7 ms·

I think Walmart has a good shot at competing effectively, and I hope it does so, because Amazon having a monopoly on online retail is not in my long-term best i

I think Walmart has a good shot at competing effectively, and I hope it does so, because Amazon having a monopoly on online retail is not in my long-term best interests. That said, I don't think they have any sort of clear advantage, for two particular reasons: First, from a technical perspective, they have some serious catching up to do before they can provide the same service level at the same scale. It is not clear from available information that they actually have the required technical competence as an organization. Second, they have to deal with a reputation that's going to keep them out of many consideration sets: from my perspective, at least, Walmart merchandise is universally cheap crap whose low utility and/or high failure rate will end up costing me more in the long run. I don't trust them to quickly and painlessly make things right if an order is broken, disappointing, or missing. In contrast, Amazon has spent years building trust (on the assumption that the short-term cost of this quality of experience is a profitable investment in securing future business). I have yet to encounter an adequate answer to "Why should I bother looking at walmart.com?", which I suspect is true for many others, and which I think is a serious threat to Walmart.

HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
As a frequent Walmart customer, let me offer a different perspective. Brick & mortar: my fastest route home every day has me driving past a rural Walmart, so even though the selection is not that great, they've become my default grocery store purely through convenience. Cheap shit that doesn't have to last long: I just bought my 7 year-old three long sleeved shirts for $6 total. He'll wear them through the Spring and by Fall will have outgrown them anyway. Convenience: when the store is on my way home anyway, and there's tons of easy parking, it's far easier to shop Walmart than go online to look for something. As a result of this convenience we're now more likely to shop at Walmart.com instead of Amazon.com, I can order online and get free in-store pickup without paying shipping or having a Prime subscription.
- grogenaut 10y ago
  This is why I get many of my computer parts at Frys because it's on my way home. I still do my research online before going though because they often don't have what I need when it's more esoteric.
  - DrScump 10y ago
    Their "promo code" deals are often excellent. Heck, I just bought TurboTax H&B at Costco yesterday, and today Fry's has it $6 cheaper. I may be biased given that I've shopped at Fry's Electronics since their very first store, in a long-since-demolished, tiny former Fry's Grocery store on Oakmead.
- digler999 10y ago
  > I can order online and get free in-store pickup this will be a game changer for me. Big time. The day when I order online, check-in on my mobile app in the parking lot, pull up to the delivery dock, Johnny comes out with a box of my stuff and puts it in my trunk, and I drive off. That will be my nirvana. I have mild social anxiety, but walmart, for some reason, amplifies it considerably. Grocery stores too. Partly because I dont do proper meal planning/shopping planning, but partly because it just feels so inefficient to wade around the store and just feeling...handicapped ? Like, I just want to get my things and go, but ther'es always something impeding me: forgetting items, people in the way, employees restocking shelves during busy hours, long lines, bottlenecks at the one exit, etc. Drive-thru supermarkets/walmarts/amazon pickup is going to change the world.
  - praneshp 10y ago
    Target kinda sorta does this. Checkout curbside pickup. Hopefully your shopping experience gets better in the future.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - adrianN 10y ago
    I combat shopping anxiety by not making any plans what to buy and just strolling through the shop looking at the items and putting things that look tasty in my cart. Sometimes I forget important items, but usually it works out well. Treating shopping more like exploring the offers and less like checking things off a mental list makes it less stressful for me. Unfortunately this doesn't work when I actually need a specific item like a pair of jeans or something like that.
    - digler999 10y ago
      I've found that going on my lunch break helps. I buy stuff for lunch, sometimes stuff for dinner, while I'm already in "work mode" and energized, vs going after work when I'm tired. The stores aren't that crowded at lunch time either.
  - 10y ago
- orasis 10y ago
  I'm rural and I just use Amazon Prime rather than ever stepping foot in a Walmart.
- bamboozled 10y ago
  I hate to have to tell you this, but there isn't really such thing as a $2 shirt, please hear me out. The monetary cost to you, acting as a consumer is an incredible $6 or, $2 a shirt; However, as a citizen of earth, the environmental and social costs of buying cheap garments from places like Walmart is absolutely, shockingly enormous. [1][2] It's just currently impossible to produce clothing at that price in an even slightly responsible way. Unfortunately, buying super cheap garments is really taking out a loan out against the future and that bonded or forced labour is probably involved. [3] If you're a documentary person, "The True Cost" is really worth watching. [7] There is a few apps that can help people make informed choices before a purchase [4][5] and of course, great brands like Patagonia [6] who make quality clothing in a responsible way. There are also amazingly good quality items in second hand stores around the world too, I know there can be some stigma attached to second hand clothing, but it's only stigma, it wears off quickly and no one knows you have a second hand shirt on. I have a friend who works at a second hand store, which is part of franchise, and there are a lot good quality, safe items in surplus around the world waiting to be worn again. [1] http://source.ethicalfashionforum.com/article/introduction-to-fashions-key-environmental-issues http://source.ethicalfashionforum.com/article/introduction-t... [2] http://source.ethicalfashionforum.com/article/introduction-to-fashions-key-social-ssues http://source.ethicalfashionforum.com/article/introduction-t... [3] http://labourbehindthelabel.net/campaigns/living-wage/ http://labourbehindthelabel.net/campaigns/living-wage/ [4] http://goodonyou.org.au/ http://goodonyou.org.au/ [5] https://rankabrand.org/ https://rankabrand.org/ [6] http://www.patagonia.com http://www.patagonia.com [7] http://truecostmovie.com/ http://truecostmovie.com/
  - HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
    I wondered how long this would take...
    - bamboozled 10y ago
      So you already know about these issues, but you just go ahead and buy the items anyway?
      - 10y ago
- 234dd57d2c8dba 10y ago
  Those shirts cost way more than $6. Walmart gets corporate welfare from the government and your tax dollars. They are allowed to pay such low wages that employees are basically required to get government handouts and welfare to survive, which you pay for. Not to mention they destroy local and small businesses, which is/was the biggest driver of middle class wealth. They are anti-union and anti-workers rights. They are everything wrong with the USA. Sell out your neighbors and fellow citizens, give an already far overreaching government more reasons to tax you, and to boot, prop up a communist government thousands of miles away that is completely destroying the environment. Seems worth it for a $2 shirt to me. Maybe your child can grow up to be a factory worker making $2 shirts for other people in a polluted city and then they can reflect on the choices of their parents, such as yourselves.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
swsieber 10y ago
On the other hand, I don't really trust amazon much these days because of fake reviews, and the ability for suppliers to switch out items for those of lower quality. Walmart at least gives the appearance of curation for quality - It's at least easy to go see the quality of the things walmart is carrying. Amazon seems to be more of a crap shoot.
manyxcxi 10y ago
I would think that Walmart probably has a competitive advantage in most logistical areas. They've been moving goods across the country (and world) for longer than Amazon has been a company. They even have their own airline for moving freight (and employees) so they've already solved the 'UPS problem' that Amazon is working on now. With all that, it would be completely unsurprising to find out that Amazon runs their warehouse and goods movement more efficiently than Walmart does, but they still don't own the entire stack like Walmart does. On top of that, Walmart gets companies to produce entire product lines at prices that they themselves pretty much set. Amazon is just going to take a cut of a lot of sales while Walmart is getting the margin they want. Technology wise I'd say it's a safe bet that Amazon is light years ahead, but don't sleep on Walmart Labs and their ability to innovate. Just don't expect it to be as useful to us as AWS. I know everyone likes to bag on Walmart for being 'cheap' and/or 'shit' but at least if I buy a brand from Walmart I can be extremely confident in it being the real thing. Which has been getting to be (at least personally) a huge issue with me for Amazon and has started moving me to buy more things at other stores (including Walmart). There are tradeoffs between the two, but I think they both run tight ships and are in the best position to be each other's biggest competitor.
- Fricken 10y ago
  If Amazon had the physical real estate that Wal-Mart does it wouldn't be long before they could service most of north America with sub-1 hour delivery for most products. In that regard, it seems that if Wal-mart was committed, they could totally steal Amazon's thunder. I must be overlooking something fundamental.
  - sjg007 10y ago
    AmaTargetazon.
  - quicklime 10y ago
    I think the fundamental thing you're overlooking is Amazon's wide selection. There's a long tail of relatively low-demand items that a company like Walmart would just remove from their shelves. Looking over my recent Amazon orders, I'd guess that around half of it is made up of this sort of item.
cma 10y ago
> I don't trust them to quickly and painlessly make things right if an order is broken, disappointing, or missing. Doesn't Wal-mart have a pretty good return policy, where you don't even need a receipt? (Things might have changed since I last made a return)
petra 10y ago
Let's say Walmart's customer service does become great, and their site better than Amazon's. Amazon's site quality seem to have gone down, according to many). How hard would it be for them to fix their brand? How long would that take ?
timothycrosley 10y ago
Jet is a joke. People use them only because they sell things at a loss through coupon codes. I only ever see someone talk about them on discount sites, explicitly saying to start a new account just to get the coupon code again. A lot of the things they "shipped" they literally just ordered from other stores that then shipped to the customer. I ordered two things from them, one was ordered and then shipped via New Egg, the other Home Depot.
- tubehouse 10y ago
  Jet is way better than Amazon for me. So much so that I rarely use Amazon anymore. Prices on Amazon are often worse than local retail stores. I find many products I want to buy are Prime only, Fresh only, or Add-ons. The last two packages I bought took an entire week to leave the warehouse even though they were fulfilled by Amazon. And Amazon has a horrible spam problem. It's difficult to sort out real products from knock-offs sold by a scam seller like SUPER DEAL PRODUCT WORLD or something. Jet, on the other hand, has no spam problem, prices usually better than local stores, and very reliable free two day shipping. Hopefully they can scale up.
  - timothycrosley 10y ago
    It's hard to overstate how easy it is to have better prices when you are operating at a loss. They're still in the "fake it till you make it stage" as is evident by their buying from other stores to then ship to consumers.
mindcrime 10y ago
Here's an anecdote, for what it's worth. I do a lot of doodling boxes-and-arrows stuff, pseudo-UML, half-assed flow-charts, etc., when working on ideas. For some strange (and largely irrelevant) reason, I'm really picky about the pencils I use. And my favorite ones have apparently gone out of production. So last week, I order two new high-end mechanical drafting pencils from Amazon. They show up, I like them right away, so I order 5 more. The package arrives, and there are only 3 pencils. From what I can tell, they were loosely slopped in along with the book that in the same order and the packaging was loose enough that I'm guessing the other 2 actually fell out. I login to Amazon.com (this was on Friday), report the 2 missing pencils, and wait to see what happens. A few hours later I get a notice that a replacement package is 5 pencils is being overnighted to me. Note that only two were lost from the original package. For all the grief Amazon gets, at times their customer service can be pretty damn good. Wal-Mart, OTOH, to me, just "feels" like a place to get mostly cheap crap, sold by underpaid employees with surly attitudes. I don't even think of walmart.com as a place to shop online. They're so far off my radar that they might as well not have e-commerce. The question then, to me, is how many people have a world view like mine? And if the answer is a large number, how does Wal-Mart get people to consider them at all? Leveraging the hybrid "click and mortar" thing sounds like a good start, but I'm wondering if it will be enough.

HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago

As a frequent Walmart customer, let me offer a different perspective. Brick & mortar: my fastest route home every day has me driving past a rural Walmart, so even though the selection is not that great, they've become my default grocery store purely through convenience. Cheap shit that doesn't have to last long: I just bought my 7 year-old three long sleeved shirts for $6 total. He'll wear them through the Spring and by Fall will have outgrown them anyway. Convenience: when the store is on my way home anyway, and there's tons of easy parking, it's far easier to shop Walmart than go online to look for something. As a result of this convenience we're now more likely to shop at Walmart.com instead of Amazon.com, I can order online and get free in-store pickup without paying shipping or having a Prime subscription.

grogenaut 10y ago
This is why I get many of my computer parts at Frys because it's on my way home. I still do my research online before going though because they often don't have what I need when it's more esoteric.
- DrScump 10y ago
  Their "promo code" deals are often excellent. Heck, I just bought TurboTax H&B at Costco yesterday, and today Fry's has it $6 cheaper. I may be biased given that I've shopped at Fry's Electronics since their very first store, in a long-since-demolished, tiny former Fry's Grocery store on Oakmead.
digler999 10y ago
> I can order online and get free in-store pickup this will be a game changer for me. Big time. The day when I order online, check-in on my mobile app in the parking lot, pull up to the delivery dock, Johnny comes out with a box of my stuff and puts it in my trunk, and I drive off. That will be my nirvana. I have mild social anxiety, but walmart, for some reason, amplifies it considerably. Grocery stores too. Partly because I dont do proper meal planning/shopping planning, but partly because it just feels so inefficient to wade around the store and just feeling...handicapped ? Like, I just want to get my things and go, but ther'es always something impeding me: forgetting items, people in the way, employees restocking shelves during busy hours, long lines, bottlenecks at the one exit, etc. Drive-thru supermarkets/walmarts/amazon pickup is going to change the world.
- praneshp 10y ago
  Target kinda sorta does this. Checkout curbside pickup. Hopefully your shopping experience gets better in the future.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- adrianN 10y ago
  I combat shopping anxiety by not making any plans what to buy and just strolling through the shop looking at the items and putting things that look tasty in my cart. Sometimes I forget important items, but usually it works out well. Treating shopping more like exploring the offers and less like checking things off a mental list makes it less stressful for me. Unfortunately this doesn't work when I actually need a specific item like a pair of jeans or something like that.
  - digler999 10y ago
    I've found that going on my lunch break helps. I buy stuff for lunch, sometimes stuff for dinner, while I'm already in "work mode" and energized, vs going after work when I'm tired. The stores aren't that crowded at lunch time either.
- 10y ago
orasis 10y ago
I'm rural and I just use Amazon Prime rather than ever stepping foot in a Walmart.
bamboozled 10y ago
I hate to have to tell you this, but there isn't really such thing as a $2 shirt, please hear me out. The monetary cost to you, acting as a consumer is an incredible $6 or, $2 a shirt; However, as a citizen of earth, the environmental and social costs of buying cheap garments from places like Walmart is absolutely, shockingly enormous. [1][2] It's just currently impossible to produce clothing at that price in an even slightly responsible way. Unfortunately, buying super cheap garments is really taking out a loan out against the future and that bonded or forced labour is probably involved. [3] If you're a documentary person, "The True Cost" is really worth watching. [7] There is a few apps that can help people make informed choices before a purchase [4][5] and of course, great brands like Patagonia [6] who make quality clothing in a responsible way. There are also amazingly good quality items in second hand stores around the world too, I know there can be some stigma attached to second hand clothing, but it's only stigma, it wears off quickly and no one knows you have a second hand shirt on. I have a friend who works at a second hand store, which is part of franchise, and there are a lot good quality, safe items in surplus around the world waiting to be worn again. [1] http://source.ethicalfashionforum.com/article/introduction-to-fashions-key-environmental-issues http://source.ethicalfashionforum.com/article/introduction-t... [2] http://source.ethicalfashionforum.com/article/introduction-to-fashions-key-social-ssues http://source.ethicalfashionforum.com/article/introduction-t... [3] http://labourbehindthelabel.net/campaigns/living-wage/ http://labourbehindthelabel.net/campaigns/living-wage/ [4] http://goodonyou.org.au/ http://goodonyou.org.au/ [5] https://rankabrand.org/ https://rankabrand.org/ [6] http://www.patagonia.com http://www.patagonia.com [7] http://truecostmovie.com/ http://truecostmovie.com/
- HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
  I wondered how long this would take...
  - bamboozled 10y ago
    So you already know about these issues, but you just go ahead and buy the items anyway?
    - 10y ago
234dd57d2c8dba 10y ago
Those shirts cost way more than $6. Walmart gets corporate welfare from the government and your tax dollars. They are allowed to pay such low wages that employees are basically required to get government handouts and welfare to survive, which you pay for. Not to mention they destroy local and small businesses, which is/was the biggest driver of middle class wealth. They are anti-union and anti-workers rights. They are everything wrong with the USA. Sell out your neighbors and fellow citizens, give an already far overreaching government more reasons to tax you, and to boot, prop up a communist government thousands of miles away that is completely destroying the environment. Seems worth it for a $2 shirt to me. Maybe your child can grow up to be a factory worker making $2 shirts for other people in a polluted city and then they can reflect on the choices of their parents, such as yourselves.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

swsieber 10y ago

On the other hand, I don't really trust amazon much these days because of fake reviews, and the ability for suppliers to switch out items for those of lower quality. Walmart at least gives the appearance of curation for quality - It's at least easy to go see the quality of the things walmart is carrying. Amazon seems to be more of a crap shoot.

manyxcxi 10y ago

I would think that Walmart probably has a competitive advantage in most logistical areas. They've been moving goods across the country (and world) for longer than Amazon has been a company. They even have their own airline for moving freight (and employees) so they've already solved the 'UPS problem' that Amazon is working on now. With all that, it would be completely unsurprising to find out that Amazon runs their warehouse and goods movement more efficiently than Walmart does, but they still don't own the entire stack like Walmart does. On top of that, Walmart gets companies to produce entire product lines at prices that they themselves pretty much set. Amazon is just going to take a cut of a lot of sales while Walmart is getting the margin they want. Technology wise I'd say it's a safe bet that Amazon is light years ahead, but don't sleep on Walmart Labs and their ability to innovate. Just don't expect it to be as useful to us as AWS. I know everyone likes to bag on Walmart for being 'cheap' and/or 'shit' but at least if I buy a brand from Walmart I can be extremely confident in it being the real thing. Which has been getting to be (at least personally) a huge issue with me for Amazon and has started moving me to buy more things at other stores (including Walmart). There are tradeoffs between the two, but I think they both run tight ships and are in the best position to be each other's biggest competitor.

Fricken 10y ago
If Amazon had the physical real estate that Wal-Mart does it wouldn't be long before they could service most of north America with sub-1 hour delivery for most products. In that regard, it seems that if Wal-mart was committed, they could totally steal Amazon's thunder. I must be overlooking something fundamental.
- sjg007 10y ago
  AmaTargetazon.
- quicklime 10y ago
  I think the fundamental thing you're overlooking is Amazon's wide selection. There's a long tail of relatively low-demand items that a company like Walmart would just remove from their shelves. Looking over my recent Amazon orders, I'd guess that around half of it is made up of this sort of item.

cma 10y ago

> I don't trust them to quickly and painlessly make things right if an order is broken, disappointing, or missing. Doesn't Wal-mart have a pretty good return policy, where you don't even need a receipt? (Things might have changed since I last made a return)

petra 10y ago

Let's say Walmart's customer service does become great, and their site better than Amazon's. Amazon's site quality seem to have gone down, according to many). How hard would it be for them to fix their brand? How long would that take ?

timothycrosley 10y ago

Jet is a joke. People use them only because they sell things at a loss through coupon codes. I only ever see someone talk about them on discount sites, explicitly saying to start a new account just to get the coupon code again. A lot of the things they "shipped" they literally just ordered from other stores that then shipped to the customer. I ordered two things from them, one was ordered and then shipped via New Egg, the other Home Depot.

tubehouse 10y ago
Jet is way better than Amazon for me. So much so that I rarely use Amazon anymore. Prices on Amazon are often worse than local retail stores. I find many products I want to buy are Prime only, Fresh only, or Add-ons. The last two packages I bought took an entire week to leave the warehouse even though they were fulfilled by Amazon. And Amazon has a horrible spam problem. It's difficult to sort out real products from knock-offs sold by a scam seller like SUPER DEAL PRODUCT WORLD or something. Jet, on the other hand, has no spam problem, prices usually better than local stores, and very reliable free two day shipping. Hopefully they can scale up.
- timothycrosley 10y ago
  It's hard to overstate how easy it is to have better prices when you are operating at a loss. They're still in the "fake it till you make it stage" as is evident by their buying from other stores to then ship to consumers.

mindcrime 10y ago

Here's an anecdote, for what it's worth. I do a lot of doodling boxes-and-arrows stuff, pseudo-UML, half-assed flow-charts, etc., when working on ideas. For some strange (and largely irrelevant) reason, I'm really picky about the pencils I use. And my favorite ones have apparently gone out of production. So last week, I order two new high-end mechanical drafting pencils from Amazon. They show up, I like them right away, so I order 5 more. The package arrives, and there are only 3 pencils. From what I can tell, they were loosely slopped in along with the book that in the same order and the packaging was loose enough that I'm guessing the other 2 actually fell out. I login to Amazon.com (this was on Friday), report the 2 missing pencils, and wait to see what happens. A few hours later I get a notice that a replacement package is 5 pencils is being overnighted to me. Note that only two were lost from the original package. For all the grief Amazon gets, at times their customer service can be pretty damn good. Wal-Mart, OTOH, to me, just "feels" like a place to get mostly cheap crap, sold by underpaid employees with surly attitudes. I don't even think of walmart.com as a place to shop online. They're so far off my radar that they might as well not have e-commerce. The question then, to me, is how many people have a world view like mine? And if the answer is a large number, how does Wal-Mart get people to consider them at all? Leveraging the hybrid "click and mortar" thing sounds like a good start, but I'm wondering if it will be enough.