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Amazon Takes Fresh Stab at $16B Housekeeping Industry

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Re: Amazon Takes Fresh Stab at $16B Housekeeping Industry

#61

Post by pdkl95 »

neogodless wrote: post #48
neogodless wrote: post #6

I'm in the weird position where, we are family planning, but (to our knowledge) unsuccessful, but started getting a series of emails from Amazon congratulating us and offering up suggestions like vitamins, baby registry and, of course, housecleaning services w/ discounts available. (The first email was, to put it lightly, premature. Now we got one that says "week one", and it could be right, or not. We don't know yet…

ETA: Too late to edit, but the point I'm trying to make is that Amazon is able to gather data on potential customers, and it's possible, even likely, that when you get pregnant, you start to think "paying for housecleaning" is worth it, and the combination of knowing if this is true, and being able to predict (or know) when someone is pregnant through their data mining and algorithms gives them a position to advertis…

"How Companies Learn Your Secrets" (2012)

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

Re: Amazon Takes Fresh Stab at $16B Housekeeping Industry

#62

Post by neogodless »

jaibot wrote: post #45
neogodless wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only assume. It's annoying that I can't (trivially) block that level of information gathering. I use AdBlock and I disable 3rd party cookies. I personally don't think I've looked up anything that would "tip my hand", but I'm sure my wife has used my computer/browser enough that things she researches have leaked into the corporate overlord databases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

Is this a trivial change in user behavior from using Chrome?

(My assumption is that, at the very least, I'll need to switch from using my password manager extension to using a separate app, and having to copy/paste. I'll also probably have to export/import bookmarks. I also use Chrome profiles heavily. Are all of these things trivial to migrate?)

Re: Amazon Takes Fresh Stab at $16B Housekeeping Industry

#63

Post by Eridrus »

mabbo wrote: post #7

> The online retailer is swapping the low cost of contract workers for the greater control of employing its own people. Doing so puts it on the hook for things like minimum wage, workers compensation and overtime pay. But it also lets Amazon determine how the workers are trained, which cleaning products they use and how they organize their schedules. As an Amazon employee, I very much hope this trend continues. Amazo…

I think the fact that cleaning services are a lot less standardized is what drives the need to hire people. There's very little difference in logistics: its both easy to do an average job (just take the route google maps suggests) and its easy to monitor if contractors are doing a reasonable job.

The impression I get for cleaning services from people who have hired them is that the person doing it will generally do the smallest/easiest amount of work possible in the allocated time, which leads to poor customer satisfaction/retention, so exercising more control as an employer is necessary.

Re: Amazon Takes Fresh Stab at $16B Housekeeping Industry

#64

Post by TheCoelacanth »

kakarot wrote: post #53
matthewmacleod wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem certain of that, but I don't think it's been quite that clear for some time. I'm not a physicist, but AFAIK the Copenhagen interpretation essentially requires indeterminacy. Suffice it to say that I don't think it's as clear-cut as you do :)

Quantum mechanics has no bearing on the macro scale that classical physics inhabit in our current models. We currently have not synthesized the two models into a singular theory. Classical physics is deterministic. I thought this was common knowledge...

The whole point of quantum mechanics is that classical physics doesn't fully describe the world. Obviously phenomena that require quantum mechanics to describe them are rarely observable at the macro level, but it's clearly not the case that they are never observable because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to make the observations that led to the idea of quantum mechanics.

It seems readily apparent that the future is not predictable solely using classical physics, because the development of the theory of quantum mechanics is something that happened and it could not have been predicted solely based on classical physics.

Re: Amazon Takes Fresh Stab at $16B Housekeeping Industry

#65

Post by mdasen »

Dowwie wrote: post #27

Does anyone remember HomeJoy? See [1] and [2] below. Amazon isn't necessarily using this business model so that it may differentiate itself from hands-off matching services. In this case, regulation and legal battles that have destroyed entrepreneurial enterprises like HomeJoy are guiding Amazon. Improved customer experience is a side effect. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/07/23/what-reall... [2] htt…

Aaron Cheung, co-founder of HomeJoy, launched Homeaglow which seem like the same business model as HomeJoy. Xiao Wei Chen, COO at HomeJoy, is also a co-founder of Homeaglow.

I'm not saying it'll succeed this time, but two execs at HomeJoy have decided to dedicate another 3 years of their lives to the idea with Homeaglow.

I know that the articles mention the lawsuits over classification of independent-contractor vs employee, but nestled in there is a huge customer acquisition cost against a low lifetime value. Offering an initial $19 cleaning means very high acquisition costs and you're getting customers who probably won't return with $100 a month later. The Forbes article notes that Handy has a much better customer retention rate and recurring revenue is so important.

It also sounds like HomeJoy might have been over-staffed. Re/code notes that 20 employees of HomeJoy would be joining Googles product and engineering teams. That seems like a lot of salary. I don't know what HomeJoy's site was like, but Homeaglow's seems simplistic - some PHP just meant to handle the booking/matching/reviews. Even small things like the forms are the kinda simplistic looking ones where the zip-code box takes up the full width of the form on a new line (the way it would if you grabbed Bootstrap and didn't want to customize anything) rather than having a form with a more natural City, State, Zip layout. But it gets the job done and looks like it can be maintained with minimal effort.

If you have 20 employees of Google-caliber, you have to imagine a lot of salary cost. From LinkedIn, it looks like Homeaglow is a 2-person shop.

It could just be that while it's a large industry, they had trouble retaining customers and had a high run rate at HomeJoy. With a lower run rate and some alterations, Homeaglow might be a happy business. They don't seem to discount first cleanings hugely. It looks like they offer a free half hour on a 3 hour cleaning for first-time users, but that means that someone is willing to spend a hundred compared to someone that just sees a deal at $19. They also only allow recurring plans that you can cancel, but it gets you into the mindset that this should be a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly recurring expense.

Re: Amazon Takes Fresh Stab at $16B Housekeeping Industry

#66

Post by [deleted] »

mseebach wrote: post #42
castis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but does this make OPs forecast any less possible?

The OPs forecast is predicated on an understanding of companies like Google and Amazon being so big and powerful that they are immune to the ebb and flow that define normal market conditions and allow new entrants to prosper and old companies to whither when they no longer create enough value for consumers. My argument is that when Facebook, a company until a few weeks ago commonly understood to be every bit as immor…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Takes Fresh Stab at $16B Housekeeping Industry

#67

Post by ghaff »

GSimon wrote: post #58
htormey wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, both companies have a major weaknesses that no amount of money seems to be able to solve. Namely, user experience. Example 1, Dropbox: Google & Amazon seem like companies ideally positioned to destroy Dropbox. They excel at making network infrastructure at scale, they both have competing products and massive existing customer basis. Yet Dropbox has managed to compete and win on user experience. Example 2, Netfli…

Not the most airtight examples. Dropbox was first to market with an innovative service, they've been losing market share ever since Google Drive which now has 25%+ of the market. Netflix was also an innovative service that was first to market. So now there's a new monopoly type of a company who dominates a new market > cable tv. Smaller company can't oust bigger ones unless it is actually possible for them to #1. Out…

In the case of Netflix, there are also some distinctions between their strategy and both Google's and Amazon's strategies that can't easily be erased.

Netflix has a 100% subscription model that includes original content plus enough licensed content (mostly TV) to fill things out.

Google is basically an engineering organization (ADDED: that makes money through advertising) that probably doesn't have a lot of interest in becoming a studio or in licensing a lot of content.

Amazon wants to offer subscription video as part of a broader bundle at a price they want to be attractive even for people who don't use the subscription video a lot. And they also want to sell video a la carte whether online or as disks.

Re: Amazon Takes Fresh Stab at $16B Housekeeping Industry

#68

Post by kadenshep »

mseebach wrote: post #21
2_listerine_pls wrote: post #12

Amazon and Google will end up being the middle men for everything. You simply can't compete with a company that has all the data, all the money, the best engineers, the patents, etc... Once they like your business model, you are out of business. This is happening at an increasingly faster pase. There will be an Amazon AirBnB, and Amazon Uber, Amazon Food, Amazon Freight, etc... the future of free markets is not free.…

> Amazon and Google A couple of weeks ago, your list would have included Facebook. The future is a lot less deterministic than you think.

Amazon and Google are engaging in concrete industries. Google is still the largest advertising company in the world, facebook is not. Facebook has been and will be second fiddle to Google in the ad industry.

"His" list wouldn't have included Facebook because they haven't really dominated anything, let alone stretched their arms out into other fields. Facebook can only hold the dimmest of candles up to Google and Amazon. There are giants, then there are titans.

Re: Amazon Takes Fresh Stab at $16B Housekeeping Industry

#69

Post by justicezyx »

castis wrote: post #31
mseebach wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon and Google A couple of weeks ago, your list would have included Facebook. The future is a lot less deterministic than you think.

Yes, but does this make OPs forecast any less possible?

No it doesn't.

It merely points out that the possibility is very low in the absolute sense.

Re: Amazon Takes Fresh Stab at $16B Housekeeping Industry

#70

Post by mabbo »

anorwell wrote: post #16
mabbo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may not be there yet, but there's certainly going to be a day where online advertisers know a woman is pregnant before she does based on the changes in her behavior. I'm not sure if that counts as a dystopia or not. Is there a good word for "Weirdtopia"?

This article talks about how Target predicts when a woman is pregnant, and the steps they go to to make it less weird: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

One of my favorite incidents and exactly what I was thinking about.
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