Costco works hard to charge you less. Amazon works hard to charge you more.
Costco is the anti-Amazon
371–380 of 610 posts
Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon
#372Forget Costco and Amazon it's all about Walmart. They are killing it with local from store delivery and they are more local then Costco. They will win at the end of the day.
Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon
#373Earlier 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.
I don't know about you, but I would rather not have stores near my home, for obvious reasons like noise, traffic, trash, etc.
Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon
#374this article sounds like a poorly AI written of a mashup of the https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/costco and CNN news article on the Mamdani bodega killing grocery store (which sounds super expensive for the value it provides)
Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
They might have the ability to do so. The motivation? Well let me put it this way: I tried Amazon’s grocery delivery service, and stopped using it because everything— everything —kept arriving in its own individual bag regardless of whether it made any sense, so it was just a bunch of bags I had to carry upstairs. That bags also had no handles. So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging…
Or the alternative that I occasionally encounter with non-grocery items - giant heavy item and small delicate item placed together in same box that is far too large for the both of them. A token piece of packing paper or lone plastic bladder tossed in, free to move about. The entire contents bouncing around. Another amusing one was when they packed a somewhat delicate pantry food item in a paper envelope. It arrived…
Yes. I recently tried ordering a standard cardboard tube box of oats from Amazon, and it arrived crushed and leaking in its presumably nonsterile paper envelope. They gave me a refund and told me to throw it out.
I think this would have been much less likely to happen without the envelope, since whoever packed the truck would intuitively pack the tube vertically.
Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
Our groceries from AH in NL come in foldable crates. The cooled items sit inside a plastic bag inside a foam box in the truck. The delivery person stacks the crates and foam boxes, brings them to your door, rings the bell. They hand the bag with cooled products to you and then you get the crates. You return the folded crates. This works just fine. They are also quite adept at filling the crates to a maximum. Unfortunately not always in the smartest way because they sometimes put the fragile things at the bottom and the heavy items like bottles of soda on top.
So this seems like a pretty solved problem. Of course you have to be home to receive the cooled products. There are some startups that sell cooled boxes that delivery persons can open with a code to put stuff in but they are not popular. Since Covid people tend to be at home more often than before.
Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon
#377Costco is mostly food, clothes, furniture, other large things, and auto services, which generally you don't get from Amazon even if you aren't a Costco member. The points about less choice more apply to like Costco vs grocery stores or Walmart. And I do like Costco, similar low-choice reason I like Trader Joe's even though Costco is its own league.
The Trader Joe's model is an interesting comparison with the Costco model. Similarities: * Like you said, both have fewer choices than a conventional grocery store: if you want ketchup or peanut butter, there's only going to be one brand and one size. * Both of them don't have scales at the registers: unlike at a conventional grocery store, nothing is sold by weight (which I'm sure provides another small efficiency g…
Trader Joe's stores are tiny compared to Costco, and only sell food.
Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon
#378Earlier 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.
It's still probably more efficient for you to just drive to the centralized place. The amount of optimization and process improvements required to 'beat that' will be enormous, like infrastructural change enormous. Your car is very useful an generalized and adaptable. So are you. Only you know what you really want, the nuances of comparison, seeing things real, returning them. Economies of scale work extremely well f…
For some of the things I buy, I prefer just doing online, because it's often not easy to figure out where one particular thing is in the store. But when I have time, I do enjoy browsing in the store and discovering new things to buy that I never thought of before.
Home delivery in the U.S. is expensive because the labor cost is expensive, and because population is generally more spread out geographically. Cities in China and India have home delivery with much lower cost. But with the advance of robot technology, maybe not too far in future home delivery in U.S. could have lower cost too.
Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon
#379130+ iq move is to order daily stuff from amazon, and same day costco delivery when you need stuff in bulk
Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon
#380Costco products have fallen off big time. Every time the long time staple items are New and Improved, they are materially worse (literally).