The Pandemic is Playing To Almost Every One of Amazon's Strengths (cnn.com) 57
An anonymous reader shares a report: As the coronavirus pandemic has forced people to stay inside, few companies have proven themselves as essential as Amazon. From groceries to cleaning supplies, shipments from Amazon have become lifelines for many who are steering clear of supermarkets and other physical retail stores. Company executives have likened the surge in demand to the annual holiday shopping crush. But e-commerce isn't the only sector where Amazon is booming. Analysts say its cloud business, Amazon Web Services, faces higher demand as people turn to some of its biggest clients -- from Zoom to Netflix -- for work and play. Amazon sells access to audiobooks and original television programs that are helping to entertain reluctant shut-ins. And with more people staying home, that's more time they have to engage with Amazon's AI-powered smart speakers.
The breadth of Amazon's sprawling business interests, and its increasingly central place in America's fragile supply chain, underscores the company's hold on consumers -- and its potential to solidify its dominance in the coming months. The longer this crisis goes on, the more formidable Amazon will become, according to James Bailey, a management professor at George Washington University's business school. "Every crisis creates a void," said Bailey. "And whatever force fills that void, inherits power." Amazon isn't the only company that could benefit. The crisis appears to be lifting the entire e-commerce industry, according to Bank of America research, which showed the sector grew 16% in March compared to a year ago. Those consumer habits could persist even after the crisis passes, marking a potential tidal wave of change benefiting Amazon's bottom line for years to come. But thanks to its existing advantages in scale and efficiency, Amazon stands to emerge from the pandemic stronger than many of its competitors, experts say. In light of the pandemic, Amazon could pull in as much as an additional $4 billion in revenue this year, though added costs of managing the pandemic may cut into Amazon's profits, said Bank of America in an investor note last week.
The breadth of Amazon's sprawling business interests, and its increasingly central place in America's fragile supply chain, underscores the company's hold on consumers -- and its potential to solidify its dominance in the coming months. The longer this crisis goes on, the more formidable Amazon will become, according to James Bailey, a management professor at George Washington University's business school. "Every crisis creates a void," said Bailey. "And whatever force fills that void, inherits power." Amazon isn't the only company that could benefit. The crisis appears to be lifting the entire e-commerce industry, according to Bank of America research, which showed the sector grew 16% in March compared to a year ago. Those consumer habits could persist even after the crisis passes, marking a potential tidal wave of change benefiting Amazon's bottom line for years to come. But thanks to its existing advantages in scale and efficiency, Amazon stands to emerge from the pandemic stronger than many of its competitors, experts say. In light of the pandemic, Amazon could pull in as much as an additional $4 billion in revenue this year, though added costs of managing the pandemic may cut into Amazon's profits, said Bank of America in an investor note last week.
I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you tried Amazon Fresh or Pantry? It's impossible to get delivery slots with "Fresh" and your just in time "Pantry" order is shipped 10 days after it was scheduled to be delivered.
You can go to retailers that do in parking lot, touchless pickup and get better prices in much less time.
Amazon is slowly gaining a cult fanboi following like Apple.
Re:I call BS (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because the slots are full. Because everyone is using it.
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That's because the slots are full. Because everyone is using it.
No, not everyone. Just more than the service can accommodate. I don't think it was ready to scale up yet. Target and Walmart are there for you, though, with pickup and delivery options.
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Re: I call BS (Score:2)
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The free market detecting local demand and stepping in with their own products, delivery service, local workers and local shopping app.
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"Have you tried Amazon Fresh or Pantry? It's impossible to get delivery slots with "Fresh" and your just in time "Pantry" order is shipped 10 days after it was scheduled to be delivered."
The word you're looking for is 'success'.
Too many clients, not enough produce, it's called free market, dude.
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Too many clients, not enough produce
No that's over demand/under supply and that's never a good thing. You have customers that are knocking your door down and you have literally nothing to give them except enough time to find someone else to go to. The position Amazon is in is never a good place to be in. Now Amazon might have a product unique to them that people can't find anywhere else and then you have something akin to a "Nintendo Switch Shortage". Which can be a good(-ish) thing, so long as you intend on getting that product to the co
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https://www.vgcats.com/comics/... [vgcats.com]
(((cohenincidences))) (Score:2, Troll)
The Pandemic is Playing To Almost Every One of Amazon's Strengths
Funny how that always works...
(((Charles Lieber))), Department Chair of Biology & Biochemistry at Harvard, is arrested for conspiring with the communist chinese [cnn.com].
Corona virus breaks out next door to a military virus lab in wuhan china. [dailymail.co.uk]
(((Chuck Schumer))): Trump's travel ban to and from china... is... ongoing war aginst immigrants! [thegatewaypundit.com]
(((Isaac Platt Zolov))): "[Lunar New Year Parade In Chinatown] is still a chance for people to come [cbslocal.com]
It's called "viral marketing". (Score:2)
Or, if a state does it, "state-sponsored forum trolls". Same thing. Astroturfers presented as "just your peers".
If you tell people often enough, that people think $x, then people will actually start thinking $x, and you can go "See? Proof!".
It's *way* more common than people think. (Just ask a big ad company to quote you a price for such a campaign.) Which is why it works.
It's also really really old.
And Amazon certainly got the money that it lacks in morals, to do that.
Re:I call BS (Score:5, Funny)
"Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded"
[often attributed to Y. Berra, but predates him]
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Virtual +1 funny, although I guess it sort of makes sense with social distancing rules in place. There's like 5% of the usual shoppers but "it seems too crowded".
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Amazon has the capital and opportunity right now to expand their distribution and remedy this flaw. They can literally just start buying up old Toys R Us and empty Sears spaces as smaller distribution points. If they do drive-up delivery exclusively they don't even need to make it look nice inside at first. The place can be turning a profit as they fit it out to be a Whole Foods.
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Amazon Fresh is faster for me than my large grocery store delivery. Not ideal, but far from "impossible".
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I've been using Amazon Fresh. There are slots pretty much every morning when I look.
I assume this depends on your location.
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Amazon Fresh is the only service I've managed to get actual deliveries from. Sure, sometimes it takes all day to get a delivery slot, but at least they exist and they deliver the things I ordered, and surprisingly fast (two have been same day, one took two days). This in contrast with Safeway who took a week to deliver, and left out half the things I ordered without notifying me, and this was before things really got bad. Grocery stores have really crappy websites and online ordering systems.
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Pass through price gouging even WITH the extreme delays now...Several food things I regularly ordered have been marked up over 400% in some cases. There may have been a hidden vendor switch in there - but the effect is that if you "buy again"...the price went up dramatically. There's a whole lot of "no longer available" as well, not sure where the responsibility lies on that one.
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Unless.... (Score:1)
What's fascinating is that they never seem to get any in stock.
Re:Unless.... (Score:4, Interesting)
The folks who ruined eBay by writing snipe bots have probably written bots for Amazon, which monitor a product you're trying to buy. Does the equivalent of hitting refresh on your browser every minute, 24 hours a day, and automatically places the order for you the moment it comes back into stock. Thus guaranteeing that anyone checking the product page manually will never be able to buy these items as long as demand exceeds supply.
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How did that ruin eBay. It depends on your perspective. Maybe the rules changed in a way that 'ruined' the game you were playing.
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It wasn't ruined, but inherently misdesigned. (Score:2)
A IP adress or user does not equal one person, and never did.
Designing it as if, is a very common fallacy, but it's nonetheless idiotic. (The worst are online votes/likes/clicks and reviews/comments.)
Your identifier, be it an IP, cookie, user name or whatever, equals an unknown amount of computing power, bandwith and actual people.
From one user being the entire NSA super-computer center and half the bandwith in the country, and one IPv4 being half of east-Asia,
to millions of users and IP adresses being just
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You happen to try to order something like toilet paper which they have been persistently out of since this stupidity started.
What's fascinating is that they never seem to get any in stock.
Strange. They've delivered some twice to me. I just haven't had any problems getting it.
Speaking of which, I've been thinking about the preppers. A LOT of people made fun of them for many years. But right now, most of them are far better off than the rest of us.
We are going to have to change our attitudes towards preppers.
In fact, I predict some of them will be moving into positions of political leadership after this is over, and displacing traditional political leaders.
They will hold the moral high gro
Dominance == Strength? (Score:4, Insightful)
The breadth of Amazon's sprawling business interests, and its increasingly central place in America's fragile supply chain, underscores the company's hold on consumers -- and its potential to solidify its dominance in the coming months
That's not a strength, that's a weakness. At least for citizens. I don't give a shit if Amazon(TM) is strong.
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There have been confirmed cases of coronavirus infection in staff at over 50 Amazon warehouses. Amazon has responded by showing that they care more about the PR than the health of their employees.
Amazon is as strong as Apple is courageous.
That's not a strength, that's a weakness. At least for citizens. I don't give a shit if Amazon(TM) is strong.
You and me both Little Greek Letter, you and me both.
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We tend to shop in strong businesses. We normally want to shop at places that will be around for a while, a place big enough to handle any problems we may have and honor refunds and returns. We don't care for fly by night companies for purchases of anything more than a few bucks, and with internet purchases, we don't want to risk a place that will sell our credit card numbers.
This, unfortunately, makes starting a business difficult. Also, this trend to go to the big business when times are tough amplifies
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10 years ago, Walmart was the big unstoppable brick and mortar retail giant. And just like the music industry was blind to downloadable music, Walmart was blind to Amazon.
The problem is that people have a hard time figuring out what the future holds, so they only think about competitors who are doing exactly the same thing they're doing themselves.
Sometimes I wish... (Score:1)
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That would require the Rolling on the Floor Laughing emoji [emojipedia.org]. Unfortunately, it would also require Slashdot to upgrade their two-decades-old code.
I guess you could always simply post "U+1F923"...
In its own way, Amazon saved us (Score:3)
Walmart and most of the big grocery stores now offer online ordering and deliver to your car. F'ing Walmart wouldn't even hire cashiers if they didn't have to. None of this would have been in place if it wasn't because Amazon forced Walmart and others to do so. Seriously, Walmart would love to make everyone self-checkout.
I know high risk people ordering online at Walmart now. Thank you very much, Amazon.
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F'ing Walmart wouldn't even hire cashiers if they didn't have to.
Well, no company would ever hire anybody, if they didn't have to...
Re: In its own way, Amazon saved us (Score:2)
What the hell is good about hiring cashiers though? It is insulting and a waste of potential, to demand from an actual human being, to do such a primitive and mind-numbing job.
(Well-designed) automatic checkout machines (like those from NCR integrators where zero touch screen input is required) should be legally mandated, aswell as passing the resulting price savings to the clients and/or their emoyees, so people have to work less to be able to afford things. And the employees should be enabled to do much m
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Want to face a "legally mandated"
Walk into a shop and talk to real local people?
Re "valuable, and fun-because-challenging-and-rewarding high-level jobs"...
The truck has to be unloaded. The good and products sorted. Every shift.
Got ready for delivery. Got ready to place stock in the shop. Every item sold.
Thats what working for a shop is all about. Getting products from a truck to people in the c
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F'ing Walmart wouldn't even hire cashiers if they didn't have to.
Is this the same Walmart that hires people to stand at the door and say hello, and that is far and away the largest employer in the US? For all of their ills, they employ a LOT of people, including many who would have a difficult time finding work elsewhere. They seem perfectly happy to employ lots of people for little pay and benefits.
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The Walmart greeters are much more friendly and less creepy than the greeters at Costco.
I mean, "Welcome to Costco, I love you." - seriously? Yikes!
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"I hate corpororations seeking to lay people off by increasing automation!" he thumbed into his iPhone which didn't cost $10 million.
Mainly its Rockefeller "strength". (Score:2)
Of being more ruthless and worker-abusive and the sleaziest car salesman type business than anyone else.
Which, it seems, is seen just as much a "plus" as a 100 years ago.
Who's gonna be Al Capone this time? ;)
Amazon is failing (Score:2)
You can't order food or other grocery store essentials. Their system won't even let me schedule a delivery time. In their regular store, 2 day shipping prime items are scheduling deliveries 3-4 weeks out.
So how can the system be overloaded if no one can order groceries and other items are shipping on slow boats? I used to see Amazon delivery trucks everywhere in my neighborhood. Now almost nothing. AND there's an Amazon warehouse nearby my house!
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Ummm... no. (Score:3)
As a Prime loyal and stockholder, I have to say no. It has shown they have cheap shipping, and are no more reliable than any other online retailer (at best). Where anything can be bought in-store, it is still a better option; where anything can be bought at another online store, it is likewise a better option to use the alternative.
I have several orders that will not ship for over a month. (Well, technically I have two and my wife has several.) One should be cancelled and just buy at Home Depot, but it is for a project that I am not anxious to tackle. The other I think I can get delivered from Office Depot, but... I can wait on that project without losing sleep as well.
I wanted to do some online-retail therapy this week, and failed miserably. That is the huge lost opportunity.
The pandemic is also playing into Amazon’s biggest weakness— hiring and retaining low-paid staff that make the machine work. Not being able to scale up, and risking the closure of 10% of their distribution centers is a pretty huge issue for them. Me using other stores is as well.
(I sold two calls yesterday because I don’t have much faith in Q1 from AMZN.)
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Why the fuck would you own shares in a patent troll?
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Um... to make money? Not many publicly traded companies out there, especially in technology, that aren’t patent trolls.
ironic (Score:4, Informative)
Due to family medical issues, I was ordering everything I could before on Amazon.
Now, I'm having to go to stores a lot more than I used to. Sucks.
What I can get online, I'm certainly spreading around more (i.e. not all Amazon) than I used to. Because I have to.
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Due to family medical issues, I was ordering everything I could before on Amazon.
Now, I'm having to go to stores a lot more than I used to. Sucks.
What I can get online, I'm certainly spreading around more (i.e. not all Amazon) than I used to. Because I have to.
If it's not obvious, the above is because they don't have anything in stock and can't ship anything in time anymore. I forgot to explicitly say that.
Never Forget... (Score:2)
...Amazon is a patent troll, and literally nothing more than that.
Buying from other retailers more often now (Score:2)
Interestingly, due to Amazon changing the priority of many items, I've found myself buying things from other retailers that I normally would have purchased from Amazon. I moved last weekend and ordered some furniture and supplies from places like Home Depot that I normally would have bought from Amazon without thinking twice.