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That would fall under the "they can't afford to deliver the orders they have" bucket if they can't find anyone that wants to do the proposed work. If true, Amaz
by ethagknight 7y ago
That would fall under the "they can't afford to deliver the orders they have" bucket if they can't find anyone that wants to do the proposed work. If true, Amazon is selling a service that isn't robust or flexible enough for such a season. Will be interesting to see how it shakes out.
- ignoramous 7y ago> Will be interesting to see how it shakes out. Long term is probably a combination of autonomous robots, self-driving vehicles, and delivery drones. The current crisis might even accelerate its development and deployment.
- zitterbewegung 7y agoYea well those strategies keep on always able to be done "next year".
- MattGaiser 7y ago> If true, Amazon is selling a service that isn't robust or flexible enough for such a season. Nobody in that area is robust enough for a once in a century pandemic.
- champagneben 7y agoDoes anyone know how Alibaba and the like have fared in China?
- barry-cotter 7y agoI live in Shanghai. There were two or three weeks after Lunar New Year where deliveries were delayed or more expensive or both for everything and grocery delivery slots were scarce for a month. Things are back to normal with all deliveries now.
- frandroid 7y agoBut since this was the Lunar New Year, I'm guessing that Ali Baba was already on a war footing?
- ethagknight 7y agoCompanies that have the ability to price according to the strain on their system, like FedEx and UPS, are presumably far more robust in this scenario. Here's the rub: Amazon Prime is a contract for services at a certain annual price between the customer and Amazon. Amazon cannot easily just ask for more if their end of the deal ends up more costly to deliver than forecasted.
- barry-cotter 7y ago> Amazon cannot easily just ask for more if their end of the deal ends up more costly to deliver than forecasted. Under the circumstances there’s probably no legal obstacle to them doing so. A pandemic looks, walks and quacks like force majeure.
- valuearb 7y agoBut they can easily take longer to deliver, and are, negating any need to change pricing.
- MattGaiser 7y agoThey can just not deliver the service. Amazon Prime doesn't guarantee that any item you want will come in two days.
- ardy42 7y ago> Amazon Prime doesn't guarantee that any item you want will come in two days. So you're saying their deal is "pay us $120/year but we make no commitment to provide anything in exchange?"
- Retric 7y agoThis is still far smaller than other pandemics in the last 100 years. The 1957 "Asian flu" had around 1–4 million dead. AIDS is sitting around 770,000 dead per year and the total is vastly higher etc. What makes things different about COVID-19 is how people are responding to it in the hope of saving vast numbers of lives.
- jlj 7y ago> This is still far smaller than other pandemics in the last 100 years. > What makes things different.. We are still in the early days of this pandemic. The history of COVID-19 is still being written. No one knows how long we're in for or what the final death count will be.
- vmception 7y agoAfter the meat shortage starts we'll all come out of this with a BMI of 20. It won't be because those remaining all lost weight.
- james_s_tayler 7y agoGiven R0 is around 4 and mortality rate is some single digit percentage, left unchecked this pandemic is bigger than those. The only recourse we have to reduce R is stay the hell away from each other. No business really plans on that.
- lallysingh 7y agoHow well did Internet stores deliver during them?
- pythonaut_16 7y agoAIDS isn't really a relevant comparison to COVID-19
- ashtonkem 7y agoIt’s entirely possible that they’ve literally bottomed out on the labor pool in some areas, what with the increase of risk to drivers and increased robustness in the social safety net. It’s kind of hard to plan around the “what if we can’t get more workers” scenario.