I'll go ahead and say it: Amazon is frighteningly large. Any time I visit a UPS store, the lines are out the door and most of the people are there to make amazon returns. I see amazon delivery trucks throughout my town - its incredible what Bezos has achieved but I fear its just gone too far.
I'm only 32 and I've seen so many companies shutting down; partly due to consumer shifts, but also by amazon pushing them out of the market. The pandemic also caused a few big players to get thrown under, but it seems that amazon only grew bigger.
"Bezos achieved" it's never one person that changes the world, it's the conditions being ripe for it along with some bloke having enough seed money and brutal determination to make it happen.
- Internet was just starting to be a thing in the 90's so right time to capitalize on a new easier way to sell things
- Bezos got hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from his parents to start his book empire. It's not like he was a rags to riches story, they never are.
- Amazon warehouse workers suffer nearly 2x the numbers of bodily injuries[1] and it's almost like the company expects (and wants) to burn through these workers bodies because they have a ridiculously high turnover rate[2]
If he didn't do it someone else would have and for all we know they could have broken less bodies along the way.
> "Bezos achieved" it's never one person that changes the world, it's the conditions being ripe for it along with some bloke having enough seed money and brutal determination to make it happen.
IMO Bezos's main achievement was to get through the dot com bubble by keeping enough investors in so that the company wouldn't collapse. Execution probably played a role, but I think what played a bigger role were his extremely good contacts to wall street and the money owning elite in general. Keeping people convinced that your "books.com" remains a fine investment while the "pets.com"s around you are dying like flies is an achievement IMO.
> how many startups do receive way, way more than that and fail?
There is always the assumption that people failed because they're stupid, and some people succeed because they're genius. This is nonsense. Of course Dr Evil, I mean, Bezos, has a strong work ethic, intelligence, and business drive, but this is not guarantee of anything. He was doing the right thing at the right time, period. He got billions of dollars to apply a business strategy that worked well for the market conditions, but this is not because he is so different from other business people.
Even today, when I buy online from a small business, it's normal to wait 3-5 business days for the order to be processed and a shipping label to be created, 1-2 days for the product to enter shipping system, and 3-5 more days for delivery. I routinely wait 2-3 weeks for popular stuff from decently big websites that are clearly 10000000X smaller than Amazon.
Meanwhile, Amazon hits same day and next day shipping all the time zero issue.
Amazon wasn't the right thing at the right time. It imagined a different type of delivery that no one else today gets anywhere near. Amazon is to delivery what Apple is to hardware. It's different and not repeatable no matter who tries.
I try to support smaller shops all the time, but it's definitely frustrating to wait 2-3 weeks on a delivery that know Amazon will next day to me.
Shout out to local pet foodstore hollywood feed which puts a branded car at each location and does physical deliveries. Y'all beat Amazon with a 30 minute delivery. Can't argue with results.
The example of same/next day delivery doesn't suggest anything special about Amazon though. It's really just an argument of economies of scale.
A small business usually only addresses a very specialized part of the market so they don't really ship that much stuff and thus can't hire that many people to deal with shipping without a huge overhead. However, if you stack thousands of businesses onto a marketplace, and then handle logistics for all of them, now there's much less overhead: the same shipment can combine many different specialized things.
Also fwiw Amazon is by far not a pioneer of fast delivery. Same day delivery has been around in densely poplated places (like in China) years before Amazon even started trialing the service.
Sorry mate, but I'm going to call bullshit on this. I've grown a home-based eCommerce business from nothing to 400k sales a year with 5000+ active SKUs.
Once you've hit around 5-10 sales per day, there is absolutely nothing physically stopping anyone from doing same-day delivery apart from poor inventory management or a simple unwillingness to do so (which is valid; some people can't work every day due to family commitments).
You have provided evidence for the exact same point I'm making, economies of scale. You have a large ecommerce business with a variety of things to sell so you benefit from economies of scale in shipping.
Most small individual sellers have maybe like 50 SKUs which makes it prohibitively expensive to do same day delivery.
No, I think you've missed the point. 5000+ SKUs make the logistics _harder_, not easier.
Back when we only had a couple of dozen SKUs, it was much easier to get everything out same day. Package them all in the same envelope, stick in a red post box. Done.
It doesn't make logistics easier, but it makes it worth investing resources into. Economies of scale means you get more value for the resources you do invest into logistics.
Anecdotally, almost all small online businesses I've seen the back end of do not have a dedicated logistics person. When there's only a handful of different kinds of stuff to ship, shipping becomes an extra low-skill task usually given to whoever is free. They also usually do not have a sophisticated inventory management system (because it is not worth it to purchase one), and instead use spreadsheets that are manually managed.
Secondly, sending out stuff same-day is not even close to same-day _delivery_. For that you need to control all aspects of the logistics chain, which only makes sense at Amazon scales. I've encountered many times where I've ordered things, had a label created the same day but then with no progress for a week. After contacting the seller, it turned out the courier only picks up packages from their warehouse once every 3 days, and then takes another couple of days to "ingest" it and do the origin scan.
Zappos and others have done it (Zappos did it better, even), but most were sucked up or forced out by Amazon as it had all the momentum. That's exactly being in the right place at the right time.
It's possible he's special, but you often see the pattern that someone starts a highly successful company, but then go on to start other companies that don't do well. That they can't replicate their success suggests luck or circumstance was involved.
And there is always the possibility that the CEO wasn't the one to make the company successful. A company isn't one person.
Mainly because some people loathe the idea that they aren't entitled to a share of what Bezos created so they prefer to view his success as something anyone could have done if only for xyz.
> how many startups do receive way, way more than that and fail?
This is not the right way to look at it. In a competitive market obviously only a few, or one will survive.
The point is, how many "rags to riches" startup can you think of? The ones with founders who did not have a safety net. The 600k (or 300k in 94) is immaterial, he could have also done it with zero capital. What matters is he was able to take risks because of his family's safety net. He would never be homeless if he failed.
The risks he could take were very different than one who refinanced their home to fund their startup.
So let him thank his parents. What’s the problem? Are you suggesting that everyone should average down to being poor? Children are an extension of their parents. Genetically and socially.
We don’t really know how impressive it is, a lot of founders made it huge in that golden time period even for terrible ideas that died shortly after, and network effects always crown one or two as massively disproportionate winners in each area.
If you acknowledge that timing, connections, background and network effects dominate the equation (if Bezos was 2 years late, is there any doubt there’d be a “different” one?), you realize there’s something gross about how wealth is distributed.
There’s definitely doubt about another Amazon appearing!
Sure we might get a dominating e-store that sells goods, that’s easy to imagine. But that same company also creating the largest cloud provider, being the largest distributor, going international, creating the kindle, now property acquisition, and so on. Yeah I do doubt there’d be another Amazon.
AWS wasn't Bezos, it was a whole squad of Amazon execs and employees and an idea that formed over a long time period through many people, if anything it proves the opposite point that he deserves outsize rewards. The rest of the success makes a ton of sense in context (Kindle and distribution from becoming the network-effect winning e-commerce store/bookstore).
I didn't say it wasn't impressive but it's as impressive as... watching someone win the Squid Games by backstabbing everyone else? I don't think it deserves any applause or proves anything.
> If he didn't do it someone else would have and for all we know they could have broken less bodies along the way.
That's a bold statement to make and I'm not sure I believe it. Even companies like Sears or Walmart who were better positioned to dominate the space missed the boat.
Like you said, it's never one person who changes the world. It's usually one talented person who has the right connections and gets a lot of luck at just the right time. There's no guarantee that someone else would have made the same choices and gotten the same breaks if Bezos didn't exist.
Amazon exists because of Bezos, but that doesn't mean he did it all by himself.
The conspiracy theory that one person can't rise to great wealth on their skill and talent and some luck rather than mostly luck and connections, is a conspiracy theory.
What was his vision? Destroying millions of mom and pop shops and forcing millions of people to work for poor wages and harsh conditions delivering Amazon products? I'm not sure a 2 day delivery window is worth that.
> What was his vision? Destroying millions of mom and pop shops...
Wal-Mart was already leading that charge. And it shocks me to no end how many people I still encounter complaining about Wal-Mart for destroying their diverse local retail centers and eliminating jobs, while simultaneously receiving notifications on their smartphone from the Ring doorbell alerting Amazon packages being delivered on their front step.
Amazon is basically Wal-Mart 2.0, now with even more consolidation, counterfeit goods, and fewer local jobs.
Bezos isn't coming for the mom and pop shops, he's coming for Wal-Mart. Maybe Home Depot and Lowes are next?
By mom and pop shops you mean retail. I don’t think the aspiration of humanity (or a participant) should be to have a retail business. It’s neither the good being sold nor the person utilizing it. The retail shop itself was inefficient and often expensive with little selection and almost no reviewing mechanism. It’s sad sure, but it was replaced with something far better.
That replacement also drove costs down, and unlocked tremendous amounts of time spent “doing” retail shopping and as a society it’s our job to put that time and those savings to use. It’s also our job , in a moral sense, to make sure displaced industries/people like “retail” also find a new way of being productive.
Let’s not forget the investors that have reaped tons of benefit from this. They too have allocated those funds back to the market either via spend, investment, or tax. Even if the capital is idle, the bank has it which is also giving someone a job.
It's feels like your "utopia" is a world controlled by a few giant corporations which guarantee the "effective movement of capital" around. If that's the case we have few things we'd agree on as our world views are just too different.
I'll just say that as we have fewer major players the more those players will lower wages and generally exploit workers. Most people won't enjoy living in that world.
If you zoom in time scales it’s kinda what happens? Sure in 1,10,20 years it isn’t good. I don’t agree we need few companies controlling everything but when you disrupt something as pervasive as retail what do you expect to have happen? I wonder what Ford thought when he put horses and livery out of business… I wonder what the local grocery store thought when they killed the butcher shop. It probably takes a while for the “next” thing to come along that displaces amazon. I guess my point is evolution happens. It’s our job as individuals to find ourselves on the right side of these changes. It’s not the governments job to make sure I’m treated fairly and it’s certainly not bezos or fords job to make sure they don’t disrupt the status quo. The market votes and we all casted ours votes.
I do believe in capitalism so maybe we disagree on a few things but I’d be curious how you see innovation without some value transfer proportional to that innovation. Amazon and I guess the “problem” is obvious but how do you get one without the other. Genuinely interested in your views.
Capitalism doesn't work when the market is non-free, and the market is non-free when it's monopolized. So if you believe in capitalism and want it to function as intended, you should be actively promoting antitrust enforcement against the likes of Amazon.
what would antitrust enforcement against amazon look like? amazon basics is a bit questionable, but aside from that they have credible competition in every business segment.
I think “genociding” is being a bit pedantic. The shop keeper you are romanticizing was often a local inventory of goods. You were just a sale and they made a living on the arbitrage of goods. Not even all American made goods.
They weren’t always knowledgeable staff with a smile that remembered you and your family. I wish it was the case but I’m afraid it wasn’t.
So, not all shops are gone. How do we reconcile that? Is it that the ones that could not be replaced and/or provided more value than amazon have remained?
Mom and pop shops selling everyday goods don’t belong in the future. A 2 day delivery window (same day where I am) for goods, with reviews, and accessible customer support is amazing. It’s every item you can want. A mom and pop shop never offered that.
I believe his original vision was to be the worlds largest book store offering. Something brick and mortar book stores couldn't do because of shelf space limitations.
Books weren't the end goal. He named it Amazon because he wanted something generic to expand into. I don't think third party sellers were in the initial vision but selling other items was
That was the slogan when it came out to steamroll books.com (the first mover), an outfit from Ohio that sold books on the Internet and shipped without plastic packaging in 1991.
You can have a middle class salary, save well, and become a millionaire in time for retirement. In fact, at retirement age you really need millions nowadays. Not that most people have that. And most of those retirement age millionaires wouldn't have hundreds of thousands to lend.
I'm talking about billionaires, and what I contend is most billionaires had parents or family members who were rich which helped them.
- Elon Musk's parents owned an emerald mine in S. Africa
- Bill Gates not only got seed money from his millionaire parents but one of his parents was on the board of IBM and helped him land early Microsoft deals
- Bezos got 300k seed money from his parents
- Zuckerberg, is maybe an exception? His parents were only upper middle class. Enough money for good schools and private CS tutors. Seems plausible that if he was lower middle class he wouldn't have made it to Harvard.
Only armchair socialists would take a guy coming from a broken home in one of the poorest regions of the world as a golden spoon to push their agenda lol
TL;DR: In the 80s, Elon’s father sold a plane for $80k, half in cash, and the rest for 50% of a Zambian emerald mine. He had it for six years and made some good money off it, but probably not a ludicrous amount. One can imagine there being exploitative working conditions in that mine, given the time and place, but I don’t have any real knowledge on the matter.
This is what I could find with a quick search regarding what Elon himself claims. I had a skim and it doesn’t seem to necessarily contradict the article I linked or my summary (perhaps depending on your definition of ”good money”). There probably was an emerald mine, and yeah it probably didn’t yield enough for Musk’s father to have the family set for life or anything like that.
Bezos made a company who is really good at scaling to any scale at all functions. He created a ton of process at Amazon to facilitate this. I spent a number of years there as a senior leader. I was profoundly impressed with how his influence is pervasive in how things are done, and they’re generally insightful and work well for operating a highly scaled distributed organization that can try many risky things, fail fast, and succeed fast. He didn’t do it alone, but he did create the environment for it to happen and held pretty tight control over the tenants and way things are done. There are many humanistic ways in which Amazon is a profound failure but I think it’s naive to underestimate how much direct and indirect influence bezos had on what Amazon has achieved and become. I think if Bezos had applied some energy to creating an environment that fosters the humanity of its people it would be a much better company in most respects, but it’s undeniable to my experience that one man did instigate the changes we’ve seen Amazon bring to our world.
(N.b., I don’t say these things out of some worship for Bezos or Amazon, you can respect and appreciate something without liking it)
"I'm only 32 and I've seen so many companies shutting down..."
I'm mostly in agreement with your position, but I just have to add a 54-year old's perspective, which is that WalMart was doing this before Amazon did. If Amazon hadn't popped up, WalMart would have kept doing it, except without making their website market available to small independent companies.
Again, not saying Amazon isn't worryingly large and ruthless, just that this problem started well before them, and if WalMart had become Amazon instead, things would not have been better.
We will never know the number of small businesses that had to shut down because unlike Amazon, they couldn't nor wouldn't indebt themselves to grow indefinitely (aka survive)
The amount of talent and efficiency in the economy that Amazon has crushed..
The "efficiency" that amazon has "crushed". Is this serious?
They offered at home COVID PCR tests. The normal timeline was you'd take it and drop it off at 5PM at your UPS store. By 10AM-11AM (Pacific) the next day they had results. Along the way you had full tracking. In transit, at lab etc. Registering the thing was a photo of the barcode.
We had major medical providers getting paid major money that would take a WEEK (!!) to get results back. I saw on my insurance they were charging something like $289 per test because the person that picked them up was a "medical professional". So despite millions / billions, I was getting better service from my $39 amazon test.
This test included 2 day delivery (free) to me, it included priority overnight delivery back to amazon + lab work + web tools etc. They must have (smartly) located the lab near UPS worldship.
Same with shipping and logistics. The USPS, with a guaranteed nationwide monopoly on certain services struggles to get me stuff on time. Fedex is even worse for some reason. Amazon is an absolute machine where I am. We have same day, next day and two day delivery that is HIGHLY reliable and efficient. We can drop stuff off back at Kohls etc without even packing it. We can pickup from Amazon lockers, or have them deliver inside our house if we want.
When folks talk about how inefficient amazon is I want to know what they are comparing them to. Fedex? Some walmart warehouse?
I think it’s not efficiency of getting a product to a customer that Amazon has squashed, rather the efficiency of innovation that comes with competition.
Amazon still has competition, both from brick and mortar stores that will let you actually touch the product and go home with it the same day, and from other online stores that can also ship stuff to you within a few days. What does Amazon sell that you cannot get something similar to from some other store?
they also provide an experience with far larger externalities (e.g. a massive fleet of vans wandering around and polluting all day) that the customer isn't paying for. i wonder why they're so popular
Is the fleet of polluting vans worse than every single delivery target hopping in their polluting cars and driving to the store (the model that amazon displaced?)
I don't think so. I think delivery has been demonstrated to be significantly "greener" than everyone individually driving to each store one by one.
Exactly this. One of the best things governments could do to help lower greenhouse gasses is incentivize people to get their goods delivered instead of going to the store. So much fuel is wasted moving a ~2 ton vehicle and a >100 lbs person to the store so they can pick up, often, <100 lbs of goods. That's <5% fuel efficiency.
Just from my side once we switched more to delivery we are driving a TON less.
We used to go a few cities over for some thing, whole foods for example not in our city so we'd go over to it to grab some stuff, then to target for a few things etc etc. All that driving has evaporated - we are cooking at home more too.
"i'm pretty sure you know it."
Please cite something rather than ascribing a (false) view to someone else. I don't know your "fact" because it seems like you are lying based on my direct experience.
I'm sure you can find a thousand articles/discussions online about the math behind how driving cars to stores is significantly more polluting than "salesman problem"ing a single delivery truck.
Bonus: it's far easier to electrify or improve 1 delivery truck than it is the 100 cars it's displacing.
> Same with shipping and logistics. The USPS, with a guaranteed nationwide monopoly on certain services struggles to get me stuff on time. Fedex is even worse for some reason. Amazon is an absolute machine where I am. We have same day, next day and two day delivery that is HIGHLY reliable and efficient. We can drop stuff off back at Kohls etc without even packing it. We can pickup from Amazon lockers, or have them deliver inside our house if we want.
Why does amazon still use freight companies like USPS and FedEX? At this point, I feel like amazon should open up physical locations where people can pick up/drop off packages (this includes returns). Perhaps even maintain inventory and have a showroom for people who want to walk in and purchase something.
The return flow varies. Amazon knows what type of package your item(s) were sent it. If it didn't come in a box, you'll be forced to buy one at USPS. If you are lucky enough to have Kohls as a dropoff option, then this isn't an issue. I'm not sure what determines USPS or Kohls as the return location when you print the waybill.
> Why does amazon still use freight companies like USPS
From my understanding - USPS offers fixed rate deliveries to the entire US, so amazon can use them in all cases where it would cost them more than the fixed price to deliver something (incidentally, this probably drives this cost up)
> open up physical locations where people can pick up
imo, amazon lockers are probably going to start accepting returns at some point, if the logistics for it makes sense
USPS actually works well with Amazon, because amazon sometimes uses them for last mile.
Somehow Amazon seems to basically deliver to the local post office, so stuff still shows up quickly but then the postal carrier brings it with other mail. For very small packages in particular this seems somewhat common where I am.
Again, this is is efficient. Amazon skips the part where USPS struggles (ie, Amazon can get something moving on their network at 2AM on a Sunday), but on Tuesday the local carrier still puts it in my box.
Amazon is akin to a planned economy. It works for now. But it will damage us in the long term and by then there won't be a "real" market to fall back on. The infrastructure of ordinary people running small businesses and pouring their sweat simply won't be there. There is no incentive for Amazon to remain efficient. Eventually, people will understand that there is no life outside of Amazon. This can have lasting consequences
It’s not just realizability (did the package get form a to b). But the consistency. 2 day shipping seems to always be exactly 2 days. Same goes for their one day shipping.
i think this is too pessimistic. via FBA they've also enabled thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of small businesses and a cottage industry of others that have formed around them.
Why are small businesses so good? Yes they offer a living for people but objectively there is scant choice, you’re paying for overhead and support is inconvenient or awkward.
Because they typically actually know their products and care about customer service. Give me a face to face interaction with a person that understand what I’m after over Amazon any day of the week.
For what it's worth, neither Target nor Walmart have a wholly unrelated cash cow (AWS) to subsidize ventures into new markets at huge losses until market dominance is established.
This is the big one here. Amazon has a completely unrelated market dominate business that lets them enter new markets at a loss until they crush everyone currently in that market. Amazon is honestly the first company that needs to be broken up. Split up AWS and Amazon market and this becomes a whole new ballgame.
i understand they have a strict approach of keeping teams entirely separate and with interaction between teams no different to interaction outside the org (API-always, bill-by-usage, ...)
This has made AWS a very good provider overall, but it probably also makes them very able to cope with being forcibly separated.
I wonder if that is a vulnerability or a planned strategy for this possibility?
I mean of the current tech monopolies(Amazon, Google, etc), Amazon should take priority as the first company among them that needs antitrust lawsuits filed against them and broken up.
I think they mean at this current point in time amazon is the company that needs to be broken up first, as in take priority over companies like facebook and apple not that this is the first company in history that has required intervention.
Its scarier because there is no competition for amazon. The closest company that comes to mind is Alibaba/Aliexpress, but even they haven't had an affect on the US market to the extent that amazon has.
The stores you mentioned are physical department stores, which have been competing in their own space for many, many years. Amazon originally disrupted the book market...now look at the amount of markets it dominates.
Correct. AWS is god-tier and many non-technical users have any clue how Amazon actually works. They don't make money off your stupid ass delivers Nancy. Amazon has a monopoly with AWS and that is what people should really fear. Not Amazon, but the power of AWS
That's because they're also counting all the server on a rack rental companies as cloud market share. If you look at just the cloud the way AWS does it - running code through their service in various datacenters as a service, it's above 50%.
Source: I work in Critical Incident Response/IT Remediation
AWS is absolutely a monopoly just like Microsoft has a monopoly on Corporate/Enterprise OS's tied to Domains. From a solely cloud based provider - not the Equipment renters or Volume based licensing.
AWS is a monster - Their market share is well over 33% regardless of how many articles you google to link me. I am balls deep buddy. It is well over 33% (At least in the US)
RENTAL RACK SERVICES are not purely a cloud based service in the way AWS provides. That article is not pertinent with the presentation of their 'facts'. That is not purely cloud market share.
From another User on this thread:
"If you look at just the cloud the way AWS does it - running code through their service in various datacenters as a service, it's above 50%."
That user is correct and so is my 'Anecdotal' experience. I'll enjoy my insanity. Thanks!
Target and Walmart didn't create their own (bottom of the barrel, low quality, abusive, toxic) shipping contractor network to attack the strong labor unions of USPS, UPS, and to a lesser degree FedEx. Amazon is cheaper because of the people they screw over along the way. I boycott Amazon.
Consider that some of Amazon's more recent ventures into automation (namely PrimeAir) are driven by the long-standing knowledge that they would exhaust the labor pool in many markets. They knew their growth and labor practices would hurtle us toward dystopia years ago.
I did a 2 month "don't buy from Amazon" which forced me to look around a bit, but there are lots of alternatives. Amazon is amazingly convenient, but it's coming at a price which is higher prices and 1 vendor issues. You can't really say it's a marketplace with all the SEO and buying positions going on either. I still get stuff from Amazon occasionally, but I found there are plenty of alternatives out there if you can wait an extra day or two.
Its not clear that AMZN is bad just because its big. The value they provide is tremendous. Surely a UPS van to your house and others is better for the environment than individuals going to a brick-and-mortar store.
AMZN is still only 5% of all retail sales in US.
They should be disrupted - but not for just being big.
And you haven't seen anything yet. Today I shopped at Amazon Go. That's the store where you go, pick items from the shelf, and leave, and Amazon directly charges your account. You don't need to scan anything, Amazon has some type of computer-vision-based system that figures out what you took, what you put back, and charges you appropriately.
I have no doubt that one day Amazon will roll this system to Whole Foods. The day this will happen is the day the Apocalypse starts for all brick-and-mortar retailers in the US.
Amazon has already rolled out the go tech at a few Whole Foods in d.c. funnily enough my parents don’t like to shop there, they claim to like the small talk with the cashier.
Sears and Roebuck dominated mail order for nearly 100 years. Now, they hardly exist. Large corporations come and go. Unless Amazon starts contract police or military service there is very little to worry about.
I'm only 32 and I've seen so many companies shutting down; partly due to consumer shifts, but also by amazon pushing them out of the market. The pandemic also caused a few big players to get thrown under, but it seems that amazon only grew bigger.
The future looks strange.