It's not simply an e-commerce giant, it's a logistics giant.
Hundreds of warehouses, hundreds of delivery stations, thousands of shipping containers, dozens of planes (plus an airport soon), a container ship is rumoured. That 341k number probably doesn't even count the independent contractors (both through Flex and through Amazon Logistics) handling deliveries.
The tens of thousands of software developers are there to (among other things) optimize the efficiency of those workers, make them achieve more with less effort via technology.
My contrarian opinion: Walmart is going to create some hard times for Amazon.
Walmart ackuired jet.com just 4 months ago. Jet.com, a startup, has managed to create a logistics network being able to do 1-day delivery to 50% of the population(or at least they claimed so), reached $1B in sales rapidly. Walmart has recently started to offer free 2-day delivery($35 minimum), which means that now, even for Prime memebers. shopping comparison is a reasonable option.
Furthermore, Walmart has curbside pickup for groceries, a very convinient service to get your groceries on the way from work, is seeing a lot of sucsess according to Walmart, with availibility in 500 stores, and planning to be in 600 more soon.
And Walmart definetly has got a huge logistics chain, maybe less in areas where Amazon is strong at, but they're probably better at the china/usa logistics part, that's why Amazon is doing some of those moves.
And Walmart does have enough capital to compete.
And once this impacts Amazon, will Amazon be able to keep it's very high stock price ? and how will this affect talent and growth ?
In short: finally , we're in for some very interesting times.
I think Walmart has a good shot at competing effectively, and I hope it does so, because Amazon having a monopoly on online retail is not in my long-term best interests.
That said, I don't think they have any sort of clear advantage, for two particular reasons:
First, from a technical perspective, they have some serious catching up to do before they can provide the same service level at the same scale. It is not clear from available information that they actually have the required technical competence as an organization.
Second, they have to deal with a reputation that's going to keep them out of many consideration sets: from my perspective, at least, Walmart merchandise is universally cheap crap whose low utility and/or high failure rate will end up costing me more in the long run. I don't trust them to quickly and painlessly make things right if an order is broken, disappointing, or missing. In contrast, Amazon has spent years building trust (on the assumption that the short-term cost of this quality of experience is a profitable investment in securing future business).
I have yet to encounter an adequate answer to "Why should I bother looking at walmart.com?", which I suspect is true for many others, and which I think is a serious threat to Walmart.
> My contrarian opinion: Walmart is going to create some hard times for Amazon.
That's not going to happen anytime soon. Walmart is trying to offer service like Amazon, but they don't have their shit together enough to succeed at that level.
Recently I wanted to buy a new Roku, and the Walmart site said it was available for pickup today nearby store. Great! I can order it and pick it up on my way home. But wait, when I select it and go to checkout, the site now tells me it will be available for pickup in 5 days. WTF Walmart?!!
Their site was being stupid, so I decided to just stop at Walmart on my way home and buy it. When I get there I have to spend time to track down an employee, and they have to track down someone with keys to get it out of the glass case. Then I realize their in-store price is $10 higher than online, so I have to wait while they track down a manager. After all that bullshit, the the manager tells me they can't match the price on their own fucking website.
I took out my phone and ordered it from Amazon in front of the Walmart manager.
I'll add some anecdotal evidence as to why I don't think Walmart isn't capable of giving Amazon any hard times.
When I got my first iPhone I was recommended a Zagg screen protector. I found that Walmart online had the best deal so I ordered it for in-store pickup. I was notified the day it arrived and headed back to the Layaway area. Nobody was there, but there was a little kiosk where I could enter my info and someone would fetch my item for me. Seemed like a very efficient setup. Walk in, get my thing, and leave.
After putting my info into the kiosk and being told my item was on its way, I waited. And waited. And waited. About 15 minutes in, after entering the info into the kiosk again and not getting a response, I called the store and asked for a manager. It took me a minute to get them to understand that I was calling from inside their store to get my item. But finally, they got it and assured me that someone would be bringing out my item shortly.
Another 15 minutes of waiting and I HAD TO CALL THEM AGAIN! And explain, again, that, "Yes, I'm standing inside your store, waiting for the thing I purchased. We talked about this already."
All told, I was probably there for 45 minutes before I got my item. That was the last time I bought something from Walmart.
Now, I'll concede that this was almost 10 years ago and maybe they've changed. But Walmart has never been known for the best customer service, and Amazon is always fantastic when I have to deal with them. So I'm placing my bet on Amazon in this particular race.
Amazon doesn't have much to worry about in the short term. Ordering online from walmart.com was so horrible that I'd never return. It's still pretty horrible, the people that's packaging the items do not give a shit whatsoever. I had a tv that had burn spots. I ordered groceries that somehow thought it was more efficient to ship from Ottawa when the nearest one was 10 minutes away.
Brand and impressions are critical when switching cost is nil. Amazon is not perfect but it's not due to their fault, it's always the carrier delivering items late.
jet.com reached their 1B revenue target by losing money on every transaction: rather than have inventory, they relist competitor's inventory at lower prices. Which is why your jet.com purchase may bear the name of some Other online retailer when it arrives. Presumably Wal-Mart will correct both the inventory and the prices in the near future. And when the subsidies dissapear, so will the competition.
Besides which, isn't Amazon a cloud tech company with a vestigial retailing arm?
Walmart is basically Amazon without AWS. Which, IMHO, means they're going to be hopelessly behind from a engineering and innovation perspective. Amazon is playing a completely different kind of game and I highly doubt Walmart will be able compete long term.
The Walton family represents a lot of what I think is wrong with America. If Sam Walton knew that Walmart pays their employees so little that they have to claim social assistance just to survive, what would he say?
While Jeff Bezos isn't an angel, at least he's doing things with his money that I find noble, like Blue Origin and contributing millions to expand the computer science program at the University of Washington
I shudder to think of a future where Walmart dominates the tech logistics scene. Might there be a "Committee for a Third Term for Donald Trump" SuperPAC in the future?
> My contrarian opinion: Walmart is going to create some hard times for Amazon.
Not just Walmart.
In Germany, Amazon actually reduced their reliance on DHL, UPS and DPD... by contracting out almost their entire logistics to Hermes.
If you've never heard of it, Hermes Logistics belongs to the OTTO Group, Europe's largest online retailer group (you likely don't know them, but basically every store contracts out their online shops to OTTO, and OTTO also has their own shops)
It's interesting when even Amazon contracts out their entire logistics to a competitor.
No one uses Jet except to take advantage of their ridiculous coupons. Those coupons are just a way to move VC money to the people, so I'm cool with that but otherwise Jet is just rubbish.
Yup. Amazon's in uncurated listings are getting worse and worse, while Wal-Mart's online shopping offerings are getting better and better. Plus Wal-Mart can offer cheaper shipping with their in-store pickup lockers.
They're going to give Amazon a real competitor. Amazon may be getting better at a lot of things, but the actual experience of shopping online with them is getting worse. I search for an item and i get a hellscape of poorly categorized over-MSRP 3rd party sellers.
Doing 1-day delivery to the majority of your customers in U.S. is easier than you might think-- You just put fulfillment centers within 1 day of the east coast. There's a UPS hub in Louisville and a Fedex hub in Memphis. Those areas are also 1-day to east coast, the rent is cheap, and the locals will give you all sorts of concessions for bringing in jobs. I have seen one Amazon subsidiary that was capable of doing same-day deliver to a large portion of their customers 10 years ago. The trick is to make it cost effective. People pay for different classes of shipping from various vendors-- but getting the order to you as quickly as possible isnt the most profitable way to do business. There are sweat spots where they minimize the cost of shipping but its still "fast enough". Take for example shipments out of the continental U.S.. Every carrier has ways to pool packages in ways that make them cheaper to ship. The shipping still costs you the same, but it'll arrive later. Most of the time you'll be fine with waiting. The times you're not you'll complain and they'll upgrade shipping.
Amazon just has such a huge head start in so many ways, it's difficult to imagine anyone catching up with them anytime soon.
For purchasing online, most people just immediately type "amazon" into their web browser. People will never have any reason to do anything differently, unless Amazon starts screwing up the user experience, or becomes significantly more expensive than other online sites. Neither of those things is likely to happen.
Suggesting that such things will happen is like suggesting that some other search engine is going to quickly replace Google.
I guess all bets are off when one tries to look ten years out–the entire world can change radically in ten years–but personally, I'd bet good money that Amazon and Google will still be the largest players by far for their markets.
The more interesting question, I think, is for how long will Amazon maintain its lead in cloud computing. Cloud computing is something of a commodity, so companies will have a great deal of incentive to go with whoever can do it most cheaply. As long as they do it well, that is. I'd still put my money on Amazon.
Wal-Mart only competes with the retail portion of Amazon. My prediction is that by the time Wal-Mart grows large enough to be a competitor (in online sales), Amazon's cloud and devices business will be larger (and more profitable) portions of the company. Amazon could then subsidize retail. Good luck to any retailer wanting to compete with that. :)
Walmart had enough capital to compete fifteen years ago too, and they chose not to seriously compete then as they are now.
Walmart is a perfect example of the difficulty of a business not disrupting itself. They could have caught up perhaps five years ago, but not now.
Here's the thing: the family still controls it. They are billionaires many times over. To seriously compete with AMZN would take many billions a year, many years in a row, and frankly, you need a guy like Bezos who just doesn't care about anything besides winning. Walmart has had nothing of the sort and the focus on their physical store base was a major distraction during the time they could have caught up. There's obviously TONS of tech involved in AMZN's retail operations, and WMT will simply never be able to hire as many or the same caliber as AMZN can (despite AMZN's poor employer reputation)
Not to mention the fact that their CEOs are concerned about the stock price a few years from now from their RSUs or stock options, and massive e-commerce investments would certainly drive EPS and/or the dividend down which is basically how Walmart is valued in the public market.
The culture, just everything is different and superior at AMZN.
My impression of Walmart is forever tainted by the few recent store experiences I've had. They have no idea where or if inventory is in the store and no one wants to help you find it if so. The last few Walmarts I've been to have had rusty shopping carts that barely roll. And that was in Palo Alto, which has to have much higher incomes than average.
Amazon now has the advantage that the freight train that is FBA has started rolling and just won't stop for a very long time. AWS operating income and FBA fees subsidize their own retail gross margins, which would make it even hard for WMT to compete.
And good luck getting your marketplace partners to deliver as on-time and reliably as AMZN already has gotten theirs to.
Walmart has mid single-digit operating profit margins (profit before taxes and interest). That makes every 1% price reduction (if they were to seriously compete on price) reduce their profit by 15-20%!
Otoh Walmart is much more subjected to the whims of the stock market and their stock price than amazon is. As such they can't afford to take the same risks with capital.
I don't see that as contrary at all. The only real question is whether Walmart can learn how to be a tech company (and innovate as fast as Amazon) better than Amazon can learn to be a full-stack logistics company (and beat Walmart to meet the customers needs).
I doubt this - Walmart have scale, experience and infrastructure over Amazon but what they're lacking for in these areas, Amazon more than makes up for it in engineering culture.
Amazon is first a foremost a data-driven company. Companies say this so much that it's now a cliche, but you better believe it with Amazon.
As an exclusively online (until recently) retailer, every single sale goes through their data warehouse. Every single product, price, clicks are all stored - think of the analytical capability of that consolidated store of data. Amazon is probably the singly largest reserve of economics data.
Moreover, I am fully certain every one of their products, cars, trucks, planes and even people are hooked up into real-time tracking. When you have that much data all centralised, and the scale of Amazon, real life problems start to resemble CS problems and Fulfillment Centers and logistics start resembling CDNs.
If only Amazon has extensive knowledge of the workings of CDNs... oh wait.
> will Amazon be able to keep it's very high stock price
People have been asking this question about Amazon for many years now. I am not saying it wont go down but its a bit tiring hearing the sky is about to fall for Amazon.
One of the most overlooked aspects to Walmart competing with Amazon is branding. Walmart is "gross". Amazon is hip. I don't see how they fix this in the short term. Long term there are strategies.
I sell on all three. Walmart is a threat to Amazon, but they dont appear to be thinking the same way as Amazon does. I think it's a company culture thing.
Considering how there are a lot more Amazon employees here on HN as opposed to Walmart employees, I doubt your contrarian opinion will be particularly well received. Regardless of its merit. Personally, I agree with you, but having a discussion about it here on HN is probably a waste of time.
I think you are raising an interesting issue. Does Amazon, while leading the automation of the retail industry, reduce employment? Or is it a net jobs creator?
Considering the growth of its number of employees, it seems to me that currently Amazon seems to increasing employment and not reducing it. Or am I wrong and is for every new Amazon employee at least one employee fired elsewhere?
I actually predict Amazon beating Walmart in the long term; brick and mortar stores are losing relevance fast especially with drone delivery becoming a reality "soon"
I think you're underestimating the value of Walmart. Sure for things you can wait to get in 2 day shipping, it's a no brainer compared to driving to Barnes & Noble, or BestBuy. But a large part of the US still shops at brick and mortar stores because they want/need things "right now." Walmart is still a juggernaut, especially in smaller cities, rural areas.
And drone delivery... I don't see that being successful for Amazon for another 10 years. Too many technical, legal, and cultural hurdles for that to happen faster, if ever.
It's a bit early to divine the impact of drone delivery. There's a large gulf between novelty prototype and widespread adoption. If anything I see Amazon winning due to better tech R&D. The fact they're experimenting with drone delivery points to them being able to identify opportunity before their competitors. That's a competitive advantage that can translate to real growth.
There is no way that 231K could have hired 110K that fast without getting lots who were not above average.
There is probably a calculated advantage to becoming an average-to-below-average giant giant as a follow-up to above average e-commerce, logistics, or web gigantism.
>optimize the efficiency of those workers, make them achieve more with less effort via technology.
And to allow Amazon to make bigger profits for itself by laying off or continuing to exploit workers rather than valuing automation as a method so humans can work less.
I actually was one of those developers, for a number of years. The reality is that we're still very far away from a robot that can visually identify random objects, identify them, and then pick them up in a safe manner. Humans are awesome at exactly that.
The automation is coming, yes, and many very tedious tasks are being automated but Amazon has never laid off warehouse employees because a robot replaced them- they just move those humans to jobs robots can't do yet, and grow faster.
Why? In this case, the majority of these employees are likely not in tech roles, but in various parts of the fulfillment pipeline. That makes them more similar to FedEx or Walmart.
So this seems like a reorganization of the market of sorts, isn't it? As retail stores like Macy's, Sears report losses after losses, Amazon keeps adding more people to support its merchandise business. Love how the free market works!
Maybe, but don't forget to factor in the relative quality of the jobs that are being replaced. I don't really have a strong opinion on the matter, and it would be a bit hypocritical of me as an amazon prime customer to complain about the working conditions at Amazon but not every job is equal to any other.
Furthermore I wouldn't be surprised if many of these new jobs ended up being automated in the near future. The free market still hasn't figured out a solution to that particular problem last I checked.
> The free market still hasn't figured out a solution to that particular problem last I checked.
Interesting, I think the entire industrial revolution is a very strong counter example to that statement. We repeatedly automated the majority of jobs on the planet every few decades and we saw the largest expansion of wealth and prosperity for the majority of humans in all of history. Should we lament over those subsistence farming jobs that were automated away?
The free market isn't some singular entity that figures out problems before they arrive and sends us all an executive summary of its plan. We currently don't have mass unemployment from automation, and I don't agree with many of the reasons people express for worrying. The only arguments I've seen against mass automation are hints of some dystopian future where somehow robots are prohibitively expensive for all but the richest people, and goods will somehow be cheap enough from automation that non-automated manufacturing can't compete, but still expensive enough that if we don't work 40 hours a week we'll starve.
Production efficiencies have been driving human civilization since the very beginning when humans were wandering around in small hunter-gatherer bands. This round of automation won't be the ruin of humanity much the same as it has been for the last 5000 years.
I chose not to shop at Amazon after returning to the US. To me it felt like the new Wal-Mart (which I stopped shopping at around 2009).
Their business practices are terrible and their boom has really hurt everyone not in tech in their home of Seattle.
They're another piece, but quite a large piece, in a consumption based world that's simply not sustainable. We are in a world today where we simply buy things, all the time. Companies like Amazon have a vested interest in ensuring we never stop making purchases.
I was reading the report because I was interested in the net effect that Amazon has on the retail job market. But I am disappointed at how poorly the report is written.
For instance, the claim of the 4 job cuts for every job that Amazon creates is based on the following statistics: the number of new hires at Amazon in a certain period, against the number of jobs lost in the brick and mortar retail industry in the same period.
Apparently the assumption is made that every single job loss in the brick and mortar retail industry is to blame on Amazon. As if Amazon is the only Internet retail shop in the USA.
The rest of the report is full with other weak claims and sensational titles as well. It appears that the writers had their conclusions already made up before they started investigating ...
I think Macy's announced 4K last January and in January 2017 announced 10k job cuts. Not sure about Sears but I saw a 5400+ number as it closes low performing stores.
1. it's not a free market. that was a thought experiment actually. there is no such thing as a free market, and even if there was, the U.S. economy isn't one.
I don't. Being forced to sell your labour in order to survive doesn't sound all that good to me. Nor the environmental damage due to pursuit of profits.
You should probably find and share the number of jobs lost by Macys, Sears, etc, before making that assertion, otherwise, it is difficult to have any reasonable confidence in what you say.
Im personally not a fan of the new review & promo process. There seem to be some obvious, and some hidden, risks. In my opinion it reduces depth of the content, breadth of the review, and broader exposure/evaluation inside the org.
The "new" transfer policy is actually from 2015 or 2016. Historically transfers in less than 1 year of employment required senior manager approval. New policy is free to transfer after 30 days. As I recall. For details see inside/wiki/
There are also changes in the SDE1 to SDE2 promo process and SDE leveling/coaching/role normalization across amazon.
From what I saw of timing and content neither change was strictly related to the nyt article.
Source: Principal Engineer in AWS, coming up on 6 years at amazon, a few years doing tech/promo assessments.
Good. Humans are wasted on such mundane tasks. I am sure many of those people, given the opportunity, could do far greater things for humanity than picking books and consumer electronics off shelves and put them in boxes.
However we need to make sure as such jobs are automated away that we give the people who would do those jobs the opportunities to become more with training and education.
I prefer to not assume that I know what's better for people than they do themselves, so I'd rather they did far greater things for themselves before I worried about humanity's loss.
That said, there are many people who enjoy mindless jobs like that.
> I am sure many of those people, given the opportunity, could do far greater things for humanity than picking books and consumer electronics off shelves and put them in boxes.
Tech has probably increased 20-25% YoY, as it has for a while. Alexa and AWS especially are basically hiring as fast as they can get people to move to Seattle. More remote offices are opening/expanding to make up the difference.
I'm guessing this tracks the rollout of Prime Now and the scaling up of Fulfilled By Amazon. Prime Now went from zero to "basic fact of life" in record time here in Chicago.
It seems obvious in retrospect that Amazon would vertically integrate into FedEx's market. In 2017 they've become sort of like the Akamai of logistics and delivery.
Not to detract from this, but just curious how many retail jobs have disappeared in that same amount of time? My google-fu is unable to turn up any stats for 2016 yet. I would think with the improved efficiencies, fewer people would be needed for shipping logistics and software development than the retail jobs being replaced.
You could also look at how many businesses have gone under the last year or so and took a bunch of jobs with them:
Sports Authority - 460 stores
Kmart/Sears - 78 stores
Aeropostale - 154 stores
Walmart - 269 stores
Where I live, a lot of these are already gone and the retail space has been vacant since the summer. Same thing in a lot of the malls I used to frequent. Hell, the Mall Of America's 4th floor was vacant for decades after they closed down all the bars. The sad thing is, nobody is filling the vacuum when all these stores close. They just sit vacant for years.
Part of that is Amazon (online shopping in general), part is the whole buy local, and part is fleeing from traditional malls. People either want really cheap (online) or boutique type shops in nice outdoor shopping areas.
I've seen the same thing happening with chain restaurants for years.
Retail is inefficient. To make a retail purchase, you have to drive to the store and back, while a delivery driver can pick an optimal route and make multiple local deliveries with their vehicle before returning to the warehouse.
To give a more concrete example, to purchase a souvenir, some personal hygiene products, some computer hardware and some spices, I'd have to make 4 stops, spend at least 2 hours and $6-8 worth of gas.
None of these things are day2day critical, like food, or essential to physically inspect before purchase (like home improvement goods)
I cannot imagine a sound hiring process to get 110k people in the door. Even if you assume a 1 to 10 ratio between interview-to-hire (that is low), it's a 1.1M interviews. Must be fun.
You under estimate the numbers of recruiters that work at Amazon. I had a team of 8 recruiters at my last position and half of them now work at Amazon.
Sure, but processes - like software - have to be designed for the right scale. The hiring process for a 15 people startup, is different than the 5k people company. At certain scale, things start to break. Imagine sourcers that need to reach out to candidates while (hopefully) don't reach the same candidate another sourcer, in another department, has reached out to. Imagine reaching out to a candidate who's already being in process or rejected. The recruiting team must be huge, and so the recruiting coordinators team.
Readit News
Hundreds of warehouses, hundreds of delivery stations, thousands of shipping containers, dozens of planes (plus an airport soon), a container ship is rumoured. That 341k number probably doesn't even count the independent contractors (both through Flex and through Amazon Logistics) handling deliveries.
The tens of thousands of software developers are there to (among other things) optimize the efficiency of those workers, make them achieve more with less effort via technology.
Walmart ackuired jet.com just 4 months ago. Jet.com, a startup, has managed to create a logistics network being able to do 1-day delivery to 50% of the population(or at least they claimed so), reached $1B in sales rapidly. Walmart has recently started to offer free 2-day delivery($35 minimum), which means that now, even for Prime memebers. shopping comparison is a reasonable option.
Furthermore, Walmart has curbside pickup for groceries, a very convinient service to get your groceries on the way from work, is seeing a lot of sucsess according to Walmart, with availibility in 500 stores, and planning to be in 600 more soon.
And Walmart definetly has got a huge logistics chain, maybe less in areas where Amazon is strong at, but they're probably better at the china/usa logistics part, that's why Amazon is doing some of those moves.
And Walmart does have enough capital to compete.
And once this impacts Amazon, will Amazon be able to keep it's very high stock price ? and how will this affect talent and growth ?
In short: finally , we're in for some very interesting times.
That said, I don't think they have any sort of clear advantage, for two particular reasons:
First, from a technical perspective, they have some serious catching up to do before they can provide the same service level at the same scale. It is not clear from available information that they actually have the required technical competence as an organization.
Second, they have to deal with a reputation that's going to keep them out of many consideration sets: from my perspective, at least, Walmart merchandise is universally cheap crap whose low utility and/or high failure rate will end up costing me more in the long run. I don't trust them to quickly and painlessly make things right if an order is broken, disappointing, or missing. In contrast, Amazon has spent years building trust (on the assumption that the short-term cost of this quality of experience is a profitable investment in securing future business).
I have yet to encounter an adequate answer to "Why should I bother looking at walmart.com?", which I suspect is true for many others, and which I think is a serious threat to Walmart.
That's not going to happen anytime soon. Walmart is trying to offer service like Amazon, but they don't have their shit together enough to succeed at that level.
Recently I wanted to buy a new Roku, and the Walmart site said it was available for pickup today nearby store. Great! I can order it and pick it up on my way home. But wait, when I select it and go to checkout, the site now tells me it will be available for pickup in 5 days. WTF Walmart?!!
Their site was being stupid, so I decided to just stop at Walmart on my way home and buy it. When I get there I have to spend time to track down an employee, and they have to track down someone with keys to get it out of the glass case. Then I realize their in-store price is $10 higher than online, so I have to wait while they track down a manager. After all that bullshit, the the manager tells me they can't match the price on their own fucking website.
I took out my phone and ordered it from Amazon in front of the Walmart manager.
When I got my first iPhone I was recommended a Zagg screen protector. I found that Walmart online had the best deal so I ordered it for in-store pickup. I was notified the day it arrived and headed back to the Layaway area. Nobody was there, but there was a little kiosk where I could enter my info and someone would fetch my item for me. Seemed like a very efficient setup. Walk in, get my thing, and leave.
After putting my info into the kiosk and being told my item was on its way, I waited. And waited. And waited. About 15 minutes in, after entering the info into the kiosk again and not getting a response, I called the store and asked for a manager. It took me a minute to get them to understand that I was calling from inside their store to get my item. But finally, they got it and assured me that someone would be bringing out my item shortly.
Another 15 minutes of waiting and I HAD TO CALL THEM AGAIN! And explain, again, that, "Yes, I'm standing inside your store, waiting for the thing I purchased. We talked about this already."
All told, I was probably there for 45 minutes before I got my item. That was the last time I bought something from Walmart.
Now, I'll concede that this was almost 10 years ago and maybe they've changed. But Walmart has never been known for the best customer service, and Amazon is always fantastic when I have to deal with them. So I'm placing my bet on Amazon in this particular race.
Brand and impressions are critical when switching cost is nil. Amazon is not perfect but it's not due to their fault, it's always the carrier delivering items late.
Besides which, isn't Amazon a cloud tech company with a vestigial retailing arm?
While Jeff Bezos isn't an angel, at least he's doing things with his money that I find noble, like Blue Origin and contributing millions to expand the computer science program at the University of Washington
I shudder to think of a future where Walmart dominates the tech logistics scene. Might there be a "Committee for a Third Term for Donald Trump" SuperPAC in the future?
Not just Walmart.
In Germany, Amazon actually reduced their reliance on DHL, UPS and DPD... by contracting out almost their entire logistics to Hermes.
If you've never heard of it, Hermes Logistics belongs to the OTTO Group, Europe's largest online retailer group (you likely don't know them, but basically every store contracts out their online shops to OTTO, and OTTO also has their own shops)
It's interesting when even Amazon contracts out their entire logistics to a competitor.
They're going to give Amazon a real competitor. Amazon may be getting better at a lot of things, but the actual experience of shopping online with them is getting worse. I search for an item and i get a hellscape of poorly categorized over-MSRP 3rd party sellers.
For purchasing online, most people just immediately type "amazon" into their web browser. People will never have any reason to do anything differently, unless Amazon starts screwing up the user experience, or becomes significantly more expensive than other online sites. Neither of those things is likely to happen.
Suggesting that such things will happen is like suggesting that some other search engine is going to quickly replace Google.
I guess all bets are off when one tries to look ten years out–the entire world can change radically in ten years–but personally, I'd bet good money that Amazon and Google will still be the largest players by far for their markets.
The more interesting question, I think, is for how long will Amazon maintain its lead in cloud computing. Cloud computing is something of a commodity, so companies will have a great deal of incentive to go with whoever can do it most cheaply. As long as they do it well, that is. I'd still put my money on Amazon.
Walmart is a perfect example of the difficulty of a business not disrupting itself. They could have caught up perhaps five years ago, but not now.
Here's the thing: the family still controls it. They are billionaires many times over. To seriously compete with AMZN would take many billions a year, many years in a row, and frankly, you need a guy like Bezos who just doesn't care about anything besides winning. Walmart has had nothing of the sort and the focus on their physical store base was a major distraction during the time they could have caught up. There's obviously TONS of tech involved in AMZN's retail operations, and WMT will simply never be able to hire as many or the same caliber as AMZN can (despite AMZN's poor employer reputation)
Not to mention the fact that their CEOs are concerned about the stock price a few years from now from their RSUs or stock options, and massive e-commerce investments would certainly drive EPS and/or the dividend down which is basically how Walmart is valued in the public market.
The culture, just everything is different and superior at AMZN.
My impression of Walmart is forever tainted by the few recent store experiences I've had. They have no idea where or if inventory is in the store and no one wants to help you find it if so. The last few Walmarts I've been to have had rusty shopping carts that barely roll. And that was in Palo Alto, which has to have much higher incomes than average.
Amazon now has the advantage that the freight train that is FBA has started rolling and just won't stop for a very long time. AWS operating income and FBA fees subsidize their own retail gross margins, which would make it even hard for WMT to compete.
And good luck getting your marketplace partners to deliver as on-time and reliably as AMZN already has gotten theirs to.
Walmart has mid single-digit operating profit margins (profit before taxes and interest). That makes every 1% price reduction (if they were to seriously compete on price) reduce their profit by 15-20%!
Otoh Walmart is much more subjected to the whims of the stock market and their stock price than amazon is. As such they can't afford to take the same risks with capital.
Dude in full hunting regalia spit what I assumed was tobacco on the floor.
I went to K-Mart, which was better. K-mart... was... better...
I'm long on AMZN.
Amazon is first a foremost a data-driven company. Companies say this so much that it's now a cliche, but you better believe it with Amazon.
As an exclusively online (until recently) retailer, every single sale goes through their data warehouse. Every single product, price, clicks are all stored - think of the analytical capability of that consolidated store of data. Amazon is probably the singly largest reserve of economics data.
Moreover, I am fully certain every one of their products, cars, trucks, planes and even people are hooked up into real-time tracking. When you have that much data all centralised, and the scale of Amazon, real life problems start to resemble CS problems and Fulfillment Centers and logistics start resembling CDNs.
If only Amazon has extensive knowledge of the workings of CDNs... oh wait.
People have been asking this question about Amazon for many years now. I am not saying it wont go down but its a bit tiring hearing the sky is about to fall for Amazon.
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and one day replace everything with robots
Considering the growth of its number of employees, it seems to me that currently Amazon seems to increasing employment and not reducing it. Or am I wrong and is for every new Amazon employee at least one employee fired elsewhere?
And drone delivery... I don't see that being successful for Amazon for another 10 years. Too many technical, legal, and cultural hurdles for that to happen faster, if ever.
There is no way that 231K could have hired 110K that fast without getting lots who were not above average.
There is probably a calculated advantage to becoming an average-to-below-average giant giant as a follow-up to above average e-commerce, logistics, or web gigantism.
And to allow Amazon to make bigger profits for itself by laying off or continuing to exploit workers rather than valuing automation as a method so humans can work less.
The automation is coming, yes, and many very tedious tasks are being automated but Amazon has never laid off warehouse employees because a robot replaced them- they just move those humans to jobs robots can't do yet, and grow faster.
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Walmart had 2.3 million worldwide and 1.4 million in the US as of 2016.
FedEx globally had 400k+ as of the end of 2016.
USPS had 493,381 career employees 131,732 non-career employees as of January 2016.
Edit: Disregard this, I can't read.
Furthermore I wouldn't be surprised if many of these new jobs ended up being automated in the near future. The free market still hasn't figured out a solution to that particular problem last I checked.
Interesting, I think the entire industrial revolution is a very strong counter example to that statement. We repeatedly automated the majority of jobs on the planet every few decades and we saw the largest expansion of wealth and prosperity for the majority of humans in all of history. Should we lament over those subsistence farming jobs that were automated away?
The free market isn't some singular entity that figures out problems before they arrive and sends us all an executive summary of its plan. We currently don't have mass unemployment from automation, and I don't agree with many of the reasons people express for worrying. The only arguments I've seen against mass automation are hints of some dystopian future where somehow robots are prohibitively expensive for all but the richest people, and goods will somehow be cheap enough from automation that non-automated manufacturing can't compete, but still expensive enough that if we don't work 40 hours a week we'll starve.
Retail vs Warehouse? I don't think it's much different in quality.
A ton of Retail is Warehouse anyway, just inside a store with customers vs a building with robots.
Their business practices are terrible and their boom has really hurt everyone not in tech in their home of Seattle.
They're another piece, but quite a large piece, in a consumption based world that's simply not sustainable. We are in a world today where we simply buy things, all the time. Companies like Amazon have a vested interest in ensuring we never stop making purchases.
For instance, the claim of the 4 job cuts for every job that Amazon creates is based on the following statistics: the number of new hires at Amazon in a certain period, against the number of jobs lost in the brick and mortar retail industry in the same period.
Apparently the assumption is made that every single job loss in the brick and mortar retail industry is to blame on Amazon. As if Amazon is the only Internet retail shop in the USA. The rest of the report is full with other weak claims and sensational titles as well. It appears that the writers had their conclusions already made up before they started investigating ...
1. it's not a free market. that was a thought experiment actually. there is no such thing as a free market, and even if there was, the U.S. economy isn't one.
2. market fundamentalism is unbecoming
I don't. Being forced to sell your labour in order to survive doesn't sound all that good to me. Nor the environmental damage due to pursuit of profits.
Bet you'll love it a lot less when Amazon has eliminated most competition and will start increasing their margins to pay back shareholders.
are you being sarcastic dude
http://www.clark.com/kmart-sears-closing-2017
I thought it was pretty common knowledge that traditional B&M consumer goods retailers have been struggling for a long time.
I wonder what changes tech employment at Amazon has seen since the NYTimes article a year or so ago.
I don't know how much of that is a result of the article though.
The "new" transfer policy is actually from 2015 or 2016. Historically transfers in less than 1 year of employment required senior manager approval. New policy is free to transfer after 30 days. As I recall. For details see inside/wiki/
There are also changes in the SDE1 to SDE2 promo process and SDE leveling/coaching/role normalization across amazon.
From what I saw of timing and content neither change was strictly related to the nyt article.
Source: Principal Engineer in AWS, coming up on 6 years at amazon, a few years doing tech/promo assessments.
However we need to make sure as such jobs are automated away that we give the people who would do those jobs the opportunities to become more with training and education.
That said, there are many people who enjoy mindless jobs like that.
If they could, they'd be doing them.
So, what's the plan?
1) Robot unemployment
2) Freedom!
3) ???something something training???
4) Utopia
?
I thought maybe these were all temporary holiday rush workers, perhaps they're all permanent now?
Sports Authority - 460 stores
Kmart/Sears - 78 stores
Aeropostale - 154 stores
Walmart - 269 stores
Where I live, a lot of these are already gone and the retail space has been vacant since the summer. Same thing in a lot of the malls I used to frequent. Hell, the Mall Of America's 4th floor was vacant for decades after they closed down all the bars. The sad thing is, nobody is filling the vacuum when all these stores close. They just sit vacant for years.
And 2017 doesn't look to change that trend:
A giant wave of store closures is about to hit the US: http://www.businessinsider.com/stores-closing-macys-kohls-wa...
I've seen the same thing happening with chain restaurants for years.
To give a more concrete example, to purchase a souvenir, some personal hygiene products, some computer hardware and some spices, I'd have to make 4 stops, spend at least 2 hours and $6-8 worth of gas.
None of these things are day2day critical, like food, or essential to physically inspect before purchase (like home improvement goods)
EDIT: this growth is due in part to seasonal hires
Unfortunately so many of them end up poorly :(