4 ms·
That’s because Amazon knows retail is already dead. Either they get beat out by a competitor or the fed breaks up the company and retail is doomed without the i
by RijilV 7y ago
That’s because Amazon knows retail is already dead. Either they get beat out by a competitor or the fed breaks up the company and retail is doomed without the integration. AWS is just quietly milking the cash out of retail and funding the science projects.
- ztratar 7y agoThis is a preposterous statement. "Retail is already dead?" By what metric. Please enlighten us how people buying things is not a massive lever to the economy and Amazon's success?
- manigandham 7y agoRetail is far from dead with just about every retailer reporting record sales and consumer confidence remaining high. Amazon has plenty marketshare to take, whether as a monolithic organization or several independent companies.
- nine_k 7y agoRetail as a business is fine. Amazon's retail may be slowly dying, overcome with fakes, razor-thin margins, dwindling faith of buyers, and a looming anti-trust investigation. The retail department is at some risk of downsizing back to mostly books. It would be wise for them to concentrate on stuff that goes well: AWS, Alexa.
- manigandham 7y agoDownsizing back to books? That goes against every available metric. Amazon retail is growing like crazy. They have more retail channels opening up beyond the main ecommerce store and they're investing 1.5B for 1-day delivery (while trivially putting Fedex on death watch as a side effect). The only serious competition they have is Walmart which has hit on groceries as a magic bullet, and Target. Fakes are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem. Margins only help Amazon beat its competitors. And there's nothing antitrust can do since there's no monopoly on retail outlets, people want to shop there by choice.