121–130 of 258 posts
I'm pulling for Walmart! I've seen the death of so many stores that I dearly miss (Sears, JC Penny, etc.). I can no longer get good hand tools or good t-shirts locally. And, the online stores are full of rip-offs and forgeries. Walmart is the last bastion of honest retail (where I can talk to a fellow human in person). I really hope they make it.
I hope they can do a better job than Amazon but I'm not confident. I'm currently gaming their system of one day delivery failure credits because they can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact hat USPS won't deliver to my door and the packages are too large. USPS gets a box, it won't fit, they take it back to the post office and tell me I can pick it up the next day. I contact amazon, tell them it's late because…
I am in the same boat. I have called and begged and pleaded and escalated to get Amazon to stop using USPS but it just doesn't work. Here in Brooklyn if anything is unusually large they just punch in "attempted delivery" a couple days in a row and send it back. They don't even bother trying, I'm pretty sure it never even leaves the regional sort facility and gets on a truck. I'm not sure I blame them. Amazon once use…
What I wonder: why did it take them this long? Walmart has warehouse-sized stores that are close to almost everybody. And most of America's houses are already visited 6 days a week by a delivery person. Walmart could and should have made a deal with the USPS a decade ago. It would have been great for all concerned. Instead, they let Amazon practically own the concept, eating away at their huge distribution advantage.
What I wonder: why didn't USPS start an e-commerce business?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and a way to get products that aren't counterfeits half the time How often do you actually get fakes? My family probably gets an Amazon delivery three or four times a week and we've never received a counterfeit item.
For a few years I was in the same boat: dozens of items delivered without issue. Within the last year or so it's become more common to hear about counterfeit issues on HN as well as personally be confronted with them--I've had to return 4 items that were obvious fakes and a 5th item that was already opened and probably not legit.
That is maybe the first sign of brick and mortar retail finally waking up. Considering that technically they have one fulfillment center in every small town they should be able to achieve really short lead times out of these. Fulfillment Centers obviously being all their stores. While it is a non-trivial thing to connect all these stores to last mile courier services it is not necessarily overly complex. Just what th…
>Considering that technically they have one fulfillment center in every small town Sorry to nitpick with an anecdote, but the closest Walmart to me is over 60 minutes away and I don't live in a small town, just one that rejects/blocks "big box" stores aggressively. Walmart certainly has a lot of stores but not everyone has one just around the corner (thankfully)
The bottom line is that Walmart's physical presence in the U.S. absolutely dwarfs that of Amazon... outside of NYC and a couple of mega-urban metropolises, who see Walmart as more "evil" than Amazon because they're in the mindset of still fighting the previous war.
I'm pulling for Walmart! I've seen the death of so many stores that I dearly miss (Sears, JC Penny, etc.). I can no longer get good hand tools or good t-shirts locally. And, the online stores are full of rip-offs and forgeries. Walmart is the last bastion of honest retail (where I can talk to a fellow human in person). I really hope they make it.
Lowes bought the Craftsman line from Sears so you can still buy good hand tools.
Worst was a ratchet where the first thing to break wasn't one of the teeth on the gear, but instead the pawl, meaning instead of simply slipping and still being mostly usable, it became immediately useless. Which is just annoyingly bad engineering.
I'm pulling for Walmart! I've seen the death of so many stores that I dearly miss (Sears, JC Penny, etc.). I can no longer get good hand tools or good t-shirts locally. And, the online stores are full of rip-offs and forgeries. Walmart is the last bastion of honest retail (where I can talk to a fellow human in person). I really hope they make it.
Just so you know, Walmart is not the underdog. Walmart sells many multiples the volume that Amazon does, and to boot, most of the products sold are owned by Walmart. Amazon is merely a fee-taker on the majority of the product sales that it facilitates.
Does anyone know if Walmart has consigned, third party merchandise like Amazon does (e.g. sold by X, but shipped prime)? And if so, does it get commingled with the Walmart supply chain inventory? My issue with Amazon is that I'm afraid of knockoffs, counterfeits and plain old cheap crap with fake reviews (really, 2000 people decided to review your plastic drinking cups?). These days, I'm shopping more and more at Tar…
So, there is a good chance that if you buy something in person at a Walmart that the products you are buying were consigned from the brand, but you would never know. Products stocked at Walmart itself go through a very rigorous vetting process, so in general you will never find anything on Walmart shelves that is truly 100% crap. As far as I know, there is no commingling with Walmart.
All online reviews are fake; there are just some products and places where the reviews are less fake than in other places. In general people don't do as much Walmart review fakery because their website gets so much less traffic and sales than Amazon does. The fakes go where the money is.
Unlike getting a product on store shelves which requires passing through a rigorous, sometimes corrupt, but difficult-to-fake process, getting a product on Amazon or Walmart Marketplace is as easy as uploading a spreadsheet or filling out a product description.
I hope they can do a better job than Amazon but I'm not confident. I'm currently gaming their system of one day delivery failure credits because they can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact hat USPS won't deliver to my door and the packages are too large. USPS gets a box, it won't fit, they take it back to the post office and tell me I can pick it up the next day. I contact amazon, tell them it's late because…
I am in the same boat. I have called and begged and pleaded and escalated to get Amazon to stop using USPS but it just doesn't work. Here in Brooklyn if anything is unusually large they just punch in "attempted delivery" a couple days in a row and send it back. They don't even bother trying, I'm pretty sure it never even leaves the regional sort facility and gets on a truck. I'm not sure I blame them. Amazon once use…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deal with USPS? Would be hard to find a manager who can make this work and not obviously post it as a huge disaster on their resumee. USPS continues to bleed money, is always understaffed, continues to misplace the mail and is bugged with pretty old technology that is hard to upgrade. Add unions to it and you have a perfect government entity altho USPS is not actually a government organisation. If anything it would m…
Wow. USPS continues to bleed money but that's due to the mandate from Congress about pre-funding pensions. That's a requirement that nobody else has - see the articles about the 3rd-largest coal company declaring bankruptcy and shedding its pension obligations. Is always understaffed? Yeah, there are lines a lot of the time. So go to USPS.com if you can and buy postage online. Go to the offices that have ATM-like mac…
This is misinformation that unfortunately has become quite widely spread.
Private employers generally are required to pre-fund their pension obligations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Retirement_Income_Sec.... FedEx and UPS both have around a 90% funded pension fund: https://www.investmentnews.com/article/20180509/FREE/1805099...; https://www.pionline.com/article/20190221/ONLINE/190229950/u....
What the 2006 postal reform legislation did is require the USPS to pre-fund its retiree health benefits as well. While it's technically true that private employers don't have that same requirement, that is only because their employees are eligible for Medicare. Like other private employers, FedEx and UPS, and their employees, pay the employer/employee Medicare taxes. Postal employees, by contrast, do not pay into Medicare and are not eligible for Medicare benefits.
There is some crazy idea out there that Congress somehow required the USPS to fund its employee health benefits to make government services look bad. That is complete nonsense. When the reforms were enacted, the postal service had a $75 billion unfunded liability for health benefits: https://taxfoundation.org/primer-postal-service-retiree-heal.... Congress saw the impending disaster, and (pretty much unanimously) voted to impose the funding requirement.