9 ms·

Amazon as experiment

185 points by notlukesky 7y ago

draw_down 7y ago
> Amazon is systematically going through every branch of the idea tree around what retail is, and doing it without any pride. Agreed, but probably not in the way he means. Let's not pretend that everyone who has issues with the things Amazon does is just a relic fuddy-duddy waiting to be cleared away.
Scramblejams 7y ago
I guess I took the wrong thing away from this piece — where do I lay my hands on a sweet, sweet physical copy of the 1908 Sears catalog?!
- zeristor 7y ago
  From Amazon of course! https://www.amazon.co.uk/1908-Sears-Roebuck-Catalogue-Schroeder/dp/0873490185 https://www.amazon.co.uk/1908-Sears-Roebuck-Catalogue-Schroe... There’s also a copy on the Internet Archive, I’ve yet to find the portable forge: https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/ https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/
  - zeristor 7y ago
    High grade wagon scales is my favourite find to date: https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/page/760 https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/page/760 (Scales is singular, isn’t it?)
    - sudhirj 7y ago
      In the same way that pants or trousers are singular, yeah. It’s really a pair of pants, trousers or scales. With all these things you need two to make them work.
      - kgwgk 7y ago
        Glasses as well, for two-eyed people.
        zeristor 7y ago
        Or four eyed
  - retzkek 7y ago
    Near the ACME anvils, of course! https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/page/528 https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/page/528 Such an amazing catalog, I could spend many hours paging through it.
GlennS 7y ago
I've recently been reading through the Amazon letters to shareholders [https://ir.aboutamazon.com/annual-reports/ https://ir.aboutamazon.com/annual-reports/]. It's clear from those letters that Amazon is not an experiment, but rather a flawlessly executed plan about how an online retailer can exploit their inherently better capital flows to grow very quickly. It's almost the opposite of the modern startup approach. Not: "We need to borrow money and take investment to get big and dominate the market". Instead: "If we drive our costs down and focus on fast fullfillment or orders/inventory turnover, we'll have all this spare money sloshing around to reinvest, and happy local customers. Therefore we can't help but get big.". (There's a lot more to it than this.) The first letter shows that they already understood the economics of web retail very well in 1997! Accusing them of lacking pride is also definitely missing the mark. Amazon are optimizing customer satisfaction and rate of fullfillment. They enter all these other markets exactly because they are proud enough to believe they'll win. Amazon wouldn't enter a market aiming to be 2nd best. I haven't gotten to the present yet, so I didn't know that Amazon had opened high-street retail shops. The earlier letters said that they wouldn't do that unless they figured out how to make it scale faster than their expenditures, like their online business.
- jcims 7y ago
  >Amazon are optimizing customer satisfaction and rate of fullfillment. This isn’t just a byproduct of high speed/low drag commerce, they intentionally and aggressively focus on and invest in customer satisfaction. Anecdotally and most certainly with exception in this very audience they are easily in my top three if not GOAT for direct human to human empathetic and effective customer service. Google in comparison leaves me feeling like I’m twisting random knobs on someone else’s lab project.
  - PakG1 7y ago
    Looking at this now, it's amazing to compare with the public criticism that Werner Vogels gave to the face of the corporate blogging movement back in 2006. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/03/naked_answers.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/03/naked_answers.h... Back then when he claimed that Amazon did a very good job of being customer focused, I was thinking: maybe, but whatever, I'm not sure what's special about their customer experience compared to others. Today, I'm thinking: wow, now that's a real example of audacious vision both executed and realized.
eridius 7y ago
> All of this reminds me of stories about early Google, and how the company systematically rethought everything from first principles. Sometimes this was just a painful waste of time, as it learned the lessons everyone else had already learned, but sometimes the result was Gmail or Maps. Didn't Gmail start as someone's 20% project, rather than something that was "systematically rethought from first principles"?
- irq 7y ago
  Why can’t it be both a 20% project and rethought from first principals?
- jasode 7y ago
  >Didn't Gmail start as someone's 20% project, Gmail's creator, Paul Buchheit, said it was not a 20% project: https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/ https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/ excerpt: >Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.”
- jimbokun 7y ago
  Isn't encouraging employees to systematically rethink things from first principles, one of the core motivations for 20% projects?
PaulHoule 7y ago
I don't think Amazon can roll over supermarkets as easily as the average mall store. People visit mall stores sporadically enough that they might forget about the bad experience they had or hope it might be different or feel they don't have a choice. Thus mall stores can damage their brand image for a quick buck; in fact they are often brain washed by their own advertising and have no idea how the customer sees them. Grocery, on the other hand, has a customer that does back at least once a week, if the brand image is not upheld they can get similar goods elsewhere. That awful whole foods at union square with the cattle chutes at the checkout might look good compared to the local bodega in NYC, but does not look good compared to a good suburban supermarket (Wegmans). It is one case where urban folk could be out of touch with the broader market.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  That is one bad thing about living in the middle of a city, the supermarkets are small, too busy and overpriced.
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    > small, too busy and overpriced Describes every facet of a city IMO.
- bluedino 7y ago
  Other than spur-of-the-moment items, the only things I need to buy from the grocery are fresh meats and produce. Possibly bakery items. Everything that's boxed, bottled, or bagged, I can get from Amazon. Instead of making a list I just scan the barcode and order and throw the empty one away (or put the almst empty one in the back in the fridge)
- zjaffee 7y ago
  I grew up near that whole foods, and you have to remember that when the store opened there was not a single grocery store near by that was nearly as large and as good as that one. Hell, the mall that it's in might look less high end than the rest of Union Square, but it's far nicer than the department store Bradley's that was there before. Also worth noting that since that whole foods opened, the grocery situation throughout a lot of manhattan improved in that they opened quite a few more locations that also were rather large compared to the older grocery stores around. This all said, I think the real market in a place like manhattan is for grocery delivery. Fresh Direct when they opened was tremendously popular right away, and given amazon's hold in the online purchasing space, within manhattan (and other cities/neighborhoods where few people drive), online grocery purchasing experience matters more for the brand than in store experience.
petra 7y ago
About the last part,regarding the buying experience: The way Amazon likes to solve problems is by creating platforms. So they created FBA, and now others discover products for them. They also created their affiliate program, and that's a good way(combined with other business Intel methods) to discover online buying experiences with potential, and than scale them. And when they do see something non-standard with potential, they invest. For example: printed t-shirts. They copied that idea. And how do they win here? A combination of a lot of traffic, the best logistics, and maybe cheaper manufacturing costs(due to scale), combined with Amazon's execution. And that could be a general method for creating new experiences.
- streetcat1 7y ago
  You are correct. Moreover,amazon uses one platform to support others. For example the eCommerce platform is supported by AWS. I would rather look at amazon as a portfolio of platforms. This model is very hard to beat, since usually the emerging platform operate at a loss, which is big barrier to entry. The key to win here is not to fight the emerging platform but the supporting platform. For example, if one attack AWS, it would likley take down the eCommerce part.
scarface74 7y ago
From a profitability standpoint, I am just not seeing how Amazon retail has any chance at the long term success that the market does. Even as they have taken over different verticals, they still had to keep prices down and margins slim. They have no pricing power and have huge fixed cost. Of course, AWS is a different story.
- falcor84 7y ago
  >...huge fixed cost What fixed costs are you referring to? It seems to me that almost their entire cost structure is variable and quite low, compared to competitors.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Retail - warehouses and warehouse workers and automation.
    - mensetmanusman 7y ago
      Those costs are lowering with automation, green energy/power, and autonomous transportation.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Autonomous transportation - the same story that Uber and Lyft are saying as the savior for their businesses that will help them finally turn a profit.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    Compared to brick and mortar retail, yes. Compared to things like Dropship or the massive use of 3rd party logistics owned warehouses are a high fix cost item.
- petra 7y ago
  Let's see: 1. Private labels enjoy about 10% extra margin. Amazon is currently scaling private labels and exclusive products(same thing), like mad. 2. Low margin doesn't mean a business is bad, just hard. Walmart is an amazing business, with low margins. 3. Let's say amazon creates a system that can supply everything, to your home, in a few hours, at the lowest price. And customers will really like that. How many other companies can build that ? maybe 1-2 in the US. So now you have a duopoly. 4. Amazon controls demand. In the internet age, that's the most important thing. Could they manufacture their own products ? be responsible to purchase inputs for their manufacturers ? Build something like AWS for manufacturing ? Who knows. 5. Amazon is growing rapidly in B2B. Not sure, but i believe products there have much higher margins.
fortran77 7y ago
> Of course, sometimes "it makes no sense" is the right reaction (remember the Fire Phone, after all). But when clever people do things that make no sense, it can be worth looking twice. Even though Amazon failed with the Fire Phone, I wish they'd try again! I think Amazon is uniquely poised to do this. Have a half-smart phone that includes their back-end services (Alexa, shopping, movies, music, storage for your photos) and a selection of curated apps (Uber, Lyft, some popular games) and a decent browser, and you may have a good phone for older people, people who want a nice phone at, say, a $150 price point but don't want to deal with complexity
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  I used a Fire Phone this year up until I lost it- and I loved it. It was small, powerful [1] supported ADB, so I was able to get the Google Play Store on it (yeah, yeah, I know- but neither Discord, nor GMail, are going to install themselves) and the multi-camera thing in the front, though a confusing choice, was pretty cool. It might be just a bit of nostalgia, but I honestly miss my Fire Phone a lot. It did everything I needed it to, was fast, and actually fit in my pocket. [1] Unlike generation-old iPhones that get slowed to a stop by software updates, the thing never got updated, and so it was still quite good [1.1]. Yay, I guess? [1.1] I came from a really cheap BLU-branded phone, and so anything was better, really.
- hef19898 7y ago
  The Fire Phone is actually a very intriguing topic. If I had to choose out one point in time when Amazon started to change I would take the Fire Phone. What follows is just my personal opinion and impression I had working at Amazon back the day, so take it with grain of salt. I also was not directly involved with the Fire Phone. The Fire Phone arguably was Jeff's pet project. E.g. the four cameras facing forward were his idea if I remember well. Then it failed. What should have happened, based on leadership principles, would have been for Jeff to own it and admit it (vocally self critical and so on). That didn't happen, my impression was that blame was put on the lower echelons of the organization. For that was, in retrospect, the point when leadership principles started to be used as a political tool by some people. After that, at least for me, the culture changed as well. It took more than a year for that effect to trickle down, so. Amazon was still a good yet challenging place to work, but it felt much more like any other large corp out there.
cityzen 7y ago
> Amazon is so new Amazon is 25 years old. I saw a comment on Medium the other day that summed up my feelings on Amazon: Third, his “business” isn’t even a business. Amazon, for 99% of its history, lost more money than it earned. The reason it even still exists today is because it was propped up by truly gigantic loans in the form of stock shares and VC capital. Propping up a non-profitable company until it grows big enough to crush any and all competition is literally the Communist Chinese model of “capitalism.” Fourth, all of Bezos’s “wealth” is built on the backs of overworked, underpaid, and horrifically mistreated employees who aren’t even allowed enough time to use the bathroom, a sizeable percentage of which are elderly folks who, in a more just society, would be enjoying their retirement. https://medium.com/@lifeinromania/jeff-bezos-is-a-fraud-458fb8cb4b36 https://medium.com/@lifeinromania/jeff-bezos-is-a-fraud-458f... Another note from another site The Street: Using this estimate, the overall business, without AWS and Prime, lost about $2 billion last quarter. Although advertising is included here, too, this loss is almost all from the retail side of the business. https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/amazon-is-losing-money-from-retail- https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/amazon-is-losing-money-fro... operations-14571703 I don't doubt that Bezos is wicked smahhht but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you borrow so much money that you can run a business at a loss for decades and undercut everyone that you'll be successful. Except he clearly isn't even able to do that.
- mbesto 7y ago
  > The reason it even still exists today is because it was propped up by truly gigantic loans in the form of stock shares and VC capital And those people are being rewarded for it..so what? > Except he clearly isn't even able to do that. Except he does. They optimize for cash flow, not income, and they're absolutely crushing it in that department. Let me kindly refer you to Amazon's cash flow statement: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials/cash-flow https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials/... For more fun reading: https://25iq.com/2014/04/26/a-dozen-things-i-have-learned-from-jeff-bezos/ https://25iq.com/2014/04/26/a-dozen-things-i-have-learned-fr... > Fourth, all of Bezos’s “wealth” is built Bezos wealth is built by shareholders who invested in Amazon. What you're referring to is a moral and regulatory criticism, which frankly shouldn't be a criticism of Bezos himself but rather the people who govern his company and wealth.
blairanderson 7y ago
This is the fluffiest BE article i've read. > So maybe that’s the real test of Amazon’s pride: can it work out how to let us shop, rather than just buy? Why even write this article?

185 points by notlukesky 7y ago

> Amazon is systematically going through every branch of the idea tree around what retail is, and doing it without any pride. Agreed, but probably not in the way he means. Let's not pretend that everyone who has issues with the things Amazon does is just a relic fuddy-duddy waiting to be cleared away.

Scramblejams 7y ago

I guess I took the wrong thing away from this piece — where do I lay my hands on a sweet, sweet physical copy of the 1908 Sears catalog?!

zeristor 7y ago
From Amazon of course! https://www.amazon.co.uk/1908-Sears-Roebuck-Catalogue-Schroeder/dp/0873490185 https://www.amazon.co.uk/1908-Sears-Roebuck-Catalogue-Schroe... There’s also a copy on the Internet Archive, I’ve yet to find the portable forge: https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/ https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/
- zeristor 7y ago
  High grade wagon scales is my favourite find to date: https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/page/760 https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/page/760 (Scales is singular, isn’t it?)
  - sudhirj 7y ago
    In the same way that pants or trousers are singular, yeah. It’s really a pair of pants, trousers or scales. With all these things you need two to make them work.
    - kgwgk 7y ago
      Glasses as well, for two-eyed people.
      - zeristor 7y ago
        Or four eyed
- retzkek 7y ago
  Near the ACME anvils, of course! https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/page/528 https://archive.org/details/catalogueno11200sear/page/528 Such an amazing catalog, I could spend many hours paging through it.

GlennS 7y ago

I've recently been reading through the Amazon letters to shareholders [https://ir.aboutamazon.com/annual-reports/ https://ir.aboutamazon.com/annual-reports/]. It's clear from those letters that Amazon is not an experiment, but rather a flawlessly executed plan about how an online retailer can exploit their inherently better capital flows to grow very quickly. It's almost the opposite of the modern startup approach. Not: "We need to borrow money and take investment to get big and dominate the market". Instead: "If we drive our costs down and focus on fast fullfillment or orders/inventory turnover, we'll have all this spare money sloshing around to reinvest, and happy local customers. Therefore we can't help but get big.". (There's a lot more to it than this.) The first letter shows that they already understood the economics of web retail very well in 1997! Accusing them of lacking pride is also definitely missing the mark. Amazon are optimizing customer satisfaction and rate of fullfillment. They enter all these other markets exactly because they are proud enough to believe they'll win. Amazon wouldn't enter a market aiming to be 2nd best. I haven't gotten to the present yet, so I didn't know that Amazon had opened high-street retail shops. The earlier letters said that they wouldn't do that unless they figured out how to make it scale faster than their expenditures, like their online business.

jcims 7y ago
>Amazon are optimizing customer satisfaction and rate of fullfillment. This isn’t just a byproduct of high speed/low drag commerce, they intentionally and aggressively focus on and invest in customer satisfaction. Anecdotally and most certainly with exception in this very audience they are easily in my top three if not GOAT for direct human to human empathetic and effective customer service. Google in comparison leaves me feeling like I’m twisting random knobs on someone else’s lab project.
- PakG1 7y ago
  Looking at this now, it's amazing to compare with the public criticism that Werner Vogels gave to the face of the corporate blogging movement back in 2006. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/03/naked_answers.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/03/naked_answers.h... Back then when he claimed that Amazon did a very good job of being customer focused, I was thinking: maybe, but whatever, I'm not sure what's special about their customer experience compared to others. Today, I'm thinking: wow, now that's a real example of audacious vision both executed and realized.

eridius 7y ago

> All of this reminds me of stories about early Google, and how the company systematically rethought everything from first principles. Sometimes this was just a painful waste of time, as it learned the lessons everyone else had already learned, but sometimes the result was Gmail or Maps. Didn't Gmail start as someone's 20% project, rather than something that was "systematically rethought from first principles"?

irq 7y ago
Why can’t it be both a 20% project and rethought from first principals?
jasode 7y ago
>Didn't Gmail start as someone's 20% project, Gmail's creator, Paul Buchheit, said it was not a 20% project: https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/ https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/ excerpt: >Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.”
jimbokun 7y ago
Isn't encouraging employees to systematically rethink things from first principles, one of the core motivations for 20% projects?

PaulHoule 7y ago

I don't think Amazon can roll over supermarkets as easily as the average mall store. People visit mall stores sporadically enough that they might forget about the bad experience they had or hope it might be different or feel they don't have a choice. Thus mall stores can damage their brand image for a quick buck; in fact they are often brain washed by their own advertising and have no idea how the customer sees them. Grocery, on the other hand, has a customer that does back at least once a week, if the brand image is not upheld they can get similar goods elsewhere. That awful whole foods at union square with the cattle chutes at the checkout might look good compared to the local bodega in NYC, but does not look good compared to a good suburban supermarket (Wegmans). It is one case where urban folk could be out of touch with the broader market.

quickthrower2 7y ago
That is one bad thing about living in the middle of a city, the supermarkets are small, too busy and overpriced.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  > small, too busy and overpriced Describes every facet of a city IMO.
bluedino 7y ago
Other than spur-of-the-moment items, the only things I need to buy from the grocery are fresh meats and produce. Possibly bakery items. Everything that's boxed, bottled, or bagged, I can get from Amazon. Instead of making a list I just scan the barcode and order and throw the empty one away (or put the almst empty one in the back in the fridge)
zjaffee 7y ago
I grew up near that whole foods, and you have to remember that when the store opened there was not a single grocery store near by that was nearly as large and as good as that one. Hell, the mall that it's in might look less high end than the rest of Union Square, but it's far nicer than the department store Bradley's that was there before. Also worth noting that since that whole foods opened, the grocery situation throughout a lot of manhattan improved in that they opened quite a few more locations that also were rather large compared to the older grocery stores around. This all said, I think the real market in a place like manhattan is for grocery delivery. Fresh Direct when they opened was tremendously popular right away, and given amazon's hold in the online purchasing space, within manhattan (and other cities/neighborhoods where few people drive), online grocery purchasing experience matters more for the brand than in store experience.

petra 7y ago

About the last part,regarding the buying experience: The way Amazon likes to solve problems is by creating platforms. So they created FBA, and now others discover products for them. They also created their affiliate program, and that's a good way(combined with other business Intel methods) to discover online buying experiences with potential, and than scale them. And when they do see something non-standard with potential, they invest. For example: printed t-shirts. They copied that idea. And how do they win here? A combination of a lot of traffic, the best logistics, and maybe cheaper manufacturing costs(due to scale), combined with Amazon's execution. And that could be a general method for creating new experiences.

streetcat1 7y ago
You are correct. Moreover,amazon uses one platform to support others. For example the eCommerce platform is supported by AWS. I would rather look at amazon as a portfolio of platforms. This model is very hard to beat, since usually the emerging platform operate at a loss, which is big barrier to entry. The key to win here is not to fight the emerging platform but the supporting platform. For example, if one attack AWS, it would likley take down the eCommerce part.

scarface74 7y ago

From a profitability standpoint, I am just not seeing how Amazon retail has any chance at the long term success that the market does. Even as they have taken over different verticals, they still had to keep prices down and margins slim. They have no pricing power and have huge fixed cost. Of course, AWS is a different story.

falcor84 7y ago
>...huge fixed cost What fixed costs are you referring to? It seems to me that almost their entire cost structure is variable and quite low, compared to competitors.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Retail - warehouses and warehouse workers and automation.
  - mensetmanusman 7y ago
    Those costs are lowering with automation, green energy/power, and autonomous transportation.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Autonomous transportation - the same story that Uber and Lyft are saying as the savior for their businesses that will help them finally turn a profit.
- hef19898 7y ago
  Compared to brick and mortar retail, yes. Compared to things like Dropship or the massive use of 3rd party logistics owned warehouses are a high fix cost item.
petra 7y ago
Let's see: 1. Private labels enjoy about 10% extra margin. Amazon is currently scaling private labels and exclusive products(same thing), like mad. 2. Low margin doesn't mean a business is bad, just hard. Walmart is an amazing business, with low margins. 3. Let's say amazon creates a system that can supply everything, to your home, in a few hours, at the lowest price. And customers will really like that. How many other companies can build that ? maybe 1-2 in the US. So now you have a duopoly. 4. Amazon controls demand. In the internet age, that's the most important thing. Could they manufacture their own products ? be responsible to purchase inputs for their manufacturers ? Build something like AWS for manufacturing ? Who knows. 5. Amazon is growing rapidly in B2B. Not sure, but i believe products there have much higher margins.

fortran77 7y ago

> Of course, sometimes "it makes no sense" is the right reaction (remember the Fire Phone, after all). But when clever people do things that make no sense, it can be worth looking twice. Even though Amazon failed with the Fire Phone, I wish they'd try again! I think Amazon is uniquely poised to do this. Have a half-smart phone that includes their back-end services (Alexa, shopping, movies, music, storage for your photos) and a selection of curated apps (Uber, Lyft, some popular games) and a decent browser, and you may have a good phone for older people, people who want a nice phone at, say, a $150 price point but don't want to deal with complexity

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
I used a Fire Phone this year up until I lost it- and I loved it. It was small, powerful [1] supported ADB, so I was able to get the Google Play Store on it (yeah, yeah, I know- but neither Discord, nor GMail, are going to install themselves) and the multi-camera thing in the front, though a confusing choice, was pretty cool. It might be just a bit of nostalgia, but I honestly miss my Fire Phone a lot. It did everything I needed it to, was fast, and actually fit in my pocket. [1] Unlike generation-old iPhones that get slowed to a stop by software updates, the thing never got updated, and so it was still quite good [1.1]. Yay, I guess? [1.1] I came from a really cheap BLU-branded phone, and so anything was better, really.
hef19898 7y ago
The Fire Phone is actually a very intriguing topic. If I had to choose out one point in time when Amazon started to change I would take the Fire Phone. What follows is just my personal opinion and impression I had working at Amazon back the day, so take it with grain of salt. I also was not directly involved with the Fire Phone. The Fire Phone arguably was Jeff's pet project. E.g. the four cameras facing forward were his idea if I remember well. Then it failed. What should have happened, based on leadership principles, would have been for Jeff to own it and admit it (vocally self critical and so on). That didn't happen, my impression was that blame was put on the lower echelons of the organization. For that was, in retrospect, the point when leadership principles started to be used as a political tool by some people. After that, at least for me, the culture changed as well. It took more than a year for that effect to trickle down, so. Amazon was still a good yet challenging place to work, but it felt much more like any other large corp out there.

cityzen 7y ago

> Amazon is so new Amazon is 25 years old. I saw a comment on Medium the other day that summed up my feelings on Amazon: Third, his “business” isn’t even a business. Amazon, for 99% of its history, lost more money than it earned. The reason it even still exists today is because it was propped up by truly gigantic loans in the form of stock shares and VC capital. Propping up a non-profitable company until it grows big enough to crush any and all competition is literally the Communist Chinese model of “capitalism.” Fourth, all of Bezos’s “wealth” is built on the backs of overworked, underpaid, and horrifically mistreated employees who aren’t even allowed enough time to use the bathroom, a sizeable percentage of which are elderly folks who, in a more just society, would be enjoying their retirement. https://medium.com/@lifeinromania/jeff-bezos-is-a-fraud-458fb8cb4b36 https://medium.com/@lifeinromania/jeff-bezos-is-a-fraud-458f... Another note from another site The Street: Using this estimate, the overall business, without AWS and Prime, lost about $2 billion last quarter. Although advertising is included here, too, this loss is almost all from the retail side of the business. https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/amazon-is-losing-money-from-retail- https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/amazon-is-losing-money-fro... operations-14571703 I don't doubt that Bezos is wicked smahhht but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you borrow so much money that you can run a business at a loss for decades and undercut everyone that you'll be successful. Except he clearly isn't even able to do that.

mbesto 7y ago
> The reason it even still exists today is because it was propped up by truly gigantic loans in the form of stock shares and VC capital And those people are being rewarded for it..so what? > Except he clearly isn't even able to do that. Except he does. They optimize for cash flow, not income, and they're absolutely crushing it in that department. Let me kindly refer you to Amazon's cash flow statement: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials/cash-flow https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials/... For more fun reading: https://25iq.com/2014/04/26/a-dozen-things-i-have-learned-from-jeff-bezos/ https://25iq.com/2014/04/26/a-dozen-things-i-have-learned-fr... > Fourth, all of Bezos’s “wealth” is built Bezos wealth is built by shareholders who invested in Amazon. What you're referring to is a moral and regulatory criticism, which frankly shouldn't be a criticism of Bezos himself but rather the people who govern his company and wealth.

blairanderson 7y ago

This is the fluffiest BE article i've read. > So maybe that’s the real test of Amazon’s pride: can it work out how to let us shop, rather than just buy? Why even write this article?