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Amazon buys PillPack, an online pharmacy, for just under $1B

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Re: Amazon buys PillPack, an online pharmacy, for just under $1B

#311

Post by ataturk »

I worked for a company that does online pharma. It was an incredibly annoying experience in a lot of ways to the regulatory headaches and the IT group's horrifying and irrational risk aversion--fear based programming is just no fun at all! Also, it was an all IBM shop, because some of the founders came from IBM and apparently still got kickbacks or something. What a shitty situation all around.

Here's just one example: My team was not allowed to use Tomcat. We wanted to move to embedded Tomcat for our web apps because it was so much easier to deal with versus Websphere and all that thing's baggage. IBM's JVM sucks. IBM's RAD environment sucks. IBM's build tools (headless RAD) totally fucking sucks. It was thus impossible for such a small team to get anything done with all these headwinds, so all we wanted was to run Tomcat or Jetty which many of the company's vendors already supplied in-house applications ran on. The IT Dept. wanted to commission a multi-year study on Tomcat even though I showed them they are already running it inside their walls and have been for years! The place made utterly no sense to me. It was just job security for crumb bums, I guess. I finally gave up when they doubled down on mainframe purchases and waterfall methodology. How they remain in business is beyond me. Amazon will fucking stomp them into the mud, probably.

Re: Amazon buys PillPack, an online pharmacy, for just under $1B

#312

Post by ceejayoz »

drb91 wrote: post #162
tombrossman wrote: post #18

This is interesting because Amazon isn't exactly known for supply chain integrity. Who here hasn't received fakes from Amazon? If you rely on a specific medication for your health, is Amazon a brand you trust to deliver it? How long until they start commingling pills and shipping random counterfeit/fake product to users? Hope it never happens but if they do with pharmaceuticals what they did with everything else they…

I don’t see any reason why Amazon would have difficulty here. There’s already regulation in place and generics are designed to be interchangeable—getting an off brand alternative would be a win to the consumer, so long as the choice is clear.

> There’s already regulation in place and generics are designed to be interchangeable—getting an off brand alternative would be a win to the consumer, so long as the choice is clear.

They're not, though.

As an example, my wife is allergic to a filler ingredient in one generic manufacturer's version of one of her medications.

Re: Amazon buys PillPack, an online pharmacy, for just under $1B

#314

Post by anderskev »

joeax wrote: post #98
simonsarris wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the time. They tried to make a move into retail registers to compete with Square, and failed. They shuttered Amazon register in 2015: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-do... They tried to take on Etsy with Amazon Handmade which bombed Etsy stock, but Handmade has gone pretty much nowhere, except some re-branding this year. People just forget Amazon's failed ventures, even fairly high profi…

+ I'm wary of Amazon Grocery. We had a bad experience with home delivery 10 years ago and my wife refuses to do it again. For packaged goods and non-perishables it's fine, but with fresh meats and produce it's hit and miss. It may not be failure but I doubt it will kill or disrupt the grocery business.

I never used Grocery, but used Amazon Fresh a few times in recent months. The experience was awful and after 3 orders I went back to just going to a store. Amazon clearly pays their last mile delivery people way under market and it shows. Rude, unprofessional, late and then harass you until you until you fork over a cash tip high enough to make it worth their effort. They also have a strange hangup about getting the bags back--one guy just kept the cooler bags in his van and handed me a stack of half melted frozen chicken, on another delivery my items were just left in the vestibule of my building, again not in a cooler bag.

This is pretty much exactly what I would do if I was at a job where: 1) I didn't care at all and it was temporary 2) I'm also getting paid nothing to do it. So I can't really fault the delivery people in this situation.

The TL;DR is that there is just no margin when it comes to food. Grocery, restaurants, meal kits, etc. People keep trying to deliver these experiences to your home, and having spent 5 years cooking in a restaurant and my entire childhood growing up on a farm I've reached the conclusion that it can't be done. Once you add in the cost of human labor for physical delivery, the margins go from slim to negative.

Re: Amazon buys PillPack, an online pharmacy, for just under $1B

#315

Post by upvotinglurker »

supertrope wrote: post #226
egyptiankarim wrote: post #145

I wonder if Amazon hopes to eventually get into manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. How long before we start to see AmazonBasics versions of Aspirin?

That doesn't seem especially profitable nor a core competency of AMZN. When you see a store branded bottle of ibuprofen, it's just a re-label of their contract manufacturer's pills.

Yep. The AmazonBasics brand of aspirin may appear, but it will just be putting their label on the product manufactured by the companies already specialized to manufacture it (as is probably true with a lot of existing AmazonBasics products).

Re: Amazon buys PillPack, an online pharmacy, for just under $1B

#317

Post by coredog64 »

cabaalis wrote: post #21
simonsarris wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the time. They tried to make a move into retail registers to compete with Square, and failed. They shuttered Amazon register in 2015: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-do... They tried to take on Etsy with Amazon Handmade which bombed Etsy stock, but Handmade has gone pretty much nowhere, except some re-branding this year. People just forget Amazon's failed ventures, even fairly high profi…

> They tried to take on Etsy with Amazon Handmade which bombed Etsy stock, but Handmade has gone pretty much nowhere, except some re-branding this year. Is severely damaging another online vendor really a failure for Amazon? It seems to me at that level, revenue from a venture is not always the only measure of success.

I can't recall which book it was, but there was a story about very early Microsoft attempts at pen computing (like mid-90s at the latest). They created some scripted demos that looked great and failed, and another executive said something like "you sure pooched that". The response was "I wasn't trying to score a touchdown. I'm the special teams guy trying to block a kick."

Re: Amazon buys PillPack, an online pharmacy, for just under $1B

#318

Post by greenail »

kylestlb wrote: post #53
simonsarris wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the time. They tried to make a move into retail registers to compete with Square, and failed. They shuttered Amazon register in 2015: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-do... They tried to take on Etsy with Amazon Handmade which bombed Etsy stock, but Handmade has gone pretty much nowhere, except some re-branding this year. People just forget Amazon's failed ventures, even fairly high profi…

And who could forget the Fire Phone debacle?

it's not about how big the failure was, it is about how much was learned from it that can be used in the future.

Re: Amazon buys PillPack, an online pharmacy, for just under $1B

#319

Post by iamatworknow »

anderskev wrote: post #314
joeax wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+ I'm wary of Amazon Grocery. We had a bad experience with home delivery 10 years ago and my wife refuses to do it again. For packaged goods and non-perishables it's fine, but with fresh meats and produce it's hit and miss. It may not be failure but I doubt it will kill or disrupt the grocery business.

I never used Grocery, but used Amazon Fresh a few times in recent months. The experience was awful and after 3 orders I went back to just going to a store. Amazon clearly pays their last mile delivery people way under market and it shows. Rude, unprofessional, late and then harass you until you until you fork over a cash tip high enough to make it worth their effort. They also have a strange hangup about getting the…

> People keep trying to deliver these experiences to your home, and having spent 5 years cooking in a restaurant and my entire childhood growing up on a farm I've reached the conclusion that it can't be done.

I think you (and I) might be in the minority here and not their intended market. I don't know anyone with experience cooking who would prefer any meal or grocery delivery services over just doing it themselves. They're probably only focused on the market whose only previous alternative is instant/frozen meals or takeout.

To us: Shitty delivery + mediocre quality = Net negative

To their intended market: Delivery on par with take out + quality that's better than take out = Net positive

Re: Amazon buys PillPack, an online pharmacy, for just under $1B

#320

Post by workinfunk »

jawr wrote: post #305
Cents wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groceries online make me very happy. I'm a convert. Carts queues and parking are anachronisms. There won't be wide adoption until the customer gets a perfect order with no substitutions or blemishes every time. The psychology of perceived loss at not getting EXACTLY what was ordered is too great. Until then millions of disappointed people will discourage others.

Carts queues and parking still happen, they're just being hidden from you.

Only with services like Instacart where they literally pay people to go and do your shopping for you. Real, end-to-end grocery services like FreshDirect do not.
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