Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

I would not work for Amazon unless my life depended on it (and even then I would have to think twice) but I have to say (reluctantly) that as a customer, both retail and AWS, I absolutely love them. The power that Amazon is acquiring scares the hell out of me, but at the same time, when I need to buy some random thing, no one else even comes close in terms of convenience and reliability. Sometimes I will make an effort to buy direct from a vendor, but more often than not the experience is so horrible that I go right back to Amazon.

View on HN

You should try walmart.com for ordering... they stepped up their game... it's not uncommon for them to do 3 deliveries for a $35 order with free shipping to get you the stuff as fast as possible... Most of the time I wish they would combine items to avoid the waste but that's what they do.

Yeah, I've considered Walmart, but it kind of defeats the purpose for me. It doesn't do a lot of good to replace one monopolistic behemoth with a different monopolistic behemoth.

I don't think there is a small mom & pop one stop shop, but if you are willing to buy different things from different stores, you have options. I buy most of my electronics from B&H, and things like fasteners from McMaster-Carr.

Amazon does feel pretty unavoidable for the long tail, though.

McMaster-Carr is amazing but Grainger is very nice too.

I'm surprised that these specialty retailers have not banded together to form some kind of syndicate with a common web front end to take orders. That sort of thing could be an Amazon-killer. Combined with a doordash-like delivery service it could offer same-day delivery and reliable product vetting.

Hm, anyone here want to start a company?

Isn't that kind of what Shopify, Fast, and some other company that I only heard off because they laid off half their staff doing?

I haven't researched the industry extensively, but I'm guessing that companies like to keep customer data to themselves and curate what they think is the ideal checkout experience. (Everyone should copy McMaster, though.) That's why you see companies happy to delegate the financing involved in buying their products to credit card companies, but still make their own website/checkout/fulfillment rather than letting, say, Amazon do that for them. (Shopify does seem to have quite a lot of traction, however.)

None of those companies are syndicates, i.e. none of them are owned by the retailers they represent. They're trying to just be middlemen. That won't work.

For the record, being on the other side, and working hard to CREATE these experiences that customers love is absolutely addictive and intoxicating.

You have to actually give a shit about it though. Which most of us do. It requires effort and grit to have this level of "customer obsession", and to be fair, I would say we are mostly well compensated for it.

But it's not for everyone. Plenty of SDEs, including in this market just want to punch in and punch out, and not meaningfully move the bar forward. That's probably OK.

It's not good enough for me. My work is 1/3 of my life, 1/2 of my waking life. That better be fucking meaningful and significant.

You'd be surprised, you might enjoy working here too.

Kudos to you. If you think it's a fair deal, more power to you. I'll sleep better at night knowing that you feel like you're not being exploited, and that you're being fairly compensated for the work you do.

But I've heard too many horror stories to ever take that risk myself.

This comment isn't directed to you specifically, but the many many others who feel the same.

"What have you got to lose?"

By that I mean, we're in a hot tech market. If it doesn't work out, you can likely find a job elsewhere with ease.

OK, but we're about to hit a recession. I'd venture Amazon is a lot safer than many other tech companies to ride out a recession in - the core business (cloud and retail) is fundamentally sound. The company is only ever not profitable when it chooses not to be because it invests all gains into new R&D and lines of business. When things tighten in the market, Amazon refocuses on core optimizations, and realizes massive profits again. Certainly I can't predict layoffs or no layoffs, but noone can, at any company.

> If it doesn't work out, you can likely find a job elsewhere with ease.

If that's true then I could just skip the Amazon pain and go straight to the "job elsewhere".

I am probably not alone, but I use Amazon.com about twice a year. Pretty much only when I don't have time to wait for something, or if there is a ludicrous deal. It's obviously harder to get what I want, but I just think about the counterfeit items and the slave labor in the warehouse.

Of course I use AWS everyday at my job. I think of it like Amish people using power tools at their job.

I'm curious if Amazon retail was equally efficient in the past, say the early 2000s. Was warehouse management the same?

Amazon wasn't a logistics expert from day one, they've learned a lot over the years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ckmbVpG390

Reply on news.ycombinator.com