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What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is

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Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is

#31

Post by gdulli »

nmcfarl wrote: post #18

What this mainly says to me is that my life is going to get much worse - as Amazon logistics cannot deliver to my house. I used to be a big user of Amazon prime, but they recently swapped over to logistics for my rural area which has no cell service and huge distances between houses and that apparently means they can’t deliver. They try and packages sit at the local warehouse for a couple of weeks before being sent b…

I thought the main benefit of Prime was guaranteed fast shipping, since free shipping can still be had without Prime. So the shipping has gotten worse while the price gets raised to subsidize the production of Citadel?

Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is

#32

Post by cmiles8 »

Amazon in a logistics and infrastructure company. It tries to be a lot more than that but isn’t very competitive outside the core skills.

Logistics = Getting stuff to your door super fast… Amazing, nobody is better.

Other stuff = An app and website that doesn’t suck and lets you find what you want amidst a sea of junk. Not great here.

Infrastructure = AWS core services which are quite good.

Other stuff = Nearly everything AWS tries to do on top of base commodity infrastructure, which is a hot mess.

Other stuff = Alexa, which is a has-been also-ran now that’s struggling to compete in the GenAI era. Rando also-ran businesses like Amazon Music. Various sports things that seem to be more Andy Jassy’s pet projects than anything. Physical retail with some keeping the lights on via Whole Foods but nearly everything else here has been shut down as a failure.

Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is

#33

Post by humangoogle »

nmcfarl wrote: post #18

What this mainly says to me is that my life is going to get much worse - as Amazon logistics cannot deliver to my house. I used to be a big user of Amazon prime, but they recently swapped over to logistics for my rural area which has no cell service and huge distances between houses and that apparently means they can’t deliver. They try and packages sit at the local warehouse for a couple of weeks before being sent b…

it's a convoluted path to get there, but you can put in delivery instructions into your profile that get surfaced to AMZN delivery folk. I had a similar issue where the AMZN maps would send drivers to a non-existent intersection.

After putting in step-by-step instructions, it's been much less of an issue.

Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is

#34

Post by twoodfin »

NickC25 wrote: post #20
SoftTalker wrote: post #6

The pattern is quite simple. Build infrastructure to serve internal operations at a scale no rational external buyer would justify. Optimize it to a level that drives marginal cost below the buyer’s internal alternative. When the surplus capacity is too large to write off, open the API and sell it. Forgot the last part: when you have eliminated all the competition and have all your customers locked in with no other o…

break. up. Amazon. break up Apple, Meta, MSFT, etc... while we're at it. Or, keep it simpler - if a company passes a market cap of 1 trillion dollars, they must forgo lobbying and "government relations". if you're worth a trillion dollars or more, you don't need the government to hold your hand.

Unfortunately for this project, the First Amendment puts the right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances” alongside freedoms of speech, the press, and religious exercise.

Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is

#35

Post by cmiles8 »

treis wrote: post #25
kikoreis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not completely wrong, but overly simplistic: > In 2006, Amazon launched what is now AWS, exposing the internal compute, storage, and database services its retail group had built. The internal pitch was identical to Marketplace seven years earlier. These were not internal services, and it wasn't exactly the retail group that built them (Chris and Ben were dedicated to EC2 and the team ran remote from Seattle). No…

I'd call that completely wrong. It's become something of an urban legend but the reality is that AWS was net new. It was not share Amazon infrastructure with the world

Correct… Amazon only migrated most of its things to AWS much later and even now some bits are kept separate.

AWS was inspired by certain engineering concepts developed inside Amazon but was launched largely as a greenfield new thing.

Amazon itself is not even “all in” on AWS despite encouraging its customers to do so.

Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is

#36

Post by NickC25 »

twoodfin wrote: post #34
NickC25 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

break. up. Amazon. break up Apple, Meta, MSFT, etc... while we're at it. Or, keep it simpler - if a company passes a market cap of 1 trillion dollars, they must forgo lobbying and "government relations". if you're worth a trillion dollars or more, you don't need the government to hold your hand.

Unfortunately for this project, the First Amendment puts the right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances” alongside freedoms of speech, the press, and religious exercise.

Citizens can absolutely do that.

Corporations might be "people" but they aren't citizens. Especially if they participate in shenanigans designed to "minimize" their tax exposure that involve shell corporations in other countries.

Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is

#37

Post by NickC25 »

kennywinker wrote: post #24
NickC25 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

break. up. Amazon. break up Apple, Meta, MSFT, etc... while we're at it. Or, keep it simpler - if a company passes a market cap of 1 trillion dollars, they must forgo lobbying and "government relations". if you're worth a trillion dollars or more, you don't need the government to hold your hand.

A trillion? Why wouldn’t we set the bar at $0 - companies are not people, and allowing them to influence politics, at any size, corrupts democracy

I like the way you think. But most wouldn't agree, they believe a company should have the right to influence government.

Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is

#38

Post by arielcostas »

logicchains wrote: post #27
entropicdrifter wrote: post #21

A gargantuan "everything company" like Amazon is the very definition of a monopoly. In any functional society this beast would have long since been broken up before becoming dominant in multiple industries. At this point, they're pretty much emblematic of the rot at the core of western society.

>A gargantuan "everything company" like Amazon is the very definition of a monopoly No it's not, the definition of a monopoly is a seller without any competitors. Stop spreading lies. Amazon has plenty of competitors for what it sells, but it has a large market share because its products and services are generally cheapest.

We can call it "abuse of market position" then. The United States' Federal Trade Commission[^1] sued Amazon in 2023 with this pretext.

In Germany, the Federal Cartel Office fined Amazon[^2] 59 million euro (68.7 millions US dollars) because of "abuse of market power" with anti-competitive practices.

The European Commission[^3] also opened an investigation regarding Amazon's practices regarding Prime and the "Buy Box" (I had to look this up, apparently it means being picked as the default seller for a product where multiple sellers are offering it), since you need to pay extra for FBA to have your products marked as Prime (appearing before on the search results, and being the "buy box") and Amazon itself competes with you sometimes, being both a marketplace and a seller.

[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/... [2]: https://www.politico.eu/article/german-regulator-fines-amazo... [3]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...

Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is

#39

Post by nmcfarl »

humangoogle wrote: post #33
nmcfarl wrote: post #18

What this mainly says to me is that my life is going to get much worse - as Amazon logistics cannot deliver to my house. I used to be a big user of Amazon prime, but they recently swapped over to logistics for my rural area which has no cell service and huge distances between houses and that apparently means they can’t deliver. They try and packages sit at the local warehouse for a couple of weeks before being sent b…

it's a convoluted path to get there, but you can put in delivery instructions into your profile that get surfaced to AMZN delivery folk. I had a similar issue where the AMZN maps would send drivers to a non-existent intersection. After putting in step-by-step instructions, it's been much less of an issue.

I did do that. And I think that most of the drivers are not local and the comments just made it more likely they would skip on doing what was going to be clearly a difficult delivery.

However, even after my third revision of the notes – to just remove them entirely – deliveries didn’t pick up again, so I don’t know. It’s opaque to me.

Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is

#40

Post by clearstack »

SoftTalker wrote: post #6

The pattern is quite simple. Build infrastructure to serve internal operations at a scale no rational external buyer would justify. Optimize it to a level that drives marginal cost below the buyer’s internal alternative. When the surplus capacity is too large to write off, open the API and sell it. Forgot the last part: when you have eliminated all the competition and have all your customers locked in with no other o…

The 10-K makes this concrete. AWS is 17% of Amazon revenue but ~60% of operating income (FY2024). The retail arm runs on thin margins — the infrastructure arm subsidizes everything.
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