[deleted]
Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.
11–20 of 132 posts
Re: Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.
#12Amazon has heavily invested in Deliveroo. Will probably buy them out eventually
Re: Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.
#13I wonder if Amazon would ever dive into the home real estate market. With modern day search, realtors provide very little value above doing the paper work, and that seems very automatable. There's just no reason to pay 6% of every house sale to middle men, but that's the way it currently works. A large company like Amazon or Google could make a ton of money at a much lower rate. I think this makes a lot more sense th…
Redfin is already in that market and it doesn't seem to be doing very well. I'm actually fairly surprised how slow redfin is able to grow and expand their market. Their website felt second to none in terms of usability.
Redfin looks like they're trying to be a "discount agent". Here is a quote from their front page:
> We're full-service, local agents who get to know you over coffee and on home tours, and we use online tools to make you smarter and faster.
This isn't what I had in mind at all, and I'm not surprised they have trouble getting traction with that approach. If they save you 1.5% on your half, but the other agent still gets their 3%, you'd only save 25% of the thousands you spent in middle man costs. Meanwhile, all the 3% agents out there are applying pressure to see it fail.
In the ideal case where they get both sides, Redfin is only saving you 50%. There is no reason home sale paperwork should cost thousands of dollars to process. Someone like Amazon could eliminate agents altogether.
Here is another analogy - imagine TurboTax charged you a percentage of your yearly income instead of a hundred dollars for the "Deluxe" version. That would be insane.
Re: Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.
#14Shame, they were the best restaurant delivery service I've used.
Re: Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.
#15I'm not surprised. Amazon's entire MO is a relentless focus on the customer. They do that by methodically optimizing and controlling every aspect of the supply chain right up to the moment the product is handed off to the customer. And they get better at it every day.
Restaurant delivery breaks that model. There is too much variability. Too much can go wrong outside their control, and they don't have enough leverage to change it.
If they can't win (even at zero margin) and can't make customers consistently happy, why be in it at all?
Re: Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.
#16Amazon had a restaurant business?
The funny thing is, Amazon probably could do a good delivery restaurant business. There are already many "delivery only restaurants"[1] Uber Eats encourages others to start them. But Amazon, unlike Uber, is capable of building physical infrastructure. The future of this is "food fulfillment centers", large warehouse spaces which house various specialty kitchens. Common functions, such as shipping, cleaning, equipment maintenance, and order handling are shared. Surprising that Amazon didn't go that way.
[1] https://ny.eater.com/2016/9/26/12717518/delivery-only-restau...
Re: Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.
#17This is bad news, it was one of the best food delivery services in the U.S
Re: Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
They already have trucks and people used to moving things around. They could sell you a house and have your stuff moved in 2 days. I even have the branding figured out for the moving service: Amazon Prime Movers.
There's already lots of healthy competition in moving companies. Imagine if the movers wanted a percentage of your home price instead of few hundred for the day's work. The problem with realtors is that they've got a lock on the bureaucratic side, and the existing realty sites (Zillow, Trulia, etc...) are aligned with them. There are upstarts in some cities, but the existing realtors in those places collude to keep t…
How does the collusion work? Just curious since it seems like such an inefficient market (our realtor was a good friend of ours, he /did/ have good local market knowledge and things to say, but no way did he have to do more than 4 or 5 hours of work total for us...)
Re: Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.
#19Amazon had a restaurant business? The funny thing is, Amazon probably could do a good delivery restaurant business. There are already many "delivery only restaurants"[1] Uber Eats encourages others to start them. But Amazon, unlike Uber, is capable of building physical infrastructure. The future of this is "food fulfillment centers", large warehouse spaces which house various specialty kitchens. Common functions, suc…
I think you might be partially on to something here; generally the idea being that food delivery is essentially commoditized and Amazon is uniquely suited to thrive in commoditized industries with their vast infrastructural advantages.
They do have Whole Foods and Amazon Go, which both supply ready-to-eat foods along with meal kits. It would be a minor logistical challenge to simply start preparing their own meal kits on-demand and delivering them via Prime Now (which operates inside the exact same markets as Amazon Restaurants?) with the bonus benefit of owning quality control in the kitchens.
Re: Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.
#20Ah, this is too bad. We used it at home occasionally. Everything we've used has either gone out of business, cut ingredients to an embarrassing portions, or raised prices way too high (probably to where they need to be to be sustainable).
It's not a viable business, I think. Not without some big leaps forward.