The Anti-Amazon Alliance • Hacker News Board

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#101

Post by happythomist » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #88

xoa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just describing the strategy of likely the majority of retailers in existence, from grocery stores to theaters though isn't it? Grocery stores have lead products that get people in the stores (like cheap roast chicken) and then make more margins elsewhere. Fast food sells burgers and hope people will buy fries. When theaters have movies that have won awards and have big buzz, it helps them sell more snacks. De…

It's a different strategy. Prime is an investment up front , so it puts people in the mindset of wanting to come up ahead. By buying full Prime, you've essentially prepaid $120 in shipping costs, so you want to take advantage of it and order more than $120 worth in free shipping. Which means you'll likely shift your non-Amazon purchases to Amazon (especially with free shipping making it a cheaper option for some of y…

> It's a different strategy. Prime is an investment up front, so it puts people in the mindset of wanting to come up ahead. By buying full Prime, you've essentially prepaid $120 in shipping costs, so you want to take advantage of it and order more than $120 worth in free shipping.

Some retailers do this too, mainly warehouse clubs (e.g. Costco and Sam's Club).

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#102

Post by sharpy » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

xenocyon wrote: post #61

softwaredoug wrote: post #4

As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons - They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven - They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused…

These sound like platitudes. And in particular the claim of Amazon's tremendous autonomy for workers doesn't even ring true to me (though I could be wrong since I'm basing this on anecdotal conversations with Amazon engineers). I think there are real, deterministic reasons why Amazon is successful (other than its unscrupulous practices) but I'm not sure your comment adequately covers them. It's hard to make these det…

Engineering teams at Amazon does indeed have a lot of autonomy. I have been part of multiple teams over a fairly long periods of time (7+ years), and it's been my experience every time. There were times when it felt like each team was its own start up, at least when it came to deciding what to build / prioritize.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#103

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

zbobet2012 wrote: post #11

softwaredoug wrote: post #4

As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons - They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven - They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused…

I agree with your points, but I've also found another one that is far more common: They sell products at a loss to gain income in other places. For example, if you are a content producer you are competing with a company that sells "ad-free" video (Prime Video) attached to a low-cost service (Prime) so that they can sell more goods online. Amazon is killing content producers by running a negative margin content busine…

Video encoding is definitely more expensive with AWS if you know how to do it yourself and you spend the money up front on hardware.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#104

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #26

softwaredoug wrote: post #4

As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons - They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven - They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused…

>other orgs heavily micromanage or have structures that create more politics than value Isn't it hard to generalize like this? Consider Apple under Jobs: arguably Apple succeeded because of Jobs micromanagement because Jobs had (to quote Bill Gates) "great taste". Without that unifying sense of taste, you get something like Google, which is quite data-driven, and which doesn't have any unifying personality . Although…

[deleted]

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#105

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

woodgrainz wrote: post #86

spaced-out wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the large retailers have their own store brand. Grocery stores like Safeway have a bunch (Lucerne, Open Nature, Safeway Select).

The large retailers are not monopolies though. Some would argue Amazon is, and therefore must be treated differently.

Last time I checked, Amazon doesn’t have a monopoly on servers, payment systems and shipping...

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#106

Post by three_seagrass » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

seph-reed wrote: post #29

subhobroto wrote: post #21

Amazon is successful because they allow people to order cheap consumer goods real fast, sometimes same day and have a great return policy to boot. The typical consumer does not care about "Made in U.S.A" vs "Made in China" vs "Made in Taiwan". They do care whether it's $9 vs $27. The typical consumer does not care whether the workers were paid fair wages and given enough bathroom breaks so as not to urinate in a bott…

> Jeff Bezos is not the monster here - he's just responding to market forces. Market forces are not moral. You don't get a free pass on your actions because you made a bunch of money.

America has a weird wealth worship complex, though maybe worship isn't the right word. It's assumed that if you have wealth you are some sort of genius to be listened to about what's the moral right thing to do.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#107

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

zbobet2012 wrote: post #40

nitrogen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they really are dumping, then I look forward to the lawsuit from all of their would-be competitors. That would help the increasingly centralized industry figure out what can be independent and what can only be done by monopolies.

Amazon paid 7 billion in content costs this year, I would estimate it cost another 1.5billion to do the distribution. That doesn't include internal development costs, advertising costs, etc. Prime all together only made 14 billion. Considering that prime almost assuredly doesn't cover its 2day shipping we can be very sure, the video unit is _certainly_ not positive. What's even more important is this quote from Bezos…

And Netflix is borrowing billions of year on content....

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#108

Post by xoa » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #88

xoa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just describing the strategy of likely the majority of retailers in existence, from grocery stores to theaters though isn't it? Grocery stores have lead products that get people in the stores (like cheap roast chicken) and then make more margins elsewhere. Fast food sells burgers and hope people will buy fries. When theaters have movies that have won awards and have big buzz, it helps them sell more snacks. De…

It's a different strategy. Prime is an investment up front , so it puts people in the mindset of wanting to come up ahead. By buying full Prime, you've essentially prepaid $120 in shipping costs, so you want to take advantage of it and order more than $120 worth in free shipping. Which means you'll likely shift your non-Amazon purchases to Amazon (especially with free shipping making it a cheaper option for some of y…

>It's a different strategy. Prime is an investment up front, so it puts people in the mindset of wanting to come up ahead

So, Costco? Or other member/buyer-club type things across many industries? It seems to have become somewhat less common, but it's still not remotely a unique idea. Psychologically, even expiring coupons and sales invoke some of that feeling of "use it or lose it".

>My guess is that Prime Video exists as a "gateway drug"; you get it for the videos and then realize that extra $4/month or $11/year will get you free shipping, and then you're back to "if I order $120 worth of shipping, it'll pay itself back" thinking.

It's interesting you have that perspective because I've always heard and experienced it as the opposite, though I haven't followed it for a while. Prime of course started based fully around shipping, and it has seemed fairly common for a lot of old Prime users at least to never use any other Amazon services at all despite them really, really pushing them. I never have either personally fwiw. If you're doing enough business with Amazon (~$5.1k+/year) it's also probably more direct to just use their dedicated card I guess.

And there's a reason upfront costing has faded in general, it's usually discouraging rather then encouraging. Causation seems more likely to flow the other way: somebody looks and sees they're doing quite a lot with Amazon already, and then decides to try to further leverage it. Of course, Amazon certainly wants to encourage this and support it so that customers don't "grow out of them", and being a full fat full service provider probably can aid them in retention. I'm not sure all this supports the original contention however.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#109

Post by tootie » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

zbobet2012 wrote: post #11

softwaredoug wrote: post #4

As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons - They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven - They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused…

I agree with your points, but I've also found another one that is far more common: They sell products at a loss to gain income in other places. For example, if you are a content producer you are competing with a company that sells "ad-free" video (Prime Video) attached to a low-cost service (Prime) so that they can sell more goods online. Amazon is killing content producers by running a negative margin content busine…

My last retail employer had multiple billions in revenue and had a really nice niche where they could apply a negative margin service to sell more goods. And a lot of their product catalog is far enough from Amazon's wheelhouse that they had room to operate.

That being said, their ecommerce org was still a complete mess. They were spending a ton of money operating a homemade ecommerce platform based on 2007 technology. They even had a mainframe running some critical features that they couldn't manage to deprecate. They ran everything focused on costs and didn't even do it right because they never considered the long-term benefits of investments. The architecture was multiple balls of mud. Teams were all aligned horizontally. Meeting customer needs wasn't never a factor in any decision making that I saw (and I spoke regularly to the CTO).

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#110

Post by arbuge » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #93

Most non-Amazon businesses are mediocre. Most grocery stores still don't have online ordering. Years, and years, and years, after Amazon entered the field, the other grocers have just decided to lie down and die. Still waiting for Chapters (a bookstore in Canada) to start sending me reading good reading recommendations. Still waiting on VISA to make generalized gift cards which are not miserable to use. I'm trying to…

> Still waiting for Chapters (a bookstore in Canada) to start sending me reading good reading recommendations.

OTOH, I am still waiting for Amazon to make the ads which appear on my Kindle lock screen have even a modicum of relevance to my buying/reading habits.

As far as grocery stores are concerned, I find that their combination with Instacart does a great job on that front.