201–210 of 865 posts
Perishable goods like groceries are one of the few businesses that Amazon is not in yet. My guess is that Amazon is looking to take Pantry to the next level.
I watched this video a while ago about what Amazon Go is a precursor for. In summary, if AWS is renting out server infrastructure for people, then you can imagine that Amazon can make the infrastructure to lease out Amazon Go to other stores. They first integrate it with Whole Foods, then as customers expect no more checkout areas, they will only go to Whole Foods because it's faster and maybe cheaper. Then because customers want it everywhere, Amazon could force other stores like Walmart and Target to integrate Amazon Go infrastructure to their stores, without Amazon directly competing with these stores, and make a ton of money leasing it out without spending money on building whole new stores. Of course, the acquisition could also be like nodes for warehousing and delivery, but both avenues are not mutually exclusive.
Aw, poor Blue Apron.
Blue Apron is not a good company relative to the other meal kit delivery services anyway. Their recipes are overly simplistic and their whole experience using UX dark patterns limiting which meals one can get in combination turned me off, and misleading people regarding cancellation. The higher quality meal kits like Home Chef won't have this problem because they give you, for about the same price, more complex recip…
Home Chef proactively emails you a week ahead of time telling you what the menu is. I've forgotten to customize my meal selection once or twice, but have been happy enough with the defaults for the "carb conscious" eater profile that I never really have to.
Don't think I had any major issues with Blue Apron, except that yeah, their recipes were simplistic, and often used lots of bread, rice, and potatoes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Place an order by noon for groceries plus anything you want from Amazon. Amazon fills up truck(s) at whatehouse and drops off at local Whole Foods. Stop by on your way home from work and they bring your items to your car. You get free same day delivery. Amazon just greatly saved on last mile delivery costs. That's the value of those nodes without having to store all the inventory.
I'm closer to Whole Foods' nearest distribution center than an actual Whole Foods. The nearest Whole Foods is almost 40 miles away. If this works out for Amazon, I wouldn't be surprised to see Walmart try and buy Trader Joe's. They own Aldi, which has made a big push to compete with Walmart's reach outside cities. The nearest Aldi is closer than Walmart, and that's already not far away.
This is not good for Instacart. My understanding is WF was their biggest partner and source of revenue. No way amazon will use them.
Why? Instacart uses humans to pick inventory from a "warehouse" and deliver it to the buyer. Amazon needs people to pick and pack, they can't just use robots to store cereal boxes on the nearest shelf in the grocery store. I bet Instacart was a major reason why Amazon bought WF. Actually, didn't Apoorva work for Amazon before creating Instacart?
Why would Amazon pick and pack from a retail store and not a distribution center?
And what does Instacart bring to the table?
Amazon already has a website and seems to have no trouble building gigantic on-demand workforces. What else does Instacart have? I would guess close to 100% of Instacart users already use Amazon for things as well.
I don't see things ending up well for Instacart at all.
Somewhat off topic, but I have had a weird thought circulating in my head (triggered by reading Red Plenty) that I wanted to put out there: What is the relationship between a centrally planned economy as for example Gosplan was trying to run in the USSR, and the presence of these huge market-like but centralized entities like Amazon and Wal-Mart inside a free-market economy? This becomes particularly interesting beca…
The major difference is that if Amazon stop running well then someone else will come along and replace them. Whereas government is a monopoly, so if it runs badly then it doesn't automatically get replaced. Now, democracy is supposed to fix this, by allowing you to vote for a different supplier of government every few years. But because of the voting system in some countries (like the US and the UK) it's actually rea…
Aw, poor Blue Apron.
Somewhat off topic, but I have had a weird thought circulating in my head (triggered by reading Red Plenty) that I wanted to put out there: What is the relationship between a centrally planned economy as for example Gosplan was trying to run in the USSR, and the presence of these huge market-like but centralized entities like Amazon and Wal-Mart inside a free-market economy? This becomes particularly interesting beca…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA2-iMz479o I watched this video a while ago about what Amazon Go is a precursor for. In summary, if AWS is renting out server infrastructure for people, then you can imagine that Amazon can make the infrastructure to lease out Amazon Go to other stores. They first integrate it with Whole Foods, then as customers expect no more checkout areas, they will only go to Whole Foods because i…
Implementation will be key. But I also agree in believing that this will be their strategy.
Somewhat off topic, but I have had a weird thought circulating in my head (triggered by reading Red Plenty) that I wanted to put out there: What is the relationship between a centrally planned economy as for example Gosplan was trying to run in the USSR, and the presence of these huge market-like but centralized entities like Amazon and Wal-Mart inside a free-market economy? This becomes particularly interesting beca…
The observation was made in "Theory of the Firm" a long time ago that companies tended to be command economies internally, rather than having internal markets; and the hypothesis supported that this is due to informational costs. WRT redistribution, I suspect the shareholders would jump on that.