Here [0] is a random street i picked in Paris with mixed use buildings - looks pretty nice tbh-lots of accommodation & amenities, easily walkable, some shops and restaurants.
[0] 61 rue de Passy https://maps.app.goo.gl/14Kxyd9SwARyT79s8
1. Straighten out that street
2. Repave those cobbles
3. Add green lane bike path
4. Parking meters
5. ...
I don't think it inconveniences anyone.
Those stores get stocked somehow- usually not by semis.
Surely you don’t actually believe the lack of a difference?
The more delivery productivity you stack on top of this infrastructure, the bigger the impact from an unforeseen issue... and humans can introduce a lot of unforeseen issues.
Amazon can't build apartment complexes on top of their warehouses because many of their warehouses are already 3 or 4 floors, and the obvious zoning issues of building complexes in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of other warehouses.
That does seem true for most sci-fi stories!
I would think the dystopian aspect is lack of entry for smaller businesses to reach those potential customers
missedthecue: Snooze
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Frighteningly they have almost 1 million employees in the US, which is more than the population of a handful of states.
Most likely, it'd be considered a "fringe benefit" and the employee would still have W2 / income taxes and withholdings on it. How municipalities would tax the property value depends entirely on how they choose to tax on-site housing (as it is technically both commercial and residential space).
Maintenance on the buildings would likely be partially deductible as operating expenses, no different than any other building operated by a landlord or business.
* The housing is provided on the property owned by the business or employer. * The housing is provided for the convenience of the employer. * The employee must accept housing as a condition of employment.
Intended more for folks like on-call firefighters living in a firehouse or a park ranger who is required to live in a cabin in a park or nanny's staying with their family. I could see some situations amazon might have an argument to make - they could probably do micro-units or shared housing / dorm style housing for workers and save massively on labor costs especially in high cost urban areas where folks would otherwise never be able to afford a place.
I wonder if this is the case in US also, or maybe just my individual experience. It is very hard for me to get how a company so successful has such a crappy flagship product.
It's replaced the department store, and usually has better service / return policy than a department store (Target etc.).
Costco might be the exception but generally I don't go to costco to search for a specific product. They either have some general version of a product, and if I'm willing to buy that I will; swim goggles for example. Perhaps I want TYR swim goggles. Costco will have better pricing on Speedo goggles but won't sell the TYR mirrored version I'm looking for. Click, bought on amazon, arrives next day.
If you're trying to discover new products of unknown quality and reputation, then it's not so good. For whatever reason, that seems to be the use case people focus on when criticizing Amazon on Hacker News, but I don't see how that can possibly be the dominant use case. Most of what people ever buy is not something brand new to them that they know nothing about.
I'm looking through my last several months of purchases here, and I'm seeing a bunch of automotive cleaning fluids, mostly from Adam's, polishing compounds and a respirator from 3M, a bunch of power tools from DeWalt, a Bose speaker. Known brands from reputable sellers, every item what I wanted and it got here quickly. In some cases, I either tried to or had to purchase elsewhere. For instance, Amazon had most of the DeWalt power tools I wanted, but was out of stock on rotary polishers, so I had to get it from some place called Acme Tools, and it took a week and a half. Amazon got me everything the next day. (I had a bunch of stuff stolen from my garage is why I needed all this at around the same time.) I tried to purchase the Bose speaker from Best Buy since I have one a five minute drive from me, and their website claimed it was in stock and I could pick it up the same day, but then right before the pick up window, they texted me to inform me they didn't actually have it and wouldn't for another week. So I canceled the order, went on Amazon, and they had free same day delivery.
It should be obvious that anything that goes from not existing 25 years ago to top five market cap company in the world is probably offering value somehow.
That is very true, I think probably from the outside looking in it was hard to see what value they were offering. But from the responses here I think I got a better picture of what people get out of it that makes it the best choice for them most of the time.
First of all, HN is full of entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs. A storefront that can't sell anything that doesn't have a good reputation outside the storefront is bad for small businesses, because nobody is willing to try anything new. A major part of the value proposition of a storefront is that the owners will vet the products they sell for a minimum standard of quality: it's not necessarily great, because greatness is subjective, but the food shouldn't poison you[1] and the AC/DC power converters shouldn't catch fire.
The second problem is that sellers will pass off counterfeit goods as being from major manufacturers when they aren't. I know I'm falling for selection bias, since I've probably bought counterfeit goods without knowing it, but that's not even really the point. The point is that I've bought stuff on Amazon that just didn't work, sold in packaging that's identical to stuff I've bought before that did work. I knew they were counterfeit and not just duds because the actual product didn't have the branding on it that genuine ones always have.
[1]: Well, okay, it might poison you if you have a special allergy. But anything with the common allergens like gluten or lactose will have labels.
Also, their returns process is painless. I thought I’d support local workers and had been shopping at Hobby Lobby instead of using Amazon. For my trouble, when I tried to return an airbrush that didn’t suit my needs (I used it once) they treated me like a criminal, it was a whole production.
With Amazon I just head to the Whole Foods down the street (or Kohls sometimes?), return it, and get credited almost instantly.
I do think Walmart is putting a lot of effort into their online offerings and if you can return online purchases in store that’d be a huge win. We bought my wife’s MacBook Air off Walmart’s online store and it was super convenient.
I had the same experience. I ordered a $70 worth of cleaning supplies directly from the manufacturer, thinking I'd support the brand and cut out the middle man. My package was stolen (box opened and left right there) so we contacted the seller and told them the situation and they said they can't do anything about it, even with a police report. Amazon would have refunded it immediately. Half the time when I return something they even let me keep the item and donate it rather than dealing with the return.
I want to support smaller online retailers but not so bad that I'm okay with getting ripped off with no recourse every once in a while.
Where does the money to pay for your stolen cleaning supplies come from? Why would you even think to contact the manufacturer about this? Why not the shipping company? Or your building's management? I've fumbled a soda and broken it on the ground right after checking out and the grocer replaced it for free, but I recognized this as a generous act of kindness and not an expected baseline of customer service. I've also lost a soda in the parking lot and I can't even imagine feeling entitled enough to go back into the store to complain about it.
Typically, the recipient can't make a claim with a shipping company as they're not the customer, only the shipper (seller) can
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,....
I have deliberately purchased non-name brand products, and sometimes I have received defective products, as one would shopping anywhere, but even then Amazon's customer services and return process is second to none. It shocks me that everyone on HN and other popular forums has very little success buying on Amazon.
I have received 5+ fake products and stopped ordering on Amazon a few years ago. Not worth it, too much risk. Would never, ever, order food from there, or anything you put on your body, or anything electronic, etc. Way too risky.
I don’t care how easy Amazon’s returns are, it’s not worth the hassle of not having the item let alone doing anything above and beyond that.
I've had a defect rate of less than 1% percent with a sample size of enough items to reduce the margin of error on that statistic to something rather negligible.
To get your configuration you need to have two items that aren't defective and five items that are.
P(!defect)^2P(defect)^5 = 0.99^20.01^5 = 9.801e-11
There are seven choose five ways you could have a particular configuration where you have five defects out of seven purchases.
7 Choose 5 = 21
So therefore the probability of what happened to you happening to me would seem to be:
9.801e-11 * 21 = 2.05821e-9
This written out in numbers is: 0.00000000205821 That number as a percentage is: 00.000000205821% For comparison the probability of being struck by lighting over the course of a person's life is 1-in-15,300 which is 0.00006535947. Many people struggle with reading really small numbers like that and so we often decide to round. If we do that the probability of what happened to you happening to me is roughly 0% if we choose to round at six decimal places. Seconding the OP claim that the general experience is shocking, because it is extremely divergent. It would be more shocking to be hearing everyone on Hacker News was regularly being hit by lightning bolts than that people are getting your defect rate.
That calculation assumes these probabilities are independent when they aren’t. What was ordered, when it was ordered, and where it’s being shipped to are all likely to impact the odds. On top of that are ability to detect fakes and defective items are likely to be different.
Having said that, I have been hit by lighting. Or at least it stuck the car I was in and I felt some effects. I didn’t report it anywhere that records such strikes, which suggests non serious lightning strikes may be underestimated in those statistics.
given the wildly diverging experiences people report, this is my assumption also. at least to my knowledge, I've never received a counterfeit item from amazon, but there are also certain things I avoid buying. for example, I would probably not buy lipo cells, especially not from a third-party merchant. they are trivial to rewrap and poor QC can literally start fires.
would you mind sharing what kinds of things (or just categories of things) you are buying to see such a high rate of counterfeits?
Everything else? I've been buying all sorts of stuff from amazon, from electronics/hardware to clothing to furniture to almost anything you can think of, and not once was it fake. Before anyone asks how I know they weren't fake, most of them came with a "register on the manufacturer's website to get extended warranty/extra stuff" unique serial number, and i was able to do so just fine. Ofc that doesn't apply to everything I bought, because not every product allows registering itself on manufacturer's website. But for those that don't, I haven't noticed a single sign of fake/counterfeit items.
Ofc this is all just anecdata and isn't an evidence of anything. But i gotta say, as others have mentioned, their extremely easy and efficient return process definitely makes my decision-making efforts much easier.
My wife and I both have. It's likely that there's a buying pattern you have that's been very lucky. If you want to assume that millions of people are lying, there's nothing more to talk about. I would suggest trying to buy parts for anything on amazon to see the inaccuracies + bait & switch behaviors.
I know people in Canada and it's nothing like that. What you can find is crazy expensive and it it takes weeks to ship.
But they did get their foothold selling books.
I've been duped into buying travel size bottles of mouthwash, toothpaste, soap, etc because the seller prices them at or around the same as full sized items.
I guess that's on me for not paying attention to the weight though...