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Amazon reports its first unprofitable year since 2014

elwebmaster 4y ago
No fear of recession. Keep up raising rates and wrecking the economy.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  The job market doesn't show much of a recession brewing. Unemployment rate fell, with 517,000 new jobs instead of the expected 187,000. The real reason for Amazon's unprofitable year is in the article. > By far, the biggest culprit for Amazon's losses over the year was the company's hefty investment in the electric automaker Rivian whose value plummeted last year and ate into Amazon's bottom line.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    … and I think a lot of expansion that doesn’t make sense. Wegmans supermarkets opened a new store a few years ago at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in reaction to that Whole Foods in Union Square with that dehumanizing cattle chute. People in the cultural-industrial complex who grew up in NYC have been getting groceries at bodegas their whole life, it is easy to impress them with a grocery store that would get laughed at in Ohio. Wegmans had to move into that space as a matter of cultural self-defense. Amazon just sent me an email pleading me to renew my Prime subscription, boasting about somebody, somewhere gets 1-day shipping for some item sometime but they are dead to me because 2-day shipping disappeared 2 years ago for me. No way am I going to pay for a subscription to get service that is worse than what I get from other retailed. (E.g. I ordered a game from GameStop on Saturday, it was postmarked an hour later.)
    - themitigating 4y ago
      "Amazon just sent me an email pleading me to renew my Prime subscription, boasting about somebody, somewhere gets 1-day shipping for some item sometime but they are dead to me because 2-day shipping disappeared 2 years ago for me. No way am I going to pay for a subscription to get service that is worse than what I get from other retailed. (E.g. I ordered a game from GameStop on Saturday, it was postmarked an hour later.)" This might work for you and people in cities but as you get to other areas what you want might take longer than 2 days to arrive.
      - PaulHoule 4y ago
        I am in a rural area about a 4 hour drive from NYC. Other retailers frequently get me next day or 2nd day shipping. This includes big ones like Walmart and Office Depot and many speciality retailers based around NYC. Amazon now promises me 5-day shipping at best. I was one of the early adopters of Prime, I subscribed shortly after it came out. Amazon Prime shipping was better than average back then, it is worse than average now, and that's completely untenable for a service which is marketing itself as "premium". It's like if the cashier made fun at you at the store for using an American Express card.
    - KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
      Where is this cattle chute of theirs?
      - coredog64 4y ago
        When you line up to check out, there are six lines side-by-side. The cashier signals you via a screen on the ceiling. The WF on the UES only has two lines (and no screen).
        KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
        Oh you mean the checkout lines. I thought they were slaughtering cows on premise to keep them fresh. I couldn't imagine how they managed to transport them through the tiny San Francisco streets.
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        I'm talking about that other Union Square in NYC. But then again they have no trouble running bulls on Wall Street.
    - _ea1k 4y ago
      > Wegmans supermarkets opened a new store a few years ago at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in reaction to that Whole Foods in Union Square with that dehumanizing cattle chute. Dehumanizing cattle chute? What do you mean? I've never heard this term in relation to a grocer.
      - tedunangst 4y ago
        Instead of a dozen lines, there's a single line feeding all registers. Somebody studied queuing theory to save you checkout time, but now it's, oh, the humanity! (Unless I'm thinking of the wrong store.)
        mindslight 4y ago
        I wholeheartedly agree with you about queuing theory, and can't not think of it every time I'm in line somewhere. But apparently they needed to study up on the fallacy of personal choice, which pervades US culture. It's the same reason Southwest has open seating. When people choose their own seats, they stick to them hard. Whereas often on a plane with "assigned" seats, there will be a bunch of people trying to swap with other people (window for aisle, let me sit next to my buddy, etc), which interferes with the new people boarding.
        vel0city 4y ago
        Sam's Club has mobile app scan and go. Its so nice just being able to scan things as I put it in the cart. When you're ready to leave you just mark finish and pay in the app. It shows a QR code you show to the loss prevention people at the exit. They scan the QR code, scan three items in the cart and do a quick eyeball count of items, and you're on your way. I truly wish more places had this. Its been my favorite way to shop so far. So fast, so easy, far less machine learning and expensive cameras and sensors everywhere. Its even better than a single queue for checkout, which is for sure far better than multiple queues.
        ceejayoz 4y ago
        Wegmans had that for a while; they got rid of due to shrinkage. (I presume lots of people were stuffing $200 beef tenderloins into the bottoms of their bags.) They're trialing a camera-driven replacement now.
  - sharemywin 4y ago
    They should split amazon services from retail and all the physical crap. I would even dump the ecommerce site from the marketplace
    - Marazan 4y ago
      Confusing consumers about whether they are buying from Amazon or the market place of 3rd party tat is a core Amazon business line though.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Amazon’s investment in building out a delivery business is suicide. The cost-effectiveness of a fast delivery network is related to the volume it moves. If there is always a full truck heading in the right direction packages don’t waste time and money sitting in warehouses. If every other retailer is helping UPS and FedEX fill their trucks, Flavor Flav will be singing “Amazon Prime is a joke in yo’ town” Amazon is big but it is not big enough to be the best.
- 1970-01-01 4y ago
  They are more or less done building the network. Right now they're converting to EVs. The article mentions this. When every other retailer is buying fuel to deliver those packages Amazon will be raking in the savings.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Maybe in the US they're done building it, but they are still expanding their logistics and delivery network in other countries.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      And it make sense for Amazon to do that. Existing varriers, DHL, UPS and the like, are hitting capacity constraints and cannot cope with Amazon's growth anymore. And since the invest in capacity is not trivial, they'd love to see Amazon to contribute. So Amazon has to invest in someones capacity, so it can easily be their own. And in India, well, there it is either your own capacity or none at all.
  - darksaints 4y ago
    UPS spends ~10x more on people than it spends on fuel. And Amazon seems to be doing far less per driver than other carriers. It’s nice that Amazon is saving money on fuel, but that isn’t going to save them… they have to figure out how to run a logistics company first.
- JOnAgain 4y ago
blinding-streak 4y ago
AWS specifically reported 20% YoY revenue growth, which is the lowest it's ever been since they started reporting the numbers publicly.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  Teams at every single AWS customer, big and small, have probably spent the last quarter finding and ending wasteful, forgotten spend lurking in their cloud footprint in a desperate attempt to prove to their MBAs that they shouldn't be in the next round of layoffs because they just saved the company 10x their salary in cloud spend. I know I have.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    > they just saved the company 10x their salary in cloud spend. Great. Thanks for doing that. Now that we have got our cloud costs manageable, the next biggest expense is people! What did you say you did again? Oh, you're our cloud cost reduction guy? I don't think we need your skills anymore, that's not a problem anymore.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      I've had that thought too, but I'm playing a tactical game rather than a strategic one at this point. The name of the game is to survive the next few quarters. Also, there is a team whose job /is/ cloud cost reduction but all they ever seem to do is spend /more/ on enormously huge Glue jobs, Athena queries, etc.
      - lumost 4y ago
        The snake eats its own tail? This is why layoffs are imprecise, everyone starts pointing fingers. If the cloud cost reduction team only ever increased costs for 2-3 years... then there is a leadership problem for letting it continue. Otherwise the cloud cost reduction team probably was doing something else for leadership.
ctvo 4y ago
What's interesting is it was Bezos who made these large, pandemic driven investments. All of this, including the Rivian investment, was under his watch. And now it falls to Jassy to clean up the mess and take the heat.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Could have been part of his reason to step down...
- simplotek 4y ago
  > And now it falls to Jassy to clean up the mess and take the heat. It was Besos that drove Amazon's growth until basically now. I don't think it's fair to suddenly badmouth him for one bad year in what? Two decades worth of unparalleled growth?
ulizzle 4y ago
Good. They deserve it for bringing us the travesty that was rings of prime. That billion dollar bet sure didn’t pan out either.
martinald 4y ago
Seems to me that some of Amazon's expansion is all over the place. For example, Amazon Fresh stores in London are shutting down in places (Dalston) but opening enormous new ones in other spots (Monuement and Croydon) in the same month. I've barely seen anyone in one; with more staff than customers.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  The Ealing Broadway one, having been open 18 months, still sometimes has queues out of the door to let people in...
  - blitzar 4y ago
    Thats the queue from the Louisiana Chicken shop 3 doors down.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      I'm dying laughing, please confirm this is true and not a joke.
      - blitzar 4y ago
        https://www.mylondon.news/whats-on/i-went-see-foodies-queued-25505508 https://www.mylondon.news/whats-on/i-went-see-foodies-queued... 'I went to see why foodies queued for hours to try new Ealing's Popeyes which made £20k on its first day'
- londons_explore 4y ago
  The main selling point of Amazons stores is that with no checkouts they can have fewer staff, and less shop footprint for the same number of items sold. Both translate into being cheaper to run. That should mean they can afford to sell items cheaper than competitors, and win custom. Yet... Amazon Fresh is the most expensive shop of its kind around.
- zxcvbn4038 4y ago
diceduckmonk 4y ago
There was a 5+ year period in my life where I was receiving Amazon deliveries every week. Last year, I purchased a single item on Amazon. In the midst of moving apartments right now, and looking for basics + upgrades. I've noticed what made Amazon so great and dare I say addicting was trustworthy reviews and crowd-wisdom curation of good-enough products. This shopping cycle, that magic felt gone. The audacity of product search to be littered with ads. A few years into that Amazon habit, I started reaching for "fake amazon reviews" on Google to get an estimate of how authentic the reviews are. Even that step has been gamed and noisy now.
- sauwan 4y ago
  Agree 100%. And now the majority of the products are made by a 7 digit letter soup brand who just popped up out of no where and likely will be gone in 6 months as the product is shifted to some other brand to avoid bad reviews building up. I have very little faith in Amazon these days and specifically order from smaller specialty shops regularly again.
- kps 4y ago
  Amazon is now Aliexpress with (sometimes) local shipping. For years we've been told that the worker in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle. Now I tell you, Jeff, that the entrepreneur in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle.
  - chollida1 4y ago
    You may be surprised to know that Jeff doesn’t run Amazon anymore.
  - staringback 4y ago
    Have you ever tried to search for something on Aliexpress? It is the worst experience I have ever had. "Free Shipping" button (sometimes) shows things with free shipping, or the actual price of the item showing as $0.99 when that is for the optional plastic lid or whatever. Only about half the time I try to use Aliexpress it gives me the results I want. Furthermore, it is stupidly obvious when something is just being dropshipped vs coming from Amazon's warehouse, just look for the Prime logo on the items. At least with Amazon I get things relatively quickly even compared to other US based options such as Ebay or even going through the retailer directly
lostoldsession 4y ago
I cancelled prime a few year ago and haven't looked back. Amazon has basically turned into a flea market chock full of counterfeit goods, goods of questionable origin, and a relentless "review optimization" schemes under the hood. Recently my mother threw out a bunch of Christmas decorations because "they gave up the ghost". What had actually happened is she got counterfeit energizer batteries from amazon (which had 5-star reviews ofc). This story is not that big of a deal, but perfectly emblematic of the mess that is Amazon's store and hardly the only bad experience I have had with the junk they sell there. Also this has been going on for years now and amazon has done _nothing_ to address it. I suppose it's because people keep voting with their dollars for them to do nothing. Maybe now they'll start to think about it.
- noveltyaccount 4y ago
  > Also this has been going on for years now and amazon has done _nothing_ to address it. Even worse, I think Amazon has done tons to address it, but they just can't keep up with the evolving garbage. Or as the Red Queen said in Alice in Wonderland, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    Amazon’s fees are so high, and sellers pay it a massive amount of money on every return (something Amazon encourages by encouraging people to buy products they don’t need), which means that legitimate businesses find it extremely hard to survive. It’s no wonder Amazon is filled with illegitimate businesses because they are the only ones that can survive Amazon’s punitive terms of operation.
- BluePen7 4y ago
  There are certain categories you can basically guarantee to get fakes. Brand name batteries is one of them, I guess that's one more thing pushing people towards "Amazon Basics", it's the only one that's not going to be counterfeit.
pen2l 4y ago
It dawns on me now that perhaps every market and every community is fated to suffer some variation of the Eternal September effect at some certain critical point of capturing majority market share. Every community that matures enough to have argued certain key topics will have decided with confidence on those topics and not kowtowing to the consensus will seem heretical -- the stagnation in some measure spells its doom, Google is thinking how to deal with an increasingly adversarial ground in which many know how to game it with sophisticated SEO thus rendering its main capability a little bit muted, sellers saw that Amazon was a dominant market and sought to exploit the rating system to their advantage, and the end-result is a market saturated with players who were adept at gaming the system. The interesting flipside observation is that in each of these cases, we see the ground fertile then for a new approach to bud out -- a manifestation of Goodhart's law being consummate. New communities arise in the ashes of old ones, ChatGPT is maybe coming to displace Google in some places, what will take place of Amazon now that its rating system and reputation has tarnished?
- erichocean 4y ago
  > the stagnation in some measure spells its doom I'm not sure where you learned about "Eternal September", but it's the exact opposite of what you're describing: not stagnation of culture, but degradation to a pre-existing, high-quality culture due to the rapid influx of new individuals who don't give a shit about maintaining it. Amazon is going down with Americans precisely because the (predominantly) Chinese sellers on there now couldn't care less about the "nice online garden" Americans created and are instead using up the pre-existing cultural capital Americans had built up for their own selfish advancement—destroying the garden in the process. But yeah, sure, maybe after the garden has been burned to the ground, something new will replace it. Sounds great.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Amazon isn't failing on customer experience because of the Chinese. The Chinese didn't make Amazon lower their standards so far that it became profitable for Chinese factories to operate on Amazon the way they do. Chinese factories would also make money on a non-shitty Amazon.
Raed667 4y ago
I was on a student Prime subscription and forgot about it since 2015. Mid 2022 they emailed me to let me know that I need to pay the full price or lose my Prime access. They gave me a moment and enough friction to think about my subscription and I ended-up deciding that it wasn't worth it. I would have probably spent close to 1k on Amazon in that period, but instead it went to local/alternative shops. I feel the same about the friction Netflix is introducing with their IP address check, it will be enough friction for people to start asking "do i really need this?"
- sebazzz 4y ago
  > I would have probably spent close to 1k on Amazon in that period, but instead it went to local/alternative shops. I don't see the direct relation to Prime. Above a threshold of about 25 euro shipping is free, and otherwise it is often free or not too expensive.
specialist 4y ago
Did everyone forget Jeff Bezos semi-famous shareholder letter about "Day 1"? Seems clear to me that Amazon has entered "Day 2". u/lostoldsession's comment comparing Amazon Prime to a flea market is spot on. And demonstrates that Amazon has abandoned "Day 1" ethos wrt "customer obsession".
manv1 4y ago
Amazon has historically said that they don't care about their stock price. The losses in question are a mark-to-market loss on Rivian. If you look at their operational numbers they're mostly fine. That's the problem with the lack of financial literacy. Is the loss a paper loss or a hard dollar loss? On a hard dollar basis amazon is doing great, for the most part. Most people don't know the difference, and most reporters for some odd reason don't either. They'll use this "loss" to talk about how the end is nigh, etc. But that's really bullshit. The end isn't near for amazon.
- green-eclipse 4y ago
  No one is claiming the end is near for Amazon. That's a strawman. But it's clear from the earnings release that the business is experiencing strong headwinds in multiple areas of the empire. Amazon closed out its slowest year of growth in its quarter century as a public company. And Amazon does care about the stock price. If they didn't, they wouldn't issue guidance to Wall St analysts every quarter about expected revs and earnings. Not all big tech companies issue guidance. Apple stopped doing it several years ago. Google has never issued guidance. Maybe Amazon didn't care about the stock price a decade ago, but that's definitely not the case now.
  - manv1 4y ago
    I suppose you haven't been reading the normal press.
skee8383 4y ago
Economy is in recession. people don't have the money for chinese junk on amazon.
- ranting-moth 4y ago
  It's not junk. It clearly says in the tile "HIGH QUALITY". It also has 120,000 5 star reviews. Although for some reason it has no 2-4 star reviews. It has 12,000 1 star review who seem to be confused like you. They say it's junk and doesn't work and suggest the 5 star reviews are fake.
mint2 4y ago
Interesting that everyone commenting on why Amazon is no longer their choice is pointing out that it’s scamazon now but no one mentions worker treatment so far. Amazon truly is a race to the bottom. Even if it were the cheapest, the dehumanization of workers is a deal breaker. There’s been a lot of consternation around the recent tech layoffs and how ai like chat gpt is a bullshit generator. Now imagine if layoffs are not an abnormal occurrence but are a daily possibility and have zero benefits packages. And that they based on badly trained models that constantly monitor one’s performance, and are set to demand 110% at all times.
renewiltord 4y ago
Everyone going all like “I canceled prime and didn’t buy anything. This makes sense”. Guys, their retail and Prime stuff is going gangbusters, your cancelation notwithstanding. The loss is because of other stuff. I won’t spoil it for you. Sometimes articles contain details.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dahfizz 4y ago
> Net loss was $2.7 billion in 2022, or $0.27 per diluted share, compared with net income of $33.4 billion, or $3.24 per diluted share, in 2021. > 2022 net loss includes a pre-tax valuation loss of $12.7 billion included in non-operating income (expense) from the common stock investment in Rivian Automotive, Inc., compared to a pre-tax valuation gain of $11.8 billion from the investment in 2021. So, not counting the rivian investment, they gained ~$10B? This just feel like accounting crap to me. The business itself is still growing. The rivian stock has just been moving like a rollercoaster the past two years. And Amazon didn't invest in rivian for the capital gains, they did it to jumpstart their own EV delivery fleet. Not very impressive results, but this doesn't exactly spell doom for the company. Reading the comments here would make you think otherwise... https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/2/amazon-com-announces-fourth-quarter-results https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/2/amazon-com-announces-fo...
pfdietz 4y ago
I still use Amazon for books. It's not bad there, although the local library is cheaper. :)
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I've switched back to my neighborhood bookshop (who thankfully still exists). If they don't have it in stock, they can get it pretty quickly.
nixcraft 4y ago
I sent a $25 Xbox gift card to a kid as Xmas gift. Guess what? The card was faulty, and the numbers were not visible at all. They sent me a picture and asked if Amazon would replace it. So, I contacted Amazon support, and they asked me to send a card back and gave me a return shipping label assuring me that it was under Amazon A-Z Guarantee. When my friend sent the card to them, they only refunded $0.32 and said the rest was restocking fees. Imagine if someone is buying MacBook Air worth $1000 and Amazon is giving you $1 as a refund saying $999 was a restocking fee. I explained to support over chat that it was a damaged Xbox gift card, but they refused and thought my friend messed it up while scratching it. So fuck Amazon. Their support is gone down hill, and it is all money-grabbing and scamming sellers. Also, they deleted my review. Only 5 stars reviews are appearing on the page except one person with similar issue.
throwawayacc6 4y ago
Has anyone else experienced a gigantic degradation in Amazon's search over the past 5 or so years? Even when searching for a specific part number, the results are packed full of obviously fake unrelated items from shady sellers. The reviews are obviously fake as well, but they're all five stars. Amazon is unusable.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  There was a recent analysis video someone posted on HN about this. Most of the search results these days are actually ads, even 3 pages into the results!
deleted 4y ago
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karmakaze 4y ago
Buying on Amazon now is like going to the casino. Sometimes I'll play but only if I'm content to take the risk and lose.
ChildOfChaos 4y ago
It seems for all the comments online that Amazon has gone to crap in the US. It's still pretty decent and my go too for online shopping here in the UK, however the delivery has gotten awful and that is with Prime increasing it's price. Almost nothing is next day anymore, which is what the service was meant to be. With Prime you can set a delivery day, but often they want to deliver different items in your order on different days, despite setting a 'prime' day, with no really clear reason why or how to avoid this. It's really annoying.
- BluePen7 4y ago
  As a Canadian, there isn't actually an alternative with reliable and fast shipping. And if you live outside of a major city, it's still like 4 days. The only downside is there's entire categories of amazon lost to fakes, if I need batteries I either have to buy amazon basics, or drive to the store.
wojciii 4y ago
Amazon is crap. It's impossible to find anything on the site that is not Chinese garbage. It's not possible to remove Chinese sellers .. not its possible to sort by 5 stars reviews .. I mean I can sort, but the reviews are mostly fake. I mostly stopped using the site. I live in DK and therefore use the German site. I had one experience where they refused to take my credit card for some reason and I had to wire the money using the bank. It cost me 20% more and after this I stopped to use the site since the support just keept on repeating the same statements.

No fear of recession. Keep up raising rates and wrecking the economy.

ceejayoz 4y ago
The job market doesn't show much of a recession brewing. Unemployment rate fell, with 517,000 new jobs instead of the expected 187,000. The real reason for Amazon's unprofitable year is in the article. > By far, the biggest culprit for Amazon's losses over the year was the company's hefty investment in the electric automaker Rivian whose value plummeted last year and ate into Amazon's bottom line.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  … and I think a lot of expansion that doesn’t make sense. Wegmans supermarkets opened a new store a few years ago at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in reaction to that Whole Foods in Union Square with that dehumanizing cattle chute. People in the cultural-industrial complex who grew up in NYC have been getting groceries at bodegas their whole life, it is easy to impress them with a grocery store that would get laughed at in Ohio. Wegmans had to move into that space as a matter of cultural self-defense. Amazon just sent me an email pleading me to renew my Prime subscription, boasting about somebody, somewhere gets 1-day shipping for some item sometime but they are dead to me because 2-day shipping disappeared 2 years ago for me. No way am I going to pay for a subscription to get service that is worse than what I get from other retailed. (E.g. I ordered a game from GameStop on Saturday, it was postmarked an hour later.)
  - themitigating 4y ago
    "Amazon just sent me an email pleading me to renew my Prime subscription, boasting about somebody, somewhere gets 1-day shipping for some item sometime but they are dead to me because 2-day shipping disappeared 2 years ago for me. No way am I going to pay for a subscription to get service that is worse than what I get from other retailed. (E.g. I ordered a game from GameStop on Saturday, it was postmarked an hour later.)" This might work for you and people in cities but as you get to other areas what you want might take longer than 2 days to arrive.
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      I am in a rural area about a 4 hour drive from NYC. Other retailers frequently get me next day or 2nd day shipping. This includes big ones like Walmart and Office Depot and many speciality retailers based around NYC. Amazon now promises me 5-day shipping at best. I was one of the early adopters of Prime, I subscribed shortly after it came out. Amazon Prime shipping was better than average back then, it is worse than average now, and that's completely untenable for a service which is marketing itself as "premium". It's like if the cashier made fun at you at the store for using an American Express card.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
    Where is this cattle chute of theirs?
    - coredog64 4y ago
      When you line up to check out, there are six lines side-by-side. The cashier signals you via a screen on the ceiling. The WF on the UES only has two lines (and no screen).
      - KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
        Oh you mean the checkout lines. I thought they were slaughtering cows on premise to keep them fresh. I couldn't imagine how they managed to transport them through the tiny San Francisco streets.
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        I'm talking about that other Union Square in NYC. But then again they have no trouble running bulls on Wall Street.
  - _ea1k 4y ago
    > Wegmans supermarkets opened a new store a few years ago at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in reaction to that Whole Foods in Union Square with that dehumanizing cattle chute. Dehumanizing cattle chute? What do you mean? I've never heard this term in relation to a grocer.
    - tedunangst 4y ago
      Instead of a dozen lines, there's a single line feeding all registers. Somebody studied queuing theory to save you checkout time, but now it's, oh, the humanity! (Unless I'm thinking of the wrong store.)
      - mindslight 4y ago
        I wholeheartedly agree with you about queuing theory, and can't not think of it every time I'm in line somewhere. But apparently they needed to study up on the fallacy of personal choice, which pervades US culture. It's the same reason Southwest has open seating. When people choose their own seats, they stick to them hard. Whereas often on a plane with "assigned" seats, there will be a bunch of people trying to swap with other people (window for aisle, let me sit next to my buddy, etc), which interferes with the new people boarding.
      - vel0city 4y ago
        Sam's Club has mobile app scan and go. Its so nice just being able to scan things as I put it in the cart. When you're ready to leave you just mark finish and pay in the app. It shows a QR code you show to the loss prevention people at the exit. They scan the QR code, scan three items in the cart and do a quick eyeball count of items, and you're on your way. I truly wish more places had this. Its been my favorite way to shop so far. So fast, so easy, far less machine learning and expensive cameras and sensors everywhere. Its even better than a single queue for checkout, which is for sure far better than multiple queues.
        ceejayoz 4y ago
        Wegmans had that for a while; they got rid of due to shrinkage. (I presume lots of people were stuffing $200 beef tenderloins into the bottoms of their bags.) They're trialing a camera-driven replacement now.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  They should split amazon services from retail and all the physical crap. I would even dump the ecommerce site from the marketplace
  - Marazan 4y ago
    Confusing consumers about whether they are buying from Amazon or the market place of 3rd party tat is a core Amazon business line though.

Amazon’s investment in building out a delivery business is suicide. The cost-effectiveness of a fast delivery network is related to the volume it moves. If there is always a full truck heading in the right direction packages don’t waste time and money sitting in warehouses. If every other retailer is helping UPS and FedEX fill their trucks, Flavor Flav will be singing “Amazon Prime is a joke in yo’ town” Amazon is big but it is not big enough to be the best.

1970-01-01 4y ago
They are more or less done building the network. Right now they're converting to EVs. The article mentions this. When every other retailer is buying fuel to deliver those packages Amazon will be raking in the savings.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Maybe in the US they're done building it, but they are still expanding their logistics and delivery network in other countries.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    And it make sense for Amazon to do that. Existing varriers, DHL, UPS and the like, are hitting capacity constraints and cannot cope with Amazon's growth anymore. And since the invest in capacity is not trivial, they'd love to see Amazon to contribute. So Amazon has to invest in someones capacity, so it can easily be their own. And in India, well, there it is either your own capacity or none at all.
- darksaints 4y ago
  UPS spends ~10x more on people than it spends on fuel. And Amazon seems to be doing far less per driver than other carriers. It’s nice that Amazon is saving money on fuel, but that isn’t going to save them… they have to figure out how to run a logistics company first.
JOnAgain 4y ago

blinding-streak 4y ago

AWS specifically reported 20% YoY revenue growth, which is the lowest it's ever been since they started reporting the numbers publicly.

ElevenLathe 4y ago
Teams at every single AWS customer, big and small, have probably spent the last quarter finding and ending wasteful, forgotten spend lurking in their cloud footprint in a desperate attempt to prove to their MBAs that they shouldn't be in the next round of layoffs because they just saved the company 10x their salary in cloud spend. I know I have.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  > they just saved the company 10x their salary in cloud spend. Great. Thanks for doing that. Now that we have got our cloud costs manageable, the next biggest expense is people! What did you say you did again? Oh, you're our cloud cost reduction guy? I don't think we need your skills anymore, that's not a problem anymore.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    I've had that thought too, but I'm playing a tactical game rather than a strategic one at this point. The name of the game is to survive the next few quarters. Also, there is a team whose job /is/ cloud cost reduction but all they ever seem to do is spend /more/ on enormously huge Glue jobs, Athena queries, etc.
    - lumost 4y ago
      The snake eats its own tail? This is why layoffs are imprecise, everyone starts pointing fingers. If the cloud cost reduction team only ever increased costs for 2-3 years... then there is a leadership problem for letting it continue. Otherwise the cloud cost reduction team probably was doing something else for leadership.

ctvo 4y ago

What's interesting is it was Bezos who made these large, pandemic driven investments. All of this, including the Rivian investment, was under his watch. And now it falls to Jassy to clean up the mess and take the heat.

londons_explore 4y ago
Could have been part of his reason to step down...
simplotek 4y ago
> And now it falls to Jassy to clean up the mess and take the heat. It was Besos that drove Amazon's growth until basically now. I don't think it's fair to suddenly badmouth him for one bad year in what? Two decades worth of unparalleled growth?

ulizzle 4y ago

Good. They deserve it for bringing us the travesty that was rings of prime. That billion dollar bet sure didn’t pan out either.

martinald 4y ago

Seems to me that some of Amazon's expansion is all over the place. For example, Amazon Fresh stores in London are shutting down in places (Dalston) but opening enormous new ones in other spots (Monuement and Croydon) in the same month. I've barely seen anyone in one; with more staff than customers.

londons_explore 4y ago
The Ealing Broadway one, having been open 18 months, still sometimes has queues out of the door to let people in...
- blitzar 4y ago
  Thats the queue from the Louisiana Chicken shop 3 doors down.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    I'm dying laughing, please confirm this is true and not a joke.
    - blitzar 4y ago
      https://www.mylondon.news/whats-on/i-went-see-foodies-queued-25505508 https://www.mylondon.news/whats-on/i-went-see-foodies-queued... 'I went to see why foodies queued for hours to try new Ealing's Popeyes which made £20k on its first day'
londons_explore 4y ago
The main selling point of Amazons stores is that with no checkouts they can have fewer staff, and less shop footprint for the same number of items sold. Both translate into being cheaper to run. That should mean they can afford to sell items cheaper than competitors, and win custom. Yet... Amazon Fresh is the most expensive shop of its kind around.
zxcvbn4038 4y ago

diceduckmonk 4y ago

There was a 5+ year period in my life where I was receiving Amazon deliveries every week. Last year, I purchased a single item on Amazon. In the midst of moving apartments right now, and looking for basics + upgrades. I've noticed what made Amazon so great and dare I say addicting was trustworthy reviews and crowd-wisdom curation of good-enough products. This shopping cycle, that magic felt gone. The audacity of product search to be littered with ads. A few years into that Amazon habit, I started reaching for "fake amazon reviews" on Google to get an estimate of how authentic the reviews are. Even that step has been gamed and noisy now.

sauwan 4y ago
Agree 100%. And now the majority of the products are made by a 7 digit letter soup brand who just popped up out of no where and likely will be gone in 6 months as the product is shifted to some other brand to avoid bad reviews building up. I have very little faith in Amazon these days and specifically order from smaller specialty shops regularly again.
kps 4y ago
Amazon is now Aliexpress with (sometimes) local shipping. For years we've been told that the worker in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle. Now I tell you, Jeff, that the entrepreneur in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle.
- chollida1 4y ago
  You may be surprised to know that Jeff doesn’t run Amazon anymore.
- staringback 4y ago
  Have you ever tried to search for something on Aliexpress? It is the worst experience I have ever had. "Free Shipping" button (sometimes) shows things with free shipping, or the actual price of the item showing as $0.99 when that is for the optional plastic lid or whatever. Only about half the time I try to use Aliexpress it gives me the results I want. Furthermore, it is stupidly obvious when something is just being dropshipped vs coming from Amazon's warehouse, just look for the Prime logo on the items. At least with Amazon I get things relatively quickly even compared to other US based options such as Ebay or even going through the retailer directly

lostoldsession 4y ago

I cancelled prime a few year ago and haven't looked back. Amazon has basically turned into a flea market chock full of counterfeit goods, goods of questionable origin, and a relentless "review optimization" schemes under the hood. Recently my mother threw out a bunch of Christmas decorations because "they gave up the ghost". What had actually happened is she got counterfeit energizer batteries from amazon (which had 5-star reviews ofc). This story is not that big of a deal, but perfectly emblematic of the mess that is Amazon's store and hardly the only bad experience I have had with the junk they sell there. Also this has been going on for years now and amazon has done _nothing_ to address it. I suppose it's because people keep voting with their dollars for them to do nothing. Maybe now they'll start to think about it.

noveltyaccount 4y ago
> Also this has been going on for years now and amazon has done _nothing_ to address it. Even worse, I think Amazon has done tons to address it, but they just can't keep up with the evolving garbage. Or as the Red Queen said in Alice in Wonderland, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  Amazon’s fees are so high, and sellers pay it a massive amount of money on every return (something Amazon encourages by encouraging people to buy products they don’t need), which means that legitimate businesses find it extremely hard to survive. It’s no wonder Amazon is filled with illegitimate businesses because they are the only ones that can survive Amazon’s punitive terms of operation.
BluePen7 4y ago
There are certain categories you can basically guarantee to get fakes. Brand name batteries is one of them, I guess that's one more thing pushing people towards "Amazon Basics", it's the only one that's not going to be counterfeit.

pen2l 4y ago

It dawns on me now that perhaps every market and every community is fated to suffer some variation of the Eternal September effect at some certain critical point of capturing majority market share. Every community that matures enough to have argued certain key topics will have decided with confidence on those topics and not kowtowing to the consensus will seem heretical -- the stagnation in some measure spells its doom, Google is thinking how to deal with an increasingly adversarial ground in which many know how to game it with sophisticated SEO thus rendering its main capability a little bit muted, sellers saw that Amazon was a dominant market and sought to exploit the rating system to their advantage, and the end-result is a market saturated with players who were adept at gaming the system. The interesting flipside observation is that in each of these cases, we see the ground fertile then for a new approach to bud out -- a manifestation of Goodhart's law being consummate. New communities arise in the ashes of old ones, ChatGPT is maybe coming to displace Google in some places, what will take place of Amazon now that its rating system and reputation has tarnished?

erichocean 4y ago
> the stagnation in some measure spells its doom I'm not sure where you learned about "Eternal September", but it's the exact opposite of what you're describing: not stagnation of culture, but degradation to a pre-existing, high-quality culture due to the rapid influx of new individuals who don't give a shit about maintaining it. Amazon is going down with Americans precisely because the (predominantly) Chinese sellers on there now couldn't care less about the "nice online garden" Americans created and are instead using up the pre-existing cultural capital Americans had built up for their own selfish advancement—destroying the garden in the process. But yeah, sure, maybe after the garden has been burned to the ground, something new will replace it. Sounds great.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Amazon isn't failing on customer experience because of the Chinese. The Chinese didn't make Amazon lower their standards so far that it became profitable for Chinese factories to operate on Amazon the way they do. Chinese factories would also make money on a non-shitty Amazon.

Raed667 4y ago

I was on a student Prime subscription and forgot about it since 2015. Mid 2022 they emailed me to let me know that I need to pay the full price or lose my Prime access. They gave me a moment and enough friction to think about my subscription and I ended-up deciding that it wasn't worth it. I would have probably spent close to 1k on Amazon in that period, but instead it went to local/alternative shops. I feel the same about the friction Netflix is introducing with their IP address check, it will be enough friction for people to start asking "do i really need this?"

sebazzz 4y ago
> I would have probably spent close to 1k on Amazon in that period, but instead it went to local/alternative shops. I don't see the direct relation to Prime. Above a threshold of about 25 euro shipping is free, and otherwise it is often free or not too expensive.

specialist 4y ago

Did everyone forget Jeff Bezos semi-famous shareholder letter about "Day 1"? Seems clear to me that Amazon has entered "Day 2". u/lostoldsession's comment comparing Amazon Prime to a flea market is spot on. And demonstrates that Amazon has abandoned "Day 1" ethos wrt "customer obsession".

manv1 4y ago

Amazon has historically said that they don't care about their stock price. The losses in question are a mark-to-market loss on Rivian. If you look at their operational numbers they're mostly fine. That's the problem with the lack of financial literacy. Is the loss a paper loss or a hard dollar loss? On a hard dollar basis amazon is doing great, for the most part. Most people don't know the difference, and most reporters for some odd reason don't either. They'll use this "loss" to talk about how the end is nigh, etc. But that's really bullshit. The end isn't near for amazon.

green-eclipse 4y ago
No one is claiming the end is near for Amazon. That's a strawman. But it's clear from the earnings release that the business is experiencing strong headwinds in multiple areas of the empire. Amazon closed out its slowest year of growth in its quarter century as a public company. And Amazon does care about the stock price. If they didn't, they wouldn't issue guidance to Wall St analysts every quarter about expected revs and earnings. Not all big tech companies issue guidance. Apple stopped doing it several years ago. Google has never issued guidance. Maybe Amazon didn't care about the stock price a decade ago, but that's definitely not the case now.
- manv1 4y ago
  I suppose you haven't been reading the normal press.

skee8383 4y ago

Economy is in recession. people don't have the money for chinese junk on amazon.

ranting-moth 4y ago
It's not junk. It clearly says in the tile "HIGH QUALITY". It also has 120,000 5 star reviews. Although for some reason it has no 2-4 star reviews. It has 12,000 1 star review who seem to be confused like you. They say it's junk and doesn't work and suggest the 5 star reviews are fake.

mint2 4y ago

Interesting that everyone commenting on why Amazon is no longer their choice is pointing out that it’s scamazon now but no one mentions worker treatment so far. Amazon truly is a race to the bottom. Even if it were the cheapest, the dehumanization of workers is a deal breaker. There’s been a lot of consternation around the recent tech layoffs and how ai like chat gpt is a bullshit generator. Now imagine if layoffs are not an abnormal occurrence but are a daily possibility and have zero benefits packages. And that they based on badly trained models that constantly monitor one’s performance, and are set to demand 110% at all times.

renewiltord 4y ago

Everyone going all like “I canceled prime and didn’t buy anything. This makes sense”. Guys, their retail and Prime stuff is going gangbusters, your cancelation notwithstanding. The loss is because of other stuff. I won’t spoil it for you. Sometimes articles contain details.

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dahfizz 4y ago

> Net loss was $2.7 billion in 2022, or $0.27 per diluted share, compared with net income of $33.4 billion, or $3.24 per diluted share, in 2021. > 2022 net loss includes a pre-tax valuation loss of $12.7 billion included in non-operating income (expense) from the common stock investment in Rivian Automotive, Inc., compared to a pre-tax valuation gain of $11.8 billion from the investment in 2021. So, not counting the rivian investment, they gained ~$10B? This just feel like accounting crap to me. The business itself is still growing. The rivian stock has just been moving like a rollercoaster the past two years. And Amazon didn't invest in rivian for the capital gains, they did it to jumpstart their own EV delivery fleet. Not very impressive results, but this doesn't exactly spell doom for the company. Reading the comments here would make you think otherwise... https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/2/amazon-com-announces-fourth-quarter-results https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/2/amazon-com-announces-fo...

pfdietz 4y ago

I still use Amazon for books. It's not bad there, although the local library is cheaper. :)

JohnFen 4y ago
I've switched back to my neighborhood bookshop (who thankfully still exists). If they don't have it in stock, they can get it pretty quickly.

nixcraft 4y ago

I sent a $25 Xbox gift card to a kid as Xmas gift. Guess what? The card was faulty, and the numbers were not visible at all. They sent me a picture and asked if Amazon would replace it. So, I contacted Amazon support, and they asked me to send a card back and gave me a return shipping label assuring me that it was under Amazon A-Z Guarantee. When my friend sent the card to them, they only refunded $0.32 and said the rest was restocking fees. Imagine if someone is buying MacBook Air worth $1000 and Amazon is giving you $1 as a refund saying $999 was a restocking fee. I explained to support over chat that it was a damaged Xbox gift card, but they refused and thought my friend messed it up while scratching it. So fuck Amazon. Their support is gone down hill, and it is all money-grabbing and scamming sellers. Also, they deleted my review. Only 5 stars reviews are appearing on the page except one person with similar issue.

throwawayacc6 4y ago

Has anyone else experienced a gigantic degradation in Amazon's search over the past 5 or so years? Even when searching for a specific part number, the results are packed full of obviously fake unrelated items from shady sellers. The reviews are obviously fake as well, but they're all five stars. Amazon is unusable.

Ancalagon 4y ago
There was a recent analysis video someone posted on HN about this. Most of the search results these days are actually ads, even 3 pages into the results!

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karmakaze 4y ago

Buying on Amazon now is like going to the casino. Sometimes I'll play but only if I'm content to take the risk and lose.

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

It seems for all the comments online that Amazon has gone to crap in the US. It's still pretty decent and my go too for online shopping here in the UK, however the delivery has gotten awful and that is with Prime increasing it's price. Almost nothing is next day anymore, which is what the service was meant to be. With Prime you can set a delivery day, but often they want to deliver different items in your order on different days, despite setting a 'prime' day, with no really clear reason why or how to avoid this. It's really annoying.

BluePen7 4y ago
As a Canadian, there isn't actually an alternative with reliable and fast shipping. And if you live outside of a major city, it's still like 4 days. The only downside is there's entire categories of amazon lost to fakes, if I need batteries I either have to buy amazon basics, or drive to the store.

wojciii 4y ago

Amazon is crap. It's impossible to find anything on the site that is not Chinese garbage. It's not possible to remove Chinese sellers .. not its possible to sort by 5 stars reviews .. I mean I can sort, but the reviews are mostly fake. I mostly stopped using the site. I live in DK and therefore use the German site. I had one experience where they refused to take my credit card for some reason and I had to wire the money using the bank. It cost me 20% more and after this I stopped to use the site since the support just keept on repeating the same statements.