" is ridiculous rhetoric. It describes China in the 80s, or Russia in the 90s.
PR
It’s a feature not a bug to have overqualified people working in warehouses because the economy is trash?
But the economy isn't trash - unemployment has plummeted and is now back to 2018 levels, which were already historic lows. Income is up. It's an employee's market.
Clearly there are two economies, one reported one where everything is great and the other one where overqualified people work in warehouses?
Conversely, the "that's a market" folks should deep read the article's last bit on how hard it is to be an "Anti Amazon Alliance" e-tailer. Amazon is piling up previously uncorrelated strategic advantages, so that you have to be an expert in way too many things for a small company to compete.
- demand sourcing
- warehousing
- last mile logistics
- defect management
- now, freight forwarding
I think their innovation in these areas is amazing and will some day benefit everyone, but it will eventually take a new type of antitrust (which recognizes cross-leveraging monopolies for efficiency) to keep Amazon from retaining all of the value generated.
Except isn't there a gigantic loophole related to, uhhh, lots of "Amazon" workers actually being employed by subcontractors rather than by Amazon.com Inc., to whom this minimum does not apply?
I'm not saying that the labor market is cartel-free, but Amazon is legit a step up from Walmart (at 65+ P/E they can afford to be).
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-18-dollars-hour-starting...
Similar (albeit only somewhat) to British Telecom being forced to firewall its telecoms infrastructure from its directly-sold telecoms services a long time back, which was a huge improvement for (among other things) competition in the UK DSL market.
This however may well be the case.
I will take that American business is very pampered, living off very protected business environment, and world's richest consumers. It's hard to not to make money here.
At the end of that process, you have a situation where:
* Amazon wins
* The consumer wins (they get the product they wanted all along, at the best possible price, with the best possible shipping)
* The original Amazon retailer semi-wins (they got a "free" burst of profit for 6 ~ 24 months before they had to switch categories when Amazon stole their category)
* The original non-Amazon retailer loses (they got outcompeted by a giant of scale, possibly overall losing money)
On the inevitable "day 1", Amazon will start coasting on its structural dominance and being net-extractive from consumers and platform participants. At that point they will be ripe for disruption themselves... but if their dominance has eroded previously healthy markets (for demand acquisition, warehousing, last mile logistics, etc.), they might spend longer in senescence than they did improving things. That's why I think antitrust is a good tool, that should eventually be applied to catalyze fresh growth.
There is really nothing innovative about Amazon, really nothing. It's a web hosting company, and a huge internet shop. That's all to it.
But one definition of innovation is:
> make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.
Focussing on the eComm side:
Amazon made and continues to make changes in how people find stuff, pay for stuff, and get stuff. Even something as seemingly simple as Amazon Prime for free+fast shipping. Or keeping a credit card on file and jumping straight to "checkout complete" first, and letting the user modify shipping/billing details for a while after the order is "complete".
None of it was invented at Amazon and all of it is trivial to implement on a small or perhaps medium scale.
Amazon's innovation is implementing Amazon.
So assume Amazon gets ‘taken care’ of magically - what’s the solution for the bigger problem here?
Unless we go back to a world of strong nationalistic sentiment where customers are willing to put their money towards’Made in USA’ - I don’t know how this gets solved. Bezos famously said ‘nobody wants to pay more for a thing’ (paraphrase).
Whatever the solution ends up being, it won't involve the return of brick and mortar - online shopping and Amazon style logistics are here to stay. Breaking up Amazon so that the shipping and warehouse part of the business gets spun off on its own might make sense, with established shipping companies able to compete.
Luddism never works - you can't eliminate automation and do things less efficiently just to arbitrarily provide work for people.
This isn't just about automation. It's also about vertical integration into one company. If all we care about is efficiency then why break up the railroad barons or company towns?
Because competition, despite some inefficiencies, makes for a more robust market. Also, we don't want our kids working in the mines.
Bailouts from taxpayers aren't a sign of robustness either. They are a sign of fragile, easily bought government and large players dominating markets.
From another stratecherry post:
> if an efficient market means that all of the profits flow to Silicon Valley, why should India particularly care about efficiency
https://stratechery.com/2020/india-jio-and-the-four-internet...
If it was just big box stores, we could have eventually pulled back and imposed a balance by limiting what range of goods and services could be offered by any one store, or come up with ways to prop up mom and pop. Amazon made those old models irrecoverably obsolete though. The question is going to be how to achieve a healthy market while keeping the benefits of vertical integration. Splitting the logistics division of Amazon away from the online store and content services might work.
But, you know, it sort of proves in an interesting point. Market/Technical/Cultural forces will push things one direction, but groups can choose to pay the higher costs to go in alternate directions.
It will be interesting to see where cultural sub-groups maintain either existing (but now niche) or otherwise alternative vestiges of the current-mainstream when the rest of the economy moves onto something else.
Are bookshops like this? A legacy of the pre-online/pre-megaseller era, but maintained by the bookish minority? Now potentially augmented by a coffee/tea shop and a greater focus on community events? Where else is this happening?
In short, if a series of actions doesn’t raise retail prices, it’s fine. Walmart beat the drum of “Made in the USA” and “Low Prices” until it didn’t matter anymore. Amazon arose during the era of impotent regulators, and just had to rope a dope Wall Street that it would someday somehow turn massive capital investment into cash.
Despite the economic engine unleashed by anti-trust actions like the breakup of AT&T and to a lesser extent standard oil, we probably won’t see significant changes for 30 years or more when demographic shifts and the cohorts of judges, etc running the show now fade away.
That being said, the SEC and FTC need to start doing their jobs. They have failed us in the 21st century. We need to rollback all these mega-mergers and stop allowing them to move forward, not just in tech but also in banks and media.
The government got weaker, and they got stronger. It's not even a fair fight.
(Which is literally a thing that has already happened, by the way - the East India Company being the classic example. It was simply called "The Company", had its own flag and military, and completely ruled India.)
One intended effect of Amazon’s PR strategy is to create a sense of momentum about their business. Obviously that is working if people are comparing it to the East India company.
Amazon indeed has a much smaller share than the East India Company had, but I think you may have exaggerated a bit with "at least 2 orders of magnitude". It should have been "at least an order of magnitude".
• 2019 global trade was $19.0 trillion [1]
• 2019 US retail was $4.85 trillion [2].
• Amazon 2019 US retail was $0.22 trillion [3].
• Amazon 2019 global retail was $0.35 trillion [4].
I'm using 2019 because the US retail Amazon data at Statista.com [3] requires an account to view the graph but the visible text on the page includes the 2019 numbers.
That puts half of global trade at 43.2x Amazon US retail (1.6 orders of magnitude) and 27x Amazon total global retail (1.4 orders of magnitude).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264682/worldwide-export-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/443495/total-us-retail-s...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104897/usa-amazon-retai...
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103390/amazon-retail-ec...
The landscape has changed but small businesses are still selling stuff. There are over 1.9 million small and medium sized business which use the amazon marketplace.
Mom and pop stores are now mom and pop sellers with amazon taking a cut. They make less money but don't have to pay rent for a commercial property.
Amazon is big but its certainly not an unprecedented level of horizontal domination. There's still walmart, ebay, alibaba, shopify...unless you're only looking at book sales.
Vertical integration wise it's trying to go there with its foray into business shipping + whole foods/amazon basics etc but seeing as its not close to dominant in terms of producing goods in any sector that I know of it's not inherently problematic.
Obviously things are different and worse in some respects (and better in others), but comparing it to the East India Company is very over the top at this point.
Keeping prices low is not necessarily so good, and can even be bad, when you consider it from the many other roles you play as a human being in a complex modern society.
“A new survey says Americans have more confidence in Amazon than they do the government or the press.”
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/25/18022956/amazon-tru...
That doesn't necessarily mean everyone loves them, being trustworthy is only one aspect of likability. You can like the results and communication without approving of the means.
As long as most people are OK with Amazon, there will not be much public demand for government to make new policy to constrain them.
Policymaking is the key process because it’s not illegal in the U.S. to outcompete other companies, regardless of how big or small they are.
The question is, "at what cost in the intervening time?"
We've also not seen the combination of scale, network effects and technological capability that's available to companies like Amazon today, making monopoly power even more potent. It's not 100% clear that the potential for their displacement is remotely as viable as has historically been the case for companies.
Either way, though, the problematic piece (and primary rationale for antitrust law) is that it's the consumers who are bearing the cost.
Who is competing against Amazon or Walmart now?
The fact that you can plug Walmart/Sears/IBM/etc into it means there was something others were able to outcompete them on with even though the incumbent had scale.
For example, right now, I source my items from Costco/Target/Best Buy/Home Depot/Lowes/Staples/Winco (grocery store), Trader Joe’s, and I make minimal use of Walmart and even less of Amazon.
Also, look at it from the perspective of a small business. If you want to sell things online you're at a competitive disadvantage by not selling on Amazon. There are a number of companies that have cited this frustration. When you do sell on Amazon you're giving up some sales data which Amazon can then use to decide to undercut your product with their basics line, which very possibly comes from the same Chinese manufacturers at lower Amazon-negotiated prices.
Small businesses are also at a competitive disadvantage by not having the prime corner spot in downtown.
It just means you have to compete by selling something else that people want. If you want to play in the 2% profit margin cheap goods market, then you probably will not have a good time competing against others who have already optimized it.
Amazon has cornered the cheap goods online market (i.e. a more comfortable version of AliExpress). So do not compete with them on that if you want to earn more. If I am looking for something of decent quality, and you can figure out how to source it and guarantee that quality, then people will buy directly from your website (I do). Or Costco or Best Buy or another retailer will want to pick it up.
Oxo is another good example. They were able to expand their marketshare because they saw a market where people wanted to spend more to be assured of a higher quality good. Walmart was and still is selling the same stuff under the Mainstays brand, yet Oxo has grown because they correctly predicted that people would be willing to spend x% more for y% higher quality (or perception of quality).
To me it seems like this amount of commerce concentration can exaggerate existing economic disparities.
Anyway, I hope you're right and it works out well for everyone!
Amazon is a website, the cost of visiting a different website is pretty much zero.
The cost of not being on Amazon increases as Amazon's size increases. Is there a point where that becomes unfair?
In my opinion, not yet in the case of Amazon. As I listed, they numerous competitors, and one hardly needs Amazon to obtain their goods. It is trivial to throw up a non Amazon retail website.
At least I can think of many more businesses where consumers do not have an option and extremely high switching costs that need to be dealt with first. Such as a home’s wired internet service provider. That is an unfair advantage that needs the government.
I would say the iOS/Android duopoly is another big one.
The inconvenience of needing to go to a different website (which already exist) is not.
And to be fair: though Amazon seems unstoppable now, so did Microsoft, IBM, Sears, GM, Kodak, and many others.
I personally hate for secondary political reasons but people need to stop looking at retail through rose tinted glasses. It's always sucked on average. Now it just sucks homogeneously.
It's still working, in the global south, to make products shipped and sold all around the global north... but those of us in the north just don't see it; we no longer see children shuffling off to work, because, thanks to Capitalism's profit-over-people ideals, the labor force that has "disgusted" the consumers in the north (child labor) (and therefore properly threatened the profit of those companies using child labor) has been moved to the south... and those consumers in the north don't really "care" that a bunch of brown and asian children are doing the work now.
It is indeed efficient—all too efficient.
And those now unemployed losers? Haha, fuck'em!
oh and google too.
I'm 100% agreeing with you though.
Yeah. That's called capitalism. No limits on the amount of capital and what the capital owner can do with it.