181–190 of 333 posts
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This reminds me of the Silicon Valley episode where the start up 'Sliceline' sells repackaged Domino's pizzas. Don't recall if they explicitly stated 'they'll make it up in volume.'
Real life version: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-p...
I now trust Walmart [jet.com] and Bestbuy more than Amazon. Walmart / Jet have made great strides in their online experience and I trust them more than Amazon now. I don't really care about the branding Jet or Walmart is fine. And for my rant/last straw with Amazon: My most recent Amazon frustration: I ordered a Ryzen processor "shipped and sold by Amazon" and got an opened and obviously installed processor. Pins wer…
I bought a beard trimmer, at a local Walmart store, in an unopened package. And found hairs and grime on the blade. Bought new DJI goggles from B&H Photo. Which turned out to be a DJI factory refurb. But it also turned out there were then only refurbs in the supply chain for that being-phased-out model.
So no-surprises supply is perhaps more nuanced and difficult than 'avoid Amazon'.
With my own taste in tech becoming more esoteric, less Amazon or AliExpress and more Alibaba, I've been feeling that personal supply chain quality management is becoming my new normal. Hmm, perhaps, just as we should be teaching personal financial management in school, we should also be teaching supply chain management? :)
Walmart bought Jet for two reasons (1) Walmart's Global eCommerce big re-write was an expensive mess. About a billion over budget and two three years behind timeline promises. There was leadership churn and they needed a new CEO of that business unit - Marc Lore made sense. Prior to Lore the CEOs (and CTO for that matter) were not technical at all. (2) They wanted to make some changes that would make the eCommerce bu…
Not quite sure what you are referring to in terms of making changes that would make e-commerce unprofitable for a long time.
Your last point I agree with as well- I often felt they were far too conservative- mid-upper management was often overpaid for their ability and thus it was in their best interest to not rock the boat too much and protect their fiefdoms and thus their jobs.
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> Seems more efficient and cheaper Option A: You drive to Walmart, pick up your shopping and three other people's, you drive home via three other homes. Option B: A driver starts at Walmart, picks up four people's shopping including yours, delivers it all, and returns to Walmart. Seems to me the number of person-hours and distance driven is identical in both cases?
Option A can likely be structured as a store incentive whose total dollar cost to Walmart is below that of an hourly worker. Option B would likely be an employee requiring additional taxes to be paid and benefits to be supplied. This is not a comprehensive argument.
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it seem like a waste not to continue the jet.com. its a simple domain that is easy to remember.
see also: buy.com -> rakuten // no amount of branding awareness tv ads are fixing the name recognition they lost with that one... still redirects though.
Walmart bought Jet for two reasons (1) Walmart's Global eCommerce big re-write was an expensive mess. About a billion over budget and two three years behind timeline promises. There was leadership churn and they needed a new CEO of that business unit - Marc Lore made sense. Prior to Lore the CEOs (and CTO for that matter) were not technical at all. (2) They wanted to make some changes that would make the eCommerce bu…
I agree with all of these statements. JK IMHO set their e-commerce business back 3 years at least. He was the champion of a horrific monolith that was delivered years late. Not quite sure what you are referring to in terms of making changes that would make e-commerce unprofitable for a long time. Your last point I agree with as well- I often felt they were far too conservative- mid-upper management was often overpaid…
At a crude level: To compete with Amazon means running eCommerce at a loss just like Amazon do. AWS subsidizes Amazon eCommerce, brick-and-mortar subsidizes Walmart eCommerce.
It is more nuanced than that of course but at a high level that is a big challenge to profit.
RE: JK.
He surrounded himself with a handful of smart technical VPs and lots of dumb ones that he held close. The good ones eventually left and the dumb ones stayed. The replacements were a mixed bag. The tension between JK and the more successful business and technical unit (mobile) siloed under a rival executive was healthy for a while then when the axe fell on mobile, it was a disaster - lost a lot of good people.
This is sad for me because Jet used F# extensively - one of the few non-finance companies to do so.
My team still uses F# and a few others do as well
If I'm going to invest in spending the time to really learn a programming language I want to know that there's a community that's doing reasonably well to promote it. Microsoft has done a terrible job - treating F# as a 2nd class citizen for a very long time. Microsoft has all its eggs in the C# basket with respect to .NET. Without Microsoft support F# will continue to be a tiny niche - sadly.
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Compared to walmart.com, though, there's no reason to keep it. As a consumer, I don't really know/trust jet.com.
There are class complications that make using the Walmart brand potentially problematic, though. People with college degrees who would shop at Whole Foods or Costco or boutique retailers look down on Costco but wouldn't have those associations with Jet.com. I'm sure Walmart has researched this but keeping both brands would seem worth it from that angle.
I now trust Walmart [jet.com] and Bestbuy more than Amazon. Walmart / Jet have made great strides in their online experience and I trust them more than Amazon now. I don't really care about the branding Jet or Walmart is fine. And for my rant/last straw with Amazon: My most recent Amazon frustration: I ordered a Ryzen processor "shipped and sold by Amazon" and got an opened and obviously installed processor. Pins wer…
Unfortunately, the Walmart app is not as good. Even worse, it connects to the following trackers: doubleclick.net, app-measurement.com, braze.com, googlesyndication.com, google tag services.com. This is shocking and super scary and Walmart needs to get some decent tech talent to fix their junk.
Story time! When Jet.com launched they had some promos going on so I wanted to check out what it was all about and ordered a bunch of stuff. I think at that point they had 2 day shipping over 25 without a membership. Their signature purple package arrives on time, in a larger than expected box. I open it, and there's a smaller Amazon box inside. I open THAT and it has all my items. I got two receipts, one from jet.co…
This is indeed poetic. It’s actually an excellent metaphor for how AWS works. Fun fact: Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. [1] [1] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/socialcapital-annual-lett...