171–180 of 443 posts
Bezos slighting Trump? Interesting
Meh, he’s already paid millions in bribes (that we now about). That’ll buy him a pass for a little while.
It just tells the administration there’s more where that comes from.
Vader: “I’m altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.”
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Grocery stores have famously low margins. Everyone thinks they’re cash cows, but they have some of the thinnest profit margins of common consumer businesses. Stores often sell common staples like bananas, generic milk, and other basics at close to cost. They’re the things that get people in the door. They make their profit on things like cereal, deli meats, packaged goods, and other non-staple items that people also…
Low margins, high volume. The family owners of our regional privately held grocery store chain (Wegmans) are worth billions. They're making plenty.
I'm fine with this as long as they include the tariff in the listed price. I'm worried businesses are going to use tariffs as an excuse to have a fake list price, then hit you with massive hidden fees at the point of sale. Some sectors have been doing this for years - "service fees" at restaurants, "regulatory response fees" in the telecom industry, all sorts of nonsense in event ticketing. Physical goods have mostly…
It’s kind of petty to list tariffs as a separate line item and not all the other costs that contribute to the final price. Why just the tariffs, unless Amazon is trying to make a political point? It strikes me as just as petty as when restaurants started listing “Living Wage Fee” on their bills. They’re bitching and moaning directly to the customer just because they need to pay their staff more and they’re butthurt a…
Would this not reveal every importer's gross margin to its competitors? The tariff is only on the importer's "landed cost". If the tariff is itemized(and not just a made up number by the seller), then you can easily work out their gross profit margin and the price they are paying their OEM. It seems like no seller would want this.
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Prices are always set by supply and demand. The price will rise until it gets high enough that the product of sales * price falls. It has always been that way. Businesses haven’t been selling goods and services out of the goodness of their hearts at an arbitrary price. It’s always supply and demand. Tariffs are expected to reduced demand because they increase prices. This is why the stock market is down and nearly ev…
> Prices are always set by supply and demand. True, but human psychology is a huge confounding factor. One area where this is evident is gas prices that "go up like a rocket, and come down like a feather" in response to crude oil prices. Simple supply and demand does not explain this.
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Low margins, high volume. The family owners of our regional privately held grocery store chain (Wegmans) are worth billions. They're making plenty.
no - I guess that the massive net worth of that family is related to capital investments.. the value of the property that a store sits on, with no debt.. skillful use of traditional investment vehicles using a predictable cash flow. things like that. Many frugal and tireless small business in the large port city here in California fail.
I’d happily take 2-3% margins of their $11B in revenue (2020 per Wiki).
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Prices are always set by supply and demand. The price will rise until it gets high enough that the product of sales * price falls. It has always been that way. Businesses haven’t been selling goods and services out of the goodness of their hearts at an arbitrary price. It’s always supply and demand. Tariffs are expected to reduced demand because they increase prices. This is why the stock market is down and nearly ev…
The demand side in particular can be tweaked by human factors, though. We have advertising because the level of demand isn't some fundamental cosmic constant of the universe like the speed of light. "The price went up 10%, that must be the 10% tariffs" is something consumers will inherently understand… but it's not the case. The 10% is not on the on-the-shelf price; it's on the wholesale price the importer's charging…
1. The average apparel retail store margin is nominally 50%, but half of that margin is given back to the consumer for their ubiquitous sales. So that $20 shirt costs the store $10, but the average selling price is actually $15. So if they directly pass through the 10% tariff, it adds $1 to the average $15 sale on that $20 shirt.
2. Increased prices reduce sales. Non-product costs are fairly fixed, so just passing through the tariffs will have a significant impact on store profitability. Retail stores are going bankrupt left and right in this Amazon age. They don't have the capacity to absorb increased costs, if they don't pass them on they'll just go bankrupt more quickly. So that $1 in tariffs turns into a $1.50 price increase.
Imagine waving your phone, or having on your VR glasses and getting this feedback "instantly".
Plus, you can sell what you learned to sellers so they can out-compete one-another (and drive prices down for consumers).
In a sci-fi world this would turn grocery stores into Faraday cages quickly.
Maybe not useful for the Doordash generation, but the majority of human life can't afford such.
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If the product was made in US but used a dozen raw materials to create it, Amazon doesn’t know where you sourced them from or how much you paid for them or even how much of each your product consumed in a per unit basis.
The only tariff Amazon needs to display is the one they need to collect. You are right that more tariffs might've been applied along the way - but it's not relevant for what Amazon has to do.
Unless they're registered as an importer? I could see that as a service they might provide to certain sellers, just like warehousing and other logistics.
But generally, they will receive their merchandise from a corporate entity who paid the tariff already.