161–170 of 190 posts
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In Europe, most of Aliexpress delivery is 10 days (except during Chinese New Year).
I think that varies a lot by country/national post service?
Berkshire Hathaway, not Warren Buffett. Large stock sales always make headlines but they don't automatically signal bearishness or really anything else. After all what's the point of investing if you never realize gains?
I think in Berkshire case they do, as they are swimming in cash and notoriously don't sell unless their business outlook changes dramatically. In any case, I would not take what Berkshire does with much weight. As Buffett himself said, if you took out their 5/6 best performing investments out of their equation they would be matching the sp500, and if you took out 20, they would be trailing it. They know that their ov…
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amz is beholden to cheap products and labor. you have both in india. elsewhere it's awful, for the exact same features you describe. they even bought a premium supermarket chain so their produce stop being returned in the US.
Yeah this is something really beautiful about India: life is cheap and there are tons of desperate people who will kill themselves for you. In the Netherlands you'll be waiting an hour for your meal to be delivered by a bored teenager on an ebike. And you're going to be grateful.
Maybe the novelty of Amazon has worn off. I occasionally purchase from their UK site, and it’s filled with tricks to get me to sign up for Prime upon checkout. Really horrible workflow and design decisions, cheapening the experience. I now see similar changes to the US version: ‘you saved $15 in shipping by being a Prime member with this purchase’ and ‘last year you made 211 sustainable product purchases’. Guys, quit…
Amazon has become AliExpress at this point, so I just skip the middleman half the time
I've gotten 2 different "You didn't return the right item" because I presume some underpaid, overworked contractor at the Amazon return site lost it or stole it.
Fortunately, the second one is very well documented, so Amazon is going to lose badly if they don't figure out what is going on.
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The Alexa's with video screen will start to show ads no matter now many times you set it to no ads. There are settings for No Ads, and after a few days, that setting is reset to allow ads. I had one so I could quickly see my Blink camera, but I threw it away because it kept showing ads.
Did you actually throw it away or returned it?
My view of Amazon's decline comes from being a "partner" in their seller and publisher ecosystems for years. The seller platforms in particular (Brand Registry, Vendor Central, Seller Central, Transparency, etc.) have crippling levels of technical debt. The situation has only gotten worse with Jassy's reckless directive for the entire organization to push into Generative AI ( https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-…
- An A-Z claim from the buyer was denied by Amazon for fraud (supposed non-delivery of the item), yet their returns department auto-approved a return for the same order just 12 days later.
- The customer returned a completely different item with documented serial number/weight discrepancies and seller-provided video evidence, yet I was left with no recourse.
- The customer then filed a fraudulent credit card chargeback. I won the first round, but Amazon refuses to participate in second-round disputes - so despite overwhelming evidence of five separate fraud attempts, they sent a generic email and docked $5k from my seller account.
- Amazon then refused to answer any further communications, including basic disclosure of which card issuer was involved or what evidence was submitted - making any independent appeal impossible.
- Every dispute stage (A-Z, returns, chargebacks) required rebuilding the fraud case from scratch. Zero continuity, and zero care for an independent seller with a strong track record of sales and feedback.
Berkshire Hathaway has my favorite website (or, WEB page, as they style it) of any big company: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
Incredibly clear and direct. Amazing to see a big company like that keeping it so old school. Thanks for pointing it out!
Amazon's core business does not make sense. Despite being so massive, their retail operation makes almost no money. There is little market share left for them to win, the best they can do to grow is shave expenses. AWS has been their real money maker, but also the explosion of AI and server farms has worked against them in threes ways: there is much more competition on infrastructure, the costs to run infrastructure…
By combining these two businesses, Amazon can achieve a more balanced capital structure. Compared to other cloud service providers such as Oracle, Amazon can maintain a lower debt-to-equity ratio, reduce its debt burden, and sustain stronger overall financial health. At the same time, it can achieve higher overall profit margins compared to traditional retailers like Walmart.
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These just aren't the relevant concerns behind Amazon's stock performance in the last month. It's the capex.
Markets can’t see the product quality of a monopoly. It won’t be reflected in the metrics because there’s no competition to anchor the earnings to the real consumer value. But that doesn’t mean quality isn’t a factor- it makes them vulnerable to disruption. Warren Buffett is known to trade on product quality (he buys what he uses). So his sale could be based on that.
There's no real evidence that this trade was made by Buffet himself, and it's part of a general major sell-off of Amazon that transparently did not temporally align with the idea that Amazon's retail business has suffered a decline in quality.
This is the market making a (reasonable!) judgment that it lacks confidence that Amazon's capital expenditures will pay off.