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Costco is the anti-Amazon

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Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#311

Post by rmunn »

newaccountman2 wrote: post #200
dpark wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon did that with an earlier version of their grocery delivery service. I assume the cost and logistics of managing and cleaning the bins just wasn’t worth it because their grocery service delivers in paper bags now. One problem with the bins for normal items is that rarely will they be packed to the brim. I imagine the overall item density would drop significantly if they started using standardized bins instead o…

OIC. I will note like the other person though that I often get like "just one thing in a box that's clearly too big"

I have been told, by (if I'm remembering my source right) someone who has worked as a UPS driver for 30+ years, that Amazon does that on purpose. Because the variable they're optimizing for is not "are we wasting cardboard". Cardboard is a renewable resource, which also recycles really well, so a little wasted cardboard is not a big deal. What they're optimizing for is packing the truck. Your item arrived in a too-big box, because that box (and the air within it) was calculated to fit exactly into what would otherwise have been empty space in the truck if the box had been smaller. In other words, you know how sometimes inside a carboard box, you'll find the item you ordered plus another smaller (and empty) cardboard box used for filler space? That's exactly what they were doing, with your box as the filler space in the truck so that other boxes wouldn't slide around and damage their contents.

... I see someone else has posted this elsewhere in the comment thread. Eh, I might as well post this anyway, because it's confirmation from a different source.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#312

Post by WillAdams »

newaccountman2 wrote: post #70
Loudergood wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this argument falls flat on it's face. Of course it's more complex than that. When I worked from the office, centralized retail was very convenient and hardly added any driving. If you work from home, the opposite is true. The next revolution would be to standardize reusable packaging, that same daily delivery truck could bring that back. But only government could make that happen.

I could imagine Amazon incentivizing reusable containers on their own TBH. If I was living in a house and not an apartment, I could easily imagine putting the Amazon bins back out so the next time I get a delivery, they take those, and we are constantly cycling bins back and forth. Even environment aside, from a purely self-interested perspective, I would much prefer it to dealing with the recycling Amazon deliveries…

Lee Valley will accept back boxes:

https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/reuse-your-shippable-boxes

(at their physical stores)

You'd think Amazon could to that at one of their physical partners' locations.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#313

Post by insane_dreamer »

sholladay wrote: post #285

I understand the appeal, but let’s be honest. Costco is designed for rich people who think they are frugal. You drive your big SUV there to load up on months worth of food and goods, which you can only do because you have a big house with enough storage for all of it. And who cares if some of it goes bad because you can always go back for more and hey it was so cheap anyway. You even pay a membership for the privileg…

I go for the $1.50 hotdogs

(just kidding, but they are the best priced hotdogs anywhere! smart move by Costco even if it loses money on them)

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#314

Post by [deleted] »

Grombobulous wrote: post #210

I think the article misses discussing Costco’s growing online business. There are a ton of Costco items that you can only buy online or that are sold in a different way online, and they’re often doing so with included shipping very similar to Amazon’s business model. The shipping is slower, but it’s an interesting part of their business, and I encourage Costco members to try it out. You’d be surprised at the quantity…

[deleted]

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#315

Post by rmunn »

danudey wrote: post #237
scrame wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite often get inappropriately sized boxes.

I remember reading somewhere that the boxes are not sized to the items they contain, but to a combination of 'items they contain' and 'space we need the box to take up on the truck'; i.e. if you have five items of one unit size in a six-unit-wide truck they will slide around (and potentially get damaged, fall over, etc), but if you put one of those items in a two-unit-size box then the boxes will not slide around, me…

I had heard the same thing from (if I'm remembering correctly about who told me) someone who has driven a UPS delivery van for 30+ years, so he has loads of experience with truck-packing. If he thinks it's true, I'm willing to believe him.

And if I'm wrong about my source, the other person who I could possibly have heard it from is my friend who works at Amazon. As a sysadmin managing a small part of AWS, not in delivery — but he would also be in a position to know.

Either way, I believe that's correct, that the oversized boxes are that size because they were being used as filler in the truck. The algorithm calculates the planned truck packing based on what items are going to be transported together (going to the same city therefore in the same truck), then picks out the box size that each item should go into. And most of them will be correctly sized, but in each row either zero or one (or possibly more in some cases) will be oversized.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#316

Post by cube00 »

It embodies the precise opposite of everything imagined by the e-commerce futurists

Costco do plenty of online only offers, partner with Doordash/Instacart, even sell holiday packages so I'm not sure how the author arrives at the conclusion they're at the "precise opposite of everything imagined by the e-commerce"

The only precise opposite is that they're still paying IBM goodness knows how much to stay on their AS/400 architecture.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#317

Post by cube00 »

klvino wrote: post #60
forrestthewoods wrote: post #55

Costco is way too damn crowded. There needs to be 2x or 3x the number of stores. It is a great deal. But an utterly miserable shopping experience.

Comparatively, as I have both a Costco and Sam's Club memberships, the floorplans on Costco stores are much more efficient. Both stores get crowded but Sams suffers from poor design which makes traffic worse. Although, Sams does compensate with a smoother checkout experience.

Costco checkouts are a nightmare, a giant queue on one side reaching back to the deli while people try to "zip merge" in from the other side in several smaller queues.

At one point they had the pallets at the front aligned so you could just queue behind a single register and then they changed it so the pallets at the front form a long wall facing the checkouts forcing you to join the checkout queues from either side.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#318

Post by righthand »

shimman wrote: post #284
righthand wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this, I have been in plenty of meetings where I propose a solution that eclipses most of the project requirements, often for a product person to turn around and say something like “yeah but I like working with X techhnology”, for example Tailwind. Okay you like Tailwind because you seem to think “p-2” is better than specifying “padding: 2rem;” because when it comes time to tinker with things you don’t want to…

While I understand your overall point your example of tailwind just seems odd. The idea that a css library makes or breaks what a project is capable of is kinda... IDK... laughable? What is the challenge in downloading class names into a style directory?

> The idea that a css library makes or breaks what a project is capable of is kinda... IDK... laughable?

Then you didn’t understand my point, because it didn’t make or break a project. Making or breaking a project wasn’t my point.

Who works with Tailwind? The dev writing code or the product person demanding that Tailwind be used in code they’ll never maintain or even look at?

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#319

Post by hx8 »

oatmeal1 wrote: post #287
Loudergood wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this argument falls flat on it's face. Of course it's more complex than that. When I worked from the office, centralized retail was very convenient and hardly added any driving. If you work from home, the opposite is true. The next revolution would be to standardize reusable packaging, that same daily delivery truck could bring that back. But only government could make that happen.

The next revolution is zoning reform so it's legal to build shopping people want to do within walking distance of where they live.

As someone that has lived in a walkable neighborhood with a lot of shopping let me tell you, it doesn't solve the problem.

Realistically you aren't going to reach more than 250k skus within a 20 minute walk of your home, and probably less. Even this is very heavily biased towards using retail space instead of space for anything else (homes, restaurants, parks, offices). You can only build up to add more space within a 20 minute walk so much, because traveling vertically takes time.

With only 250k skus, you're still ordering from outside of walking distance often for items. This is much less variety then the average consumer is use to. Now, you have a dense area with lots of people and lots of business all needing goods brought in and waste brought. It's doable, but requires the right planned infrastructure, and people start trying to optimize the last mile with ideas like package lockers.

EDIT: It's probably possible to reach 250k if you heavily lean on books/cds/dvds with only a few copies each. The actual daily items you'd expect a store to keep in stock (and thus need more inventory of each sku) end up just consuming a lot of space.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#320

Post by analog31 »

antiframe wrote: post #297
rsanek wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exepense is what's not to like. Far cheaper to build a single-story warehouse + outside parking lot than a second story above a parking garage.

Only because stores that have large parking lots are in cheap land areas that are hard to reach by bus, bike, or anything except a car really. Where one can comfortably walk to a store, giant parking lots are awful.

Indeed, and in defense of Costco, you don't go there by bus or bike anyway because you'll be coming home with 200 pounds of stuff. Target is different for me. I hop in there for one or two odd things that I need, likewise the nearby grocery store. A side effect is that I don't waste money or space on stuff that I don't need, because I can always hop over there in a jiffy if I do need it.

In lieu of Costco, my family buys all of the big and non-perishable stuff at a giant discount supermarket that's closer to the edge of town, or at least it was until other stuff got built up around it. But we try to minimize the number of trips.

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