I can't remember if a friend working at Amazon told me this, or if I read it online.
Supposedly, Amazon does tons of backend real world optimization on shipping.
Say you, a SF resident, look at a book today on Amazon.com. Based on your past actions, Amazon knows very well how likely you are to purchase right away, or tomorrow, etc.
Now imagine the book isn't in a warehouse close enough to you for prime, but Amazon's data tells them you are much more likely to buy it when you come back to Amazon tomorrow if Prime is offered.
They'll ship the book to the warehouse in case you come back tomorrow to look at that book. Of course there's tons more modeling behind it to make sure they have very accurate estimates of the cost to pre emptively ship vs the payoff of you buying it, but that's the gist of it.
That was a few years ago, and it blew my mind at the time to think of all the optimization you can do in shipping to individuals when you're working at scale.
Amazon is more and more essentially running a CDN, but for the real world.
I say it to all my friends all the time - Amazon is a tech company that happens to do retail, not a retail company that does tech.
It's no coincidence that Amazon calls a unit of storage space in its FCs a "bin" and also happens to pseudo-randomly distribute products in the FC. I am convinced that Jeff Bezos' long term plan is to automate everything, and treat every problem like a CS problem so your CDN analogy is spot on. Pricing is automated, ordering is automated, and I'm pretty sure with Kiva storage positioning is dynamically optimized too. [0]
The thing is, the further invested Amazon is along this path, the cheaper and more profitable it becomes to continue. Moreover, the harder it becomes for new players to catch up.
Will be interesting what the plan is with these planes, I note Amazon also is investigating entering the shipping industry, a space pretty ripe for disruption[1][2]
Bin is a very, very common word in ecommerce that means storage unit.
You're partially correct in your overall assessment of Amazon, but they aren't a tech company first. They're a logistics company that was forced to become a tech company to support their retail efforts.
We just call them bins in the UK, not trash bins. Putting something in the bin idiomatically means throwing it away. Perhaps that's a modern usage. We do also have bread bins, which is about the only use meaning 'receptacle' I can think of outside of warehouse bins.
I think it is a UK phrase, or at least not US. A friend of mine from Taiwan, with excellent (US) English, had never heard of using the word 'bin' for trash before.
It's not common in the US, but you hear it now and again here. The most similar example I can think of is probably "lift." You'll hear someone call an elevator that every so often in the US, but it's mainly the UK term
Amazon most probably does tons of backend optimization in all its activities.
What I have found more amazing is the selection of books in Amazon "brick-and-mortar" bookstore compared to Barnes & Noble (B&N) bookstore in same Seattle shopping complex previously. I typically visit that shopping complex few times a month. Every time, I have visited Amazon bookstore, I tend to pickup couple of books to browse that I find interesting. When I used to visit B&N in same complex previously, it was rare for me to pickup books to browse in repeat visits. Amazon is able to achieve in 1/4th of the one floor what B&N couldn't do with books on two floors, make me pick up books on repeat visits. Amazon seems to refresh books more often in its store. Amazon might also be using the browsing/purchasing habits of users living in the area to determine what books to stock at the store.
Much as I love my e-readers, paper tech books and other textbooks are really still the only way to go simply because you can't easily flip back and forth between pages to cross-reference things or find specific information by flipping to a chapter quickly.
For fiction and any other type of linear reading material though, e-readers have been a godsend.
I disagree. Navigation non-linearly through electronic versions of texts is much easier than having to fan through the pages to look for that one phrase or code snippet you saw 3 months ago. Search and bookmarks...I've seen this in PDFs for years though I don't have much experience working with the newer e-book specific formats.
You'd be amazed how quickly you can find something in a book (or in a few cases for me, a blueprint) when you can just hit F3 or ctrl-f and search for it.
If you know precisely what you're looking for, I would agree that direct search is great; heaven knows I've wished there was a way to grep a book often enough.
However, I often find myself in situations where I don't know precisely the term to search for and am simply browsing to see if there is some information applicable to the problem I'm attempting to solve. That's where the ability to flip rapidly back and forth shines.
Tech books are the only thing I read on paper. I love free tech books, but honestly I'd rather pay to get the physical copy, just for ease of reference. The only time I enjoy digital copies of technical books is when copy and paste works, which it doesn't on Kindle books.
Yep - as others have pointed out, good for flipping back and forth. Also, do pick up language/framework specific ones for initial learning, then head online to pick up on the changes/other aspects.
Surprisingly I've actually increased my spending in hardcover books since getting a Kindle. Kindle is for travel / free books / classics. Hardcover for sitting at home in a comfy chair. Regardless of what people say, physical paper is still easier on my eyes.
These are the only kind of physical books I buy. I can read a novel or most non-fiction on my Kindle just fine. But the Kindle sucks for quickly jumping through pages, or pages with images, charts, or equations. Also you can't lend the majority of Kindle books, and even then it's only to someone else's Kindle account. I love lending out my tech books to friends. I just lent my copy of Mastering Regular Expressions to someone in my office for like the tenth time.
Until I can find a decent reader that doesn't hurt my eyes[1] and does ePub and PDF, yep, I'm buying paper books. Having the ability to highlight, draw, and add post-it like notes would be a bonus since I do that with real books too.
1) the current Apple trend to get rid of all PDFs has made my Mac time a pain given I cannot get good print outs of documentation or use it on something other than an iPad.
There are some new e readers which do both ePub and PDF. A quick search turned up a few like the Nook GlowLight+, and a couple Kobos. Amazon's offerings don't do native ePub, but they (and others) make it trivial to email or upload an ePub and convert it to mobi and deliver to your device.
I can relate with the sentiment on paper books though. It's quite great being able to quickly flip back and forth to several places, or place notes throughout. I've had luck with the highlighting feature on my Kindle, which gives a decent interface for going back and looking at all the things I've highlighted; I've developed the habit of highlighting all the important parts in a book and going back and re-reading just the highlighted bits, which has helped tremendously. Unfortunately, highlighting across pages is rather aggravating.
Apologies if I seemed flippant -- things are changing so quickly nowawdays that apart from a few core texts on algorithms and programming languages, I've pretty much stopped expanding my library. It seems to be stackexchange and blog posts across the board now.
I suspect I'll pay for this choice sooner or later...
I avoid tech books on anything that's changing quickly - like frameworks. It's a waste of paper and ink, IMO. I get those in e-book format instead. I do however buy dead-tree versions of stuff that won't change fast or that I expect to flip back and forth.
I think if it's a "concepts" book like SICP, a book explaining the patterns of the Erlang OTP framework, etc it's still worth a real purchase. If it's "Programming Framework version X", why bother unless it's really cheap? Though to be fair, a lot of projects have awful docs which make books necessary.
Yes, but only books that won't be out of date in a year, so no programming language or framework specific books.
I did buy a copy of The C Programming Language a couple of years back though, but that's just because I feel like it's just one of those books you must have.
Say you, a SF resident, look at a book today on Amazon.com. Based on your past actions, Amazon knows very well how likely you are to purchase right away, or tomorrow, etc. [...] They'll ship the book to the warehouse in case you come back tomorrow to look at that book.
It's unlikely that it would be worth doing this if one person looks at a book; the return-and-buy-later rates wouldn't be high enough. But if ten people look at a book, it makes sense to move one or two copies to a closer warehouse -- and that's where Amazon's scale really wins. With O(N) customers and good historical data they can predict future purchases to within O(sqrt(N)) thanks to the central limit theorem.
> It's unlikely that it would be worth doing this if one person looks at a book
Yeah... But then again, if a truck is leaving soon from warehouse A to warehouse B, why not put that book on the truck, if no one near A has looked at it recently?
There IS a marginal cost to touching a book and to moving it, even if the truck is going ANYWAY, it might be pennies of fuel + pennies of labor to move it. This could eat into the margins.
Even then if you really have data for everything, you can take into account, "are we overstaffed in warehouse A right now? what are the staffing costs in warehouse B when we arrive?", and do more or less physical work depending on that information
But there a again, I don't collect patterns about my behaviour so it could be true.
Sometimes I look at Amazon and then buy the product elsewhere, say if I spent 3 occasions over a few days looking at a product, does that breach some threshold somewhere for them to say "we have one on the hook, lets start moving this to a warehouse near him just in case"
I have no actual knowledge on the topic, but I presume it's not calculated on a purely individual level. If 100 people live within the range of the local distribution warehouse are interested in this book, and they say "this one is 87% likely to buy, this one is 43% likely to but..." they can work out a model that results in very few over-shippings.
But again, I know nothing, other than thinking about it a bit when the patent app became known.
The patterns in this would be very exciting to know for people who are looking for their "tribe". It's actually something very hard to find out before moving somewhere thats not the Valley, what is the main intellectual focus of the region, is there none?
I missed a lot in my own childhood and upbringing to have people in my environment that we're or we're in contact with people at the top of their field, having deeper understanding of something instead of just struggling at their level.
We all talk about Google and Facebook's rich data source for human behaviour. We talk less about Amazon's rich data source on consumer behaviour. As Google themselves once said Amazon is a search engine for products/shopping.[0] They said this some 3~ years ago, Amazon has continued to expand since. It is fairly safe to assume Amazon is the single most largest consolidated reserve of consumer behaviour data on the world now.
Facebook can gauge the difference between different types of likes from how you read a page[1], Amazon does too from their harvested clickstream.
With a lot of data, the aggregate probabilities will become reasonably accurate. If they predict that there's a 60% chance you'll buy, that they'll make $2 from you if you do, and they'll lose $2 on wasted shipping if you don't, then on average they'll make money by prepositioning your prospective purchase.
For Prime orders I can see it making a huge difference. Two-day shipping gets really expensive compared to slower methods when shipping over large distances, but for short distances it can be done entirely on normal ground delivery trucks and is cheap. If prepositioning wastes a few bucks sometimes and saves a bunch of money on expensive two-day shipping other times, it could be a big win.
Its easy to believe if the marginal cost to ship the item approaches 0. For Amazon, this might actually be close enough to true to matter. Especially after this move.
It probably does approach 0. The truck is going anyway, most of the cost of a truck is wind resistance so adding more books up to the weight limit is close to zero.
Amazon is probably never shipping a single book, they are using analytics to decide if they should ship a case of books. If they think you are 90% likely to buy a book tomorrow but you are the only one who will it isn't worth the risk. If they decide 100 people are 50% likely to buy a book, sending a box of 100 books is a good investment - if 50 people buy tomorrow that implies 40 will buy the next day and 30 the day after and then 45 the next day and so on for a few weeks/months as sales slowly drop to zero.
I worked NA logistics back when I was with Amazon, and was with the team behind the LA fresh and the team which works with intermediate FCs (they don't stock goods, but do store-and-forward at crucial locations in the logistics pipeline). And you are right, Amazon does an incredible amount of stuff when it comes to logistics. There is an entire building that houses trans & metrics team, and the hyderabad center in India is mostly just the transportation team.
Amazon is way ahead in the logistics game, even further than some of your flagship logistics companies.
I was formerly a customs broker for Amazon in the past and found their orders to usually be pretty typical, usually based around volume/time of year. They definitely rotate vendors based off time of year + what would be seasonally important but I think it's mostly just based off what sells. I don't think their algorithm is quite as complex but I don't think it's any bit weak, honestly. But as I was their broker and didn't work internally, I can't comment to specifics, really.
> [Amazon] plans to launch its first ever branded cargo plane, the Amazon One, at Seattle’s SeaFair Air Show on Friday. The plane is a a Boeing 767-300 operated by Atlas Air, an existing provider of air cargo services for Amazon.com.
Unless I'm missing something, the only new thing here is the paint on the plane.
The ownership stake in Atlas with Amazon is interesting to me.
Amazon was contracting with Air Transport Services Group (Airborne Express/DHL US, for those keeping track at home) for flights into and out of Wilmington for an air sort program. Amazon must have crunched the numbers on what they were paying to FedEx and UPS and realized that they could lease planes for what they were paying for someone else to do the deliveries...
40 Aircraft pushing packages from one corner of the globe to another? This means that they can cut their logistics costs (or, alternatively, move them in house from an external vendor, giving them more control) and be able to fine-tune delivery.
>> "In other respects, seen any other tech companies painting their logos onto cargo planes recently?"
Why would they? Amazon's entire business is reliant on shipping and their USP is basically, you can get anything shipped to you quickly. What other tech company has a requirement like this?
Maybe not tech company, but Walmart just bought Jet.com, and Target has also been trying to get into the online business.
I guess all retailers will try to catch up to Amazon, but there's 20 years or experience and literally billions of investment to recreate.
Even if Walmart (or others) tried to invest enough to catch up, I'm not convinced there are enough engineers (with relevant experience) available! They'd have to poach from Amazon. :)
The registration, too. I looked up the tail number to see what I could find out about the history of the airframe, because I'm a huge nerd like that, and the only prior aircraft with that number was a hot air balloon that crashed twenty years ago. The current registration is dated July 26.
With the number of airlines who lease their planes from holding companies, it's actually quite similar to what in the rest of the industry would be "launching" their own service. The pilots can just be considered agency ones, and they'll get to decide more on routes, holding and slots.
Not entirely true. Looks like they also get a lot more control over the fleet now. This will allow them to ship with greater flexibility and for cheaper rates.
Only tangentially related, but a useful thing to know about Amazon, and not something it seems a lot of people are aware of:
If you have problems with a specific shipper Amazon uses, you can contact their customer support and request they deprioritize that carrier, which has the effect of weighting it to the bottom of the shipper selection algorithm. This does not guarantee they'll never be chosen, but it does make it very unlikely.
In my own case, I had a lot of problems with Amazon's in-house fulfillment, which here in Baltimore is kind of a trash fire. (Prime Now is great. Amazon Fulfillment is not.) After an unbroken streak of erroneously failed deliveries, I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Amazon's support department, culminating in the discovery that carrier deprioritization is a thing that exists. Since it's been applied, Amazon Fulfillment has not been selected to deliver me a package, in contrast to its former high likelihood of selection. So this appears to be more than just placebo. Others have reported similar results.
As far as I can tell, in order to obtain this benefit, you need to use the specific form of words: "carrier deprioritization", or something very close to it. The specific phrase I've heard them use is "carrier deprioritization", and it'll probably help if you call it that too; I had several representatives tell me there was nothing at all they could do, until I happened upon one who mentioned this phrase. Asking for it by name may save you a lot of time.
If you've had persistent difficulty with a specific carrier, you can do worse than to get in touch with Amazon customer support and make this kind of request. Hope this helps!
Whoever you were talking to may have had the nous to deprioritize OnTrac even though you didn't specifically ask for that to be done. It seemed to me like the form of words was necessary because I'd complained about AMZL_US quite a few times before anyone actually mentioned that it was a thing which could be done - but maybe they're just hesitant to deprioritize that specific carrier because, as an in-house organization, it probably offers better margins than a third-party shipper would.
You do realize you can just select the carrier on the order page? That's kinda the point of it.
You get a bunch of radio buttons to select if you want to get stuff delivered via Hermes, DHL, DHL Express, Amazon Prime Now, UPS, etc. each with different prices.
EDIT: Turns out that feature got removed several years ago. I wonder why.
> You get a bunch of radio buttons to select [carriers]
No, I don't; I get a bunch of radio buttons to select the delay with which items are delivered, each with different prices. No doubt this influences the algorithm which picks carriers, but each time tier can be fulfilled by multiple carriers, even for the same item from the same seller. It's not at all the same as having a direct choice of carrier. (If I did have such an option, don't you think I'd have used it, rather than burning up time with customer support the way I described? I'm kind of a jackass, but I'm hardly a moron.)
No one with whom I've ever discussed this issue has mentioned having such a choice. If you do have it, how did you come by it? Is it perhaps a per-country thing, such that you have it because you live somewhere other than the US? Certainly there are enough other things about Amazon which differ from country to country; I wouldn't be surprised to learn this was another one. (But, from the attitude with which you respond, perhaps you might be!)
I suppose you talk about German Amazon? Because I don't get such a selection and never heard of anyone having one - only people complaining that Hermes lost their orders.
On my order page I get to choose between Prime speed (with a "guaranteed" delivery date[1]) and standard delivery. Depending on the item they also offer express, early-morning or same-day delivery but that's about it. Nowhere on the page are specific carriers mentioned and for the same option different carriers are chosen (though I usually only use the Prime one).
You can choose to have the package delivered to a drop-off location instead of your home. In that case you get to see the carrier before placing the order because they operate those shops.
The only place I have ever seen a carrier selection is the return page where you usually (but not always) can choose between a Hermes and a DHL label.
Just to satisfy my curiosity I'd like to see a screenshot of your order page.
[1]: Which often was missed until I complained. Now it works magically.
I've contacted them by phone many times. The number is easily found on their support page. I also just Googled 'Amazon Support Number' and it showed the number in a box at the top of the screen.
Thanks. Something new. Greatly appreciated. Not kidding for years I have been trying to find a number and gave up in January when my prime was scheduled to renew
This is interesting, because I thought it was extremely easy to find their number. I have talked to agents on several occasions about problems. One of the reasons I like being a prime member is because I get such good service on the phone. I have never had a problem they haven't fixed. Maybe I just got lucky.
Maybe -- but the advantages to Amazon are the differences from UPS and FedEx. For example, there are few sources -- the warehouses. If done right, there's no need to sort, the warehouse releases ready-to-go containers. And so on.
That would be nice - an alternative to the UPS FedEx duopoly. Maybe they can push the shipping rates lower than the evil twins set it at now. The two are doing about 100 billion in business, so it is a large market to go after.
I have been shipping daily with both of them for a decade; it would be nice to have another choice with national coverage.
I would hope that Amazon is introducing competition to UPS and FedEx - but its also possible that they are paving the way for a Vertically integrated Monopoly. Time will tell, I suppose.
Unlike ISP service, parcel shipping is already dirt cheap. Amazon has already had a large impact in that space by pushing its carriers to optimize and making things like Prime possible, but I'm not sure what they could do for parcel rates at retail. I feel like they're already bottom of the barrel.
Automated trucks are probably going to be the next big thing that could potentially decrease retail shipping costs (at the expense of laying off all those truck drivers).
Amazon can't really compete with DHL, and likely won't ever be able to.
Sending a parcel within of 1 day from anywhere in Europe to anywhere in Europe for about 5$? That's cheaper than Amazons shipping (although amazon uses DHL), and faster.
And while DHL is already using drones for deliveries on the coastal islands and testing them on large scale for cities, Amazon is repainting an airplane with another name.
I'm not sure Amazon can ever compete on a truly global scale.
Can you please give example for that 1 day for 5$ from ... lets say Sofia, Bulgaria to Lisbon, Portugal . I had to pay good 30EUR last time I used them.
Well, I dunno the prices for that - but the 5$ was literally what I paid the last time I sent a package from Germany to Britain, which was surprisingly cheap.
Sending stuff abroad from Germany with DHL is really cheap. Sending stuff from the UK to Germany is a whole lot more expensive (independent of carrier). It was double to thrice the price last I checked. Anyone happen to know why?
Not sure if this is actually connected to your DHL pricing, but there is a surprising amount of cheap air transit to the UK because it is a major transport hub. Fresh flowers and cut vegetables are flown to the UK from Kenya, simply because there is enough spare capacity (there are planes that would otherwise fly empty from Kenya->UK) that the air freight is very cheap. These 'backloads' as they are called are more common to the UK because, being a transport hub, empty planes are more likely to fly to the UK to collect another load to carry.
It also complicates things like calculating the carbon footprint of goods. Do fresh flowers from Kenya have a high carbon footprint, given that the plane that carried them would have flown there regardless of whether or not it carried the flowers?
It could be because there is more space on the planes travelling from UK->Germany than Germany->UK, or perhaps DHL have a German hub that means there are many more routes there?
And it actually could raise prices. As Amazon has expanded into other carriers, they give the easy metro markets to the smaller carriers and give UPS and FedEx the rural areas.
Because UPS and FedEx must deliver everywhere in the US for PR/marketing/network effect reasons, they operate many of the rural areas at a massive loss, but subsidize them with metro areas which are profitable. Amazon basically is screwing them over - they might have to either raise prices or exit the market.
Maybe FedEx could at least test the idea of hyperloop for freight --a lot more forgiving in terms of safety than moving people. Of course does not make it that cheaper to build, but right of way with present-day rail
It's more the original google fiber, when they started running their own long-haul lines to become a backbone ISP back in the early 2000s. That's how they were able to buy youtube and rapidly ratchet up the video quality offered (remember it was originally 240p!) without loses tons of money on transit fees.
If they are smart they would raise prices now (for anticipated lower volumes) while they have a small time window in which Amazon needs them while it scales. If they don't they will be toast.
My initial reaction was to question their growing levels of vertical integration, but their volume is so huge that they will probably rival UPS/Fedex if you included all of Amazons shipments across carriers.
It would cost Amazon 40-50b to buy Fedex, probably twice as much for UPS. If they really plan to run their own fleet they probably have a plan beyond just doing Prime deliveries.
The beauty of it for Amazon is they only need to compete in their best markets. Pure shipping companies have to go everywhere, but Amazon has the luxury of doing its own delivery only where it is easy and outsourcing it to legacy shippers where it's not. For example, I could easily see Amazon delivering directly to large condo/apartment buildings in urban areas.
Only USPS ships everywhere. If you go to UPS/FedEx/DHL, they will tell you they ship everywhere and take your package, but if they deem your package not profitable enough they will hand it over to USPS.
The shipping market is incredibly complex with USPS and FedEx actually being each other's largest customers.
That is true, but it is also true that UPS and FedEx still operate a lot of non-profitable areas. They rely on easier metro areas to help subsidize the losses.
This already started to happen a while ago (couple months?) in Munich. Amazon packages are delivered by a specific Amazon delivery person instead of DHL as before. Now I don’t need to sign anything any more when at home and when I’m not at home, it will be left in front of my apartment door; whereas DHL either handed it over to a neighbour or a ‘closeby’ post office.
Not sure what I would do if a shipping went missing while in front of my apartment door, but from past interactions with Amazon, I’d assume they send a new one without asking questions.
There is zero reason for them to buy UPS or Fedex, zero.
Let me tell you a secret, Amazon's relationships with shipping companies are so good that they can get incredible deals on rates. That may seem obvious, but it's true and it's important. Because it means that there isn't a huge amount of savings to be had by buying up a shipping company. The advantage to Amazon would be acquiring the business of the shipping company, but those companies operate on thin margins and have to deal with a lot of hassles that our outside of Amazon's business scope right now, so overall it doesn't seem like a good idea.
In terms of vertical integration, it makes far more sense for Amazon to simply build whatever it needs itself if it really wants to, it's already done some of that with Amazon Fresh so they are keenly aware of the issues in that part of the business and have a good idea of when it would make sense to get into it or not (currently, for last mile delivery, the answer is "sometimes but usually not").
> but their volume is so huge that they will probably rival UPS/Fedex if you included all of Amazons shipments across carriers
Not even remotely close. Amazon's total retail shipping volume represents about 5%-6% of UPS by itself. Amazon's total shipping costs annually are equal to about 9% of the revenue UPS does currently. You're dramatically underestimating how big UPS + Fedex + USPS are. Those three deal with shipping for businesses and consumers representing $40+ trillion in global economic activity, and of course have a huge share of the US $18 trillion economy. Amazon is still just a large drop in that vast shipping ocean.
No, don't be ridiculous, it doesn't just go to shipping, it all goes to just these 3 entities. All other shipping companies are about $25 trillion. It's truly surprising how little of all money spent actually goes towards stuff.
Check your next credit card bill. I'd be willing to bet that over 80% of all you spending in a given month is shipping.
There have been fascinating studies done on the psychology of it. It's become such a large part of our cultures that most people forget they even do it. There was a documentary that followed 17 people through their daily lives in a major US city for 6 whole months. Most people didn't even remember shipping something most days, yet on average each person when into either a Fedex, Ups, or USPS store 37 times per day to ship things. Absolutely amazing.
> Most people didn't even remember shipping something most days, yet on average each person when into either a Fedex, Ups, or USPS store 37 times per day to ship things.
You had me going for a second until I got to this line. Genius.
The $40trn latter figure is just a vanity metric about how much money those couriers' customers (most businesses have sent or received something from them at some point during the year) make overall.
Combined revenues of USPS, UPS and Fedex are easily found and are a little over $150bn per annum
I'd think Amazon would be able buy either for less than market value. They'd drop in value anyway if Amazon moved away from them and did their own thing.
The more they innovate on shipping the more I commit to a set of values that doesn't include instant gratification or equating consumer possessions with happiness.
A rule of thumb I use before buying something is, do I need it or want it so much that it's worth more effort to obtain than a few mouse clicks?
If it took a week to ship and I can do without it for that long, can't I do without it altogether? If I need it sooner, can't I just go get it? I used to be a huge online shopper but I've rediscovered that going out into the world is not a chore and it's good to have excuses to do so.
Freeing oneself from Amazon is even better than freeing oneself from Facebook.
> If it took a week to ship and I can do without it for that long, can't I do without it altogether?
No? For this to be true in general requires a complete inability to plan for the future. If my daughter needs diapers but not urgently, that's not something I can just do without. If I need a new wireless router because mine is failing intermittently, I can probably wait a week, but I'm not waiting forever.
Piling on, If I need a special wrench to repair my bicycle, I can drive to work for a week, but abandoning the bicycle and driving all the time is clearly worse...
While I get your point here's a counter example. I needed a power adapter for a router urgently. I checked Amazon and they could deliver it by Prime the next day. I decided instead to go out into the real world and check first. I went to 3 different small electronics stores near my home - none of them had it. After an hour of searching/wasting my time I bought it on the Amazon app as I walked home. I think the point is - it depends where you live. These electronics stores were small places that doubled as internet cafés and were run by local people. I would have really had to go out of the way to find a Maplin/Radioshack/Best Buy kind of store. If I drove a car or lived near a mall I probably could have gotten the item easily but I live in a city and small locally run stores are much more common than chains which stock everything. It wasn't even that obscure an item but without wasting several hours and spending £6 on public transport Amazon was the only solution.
Going to Best Buy in my experience means paying more for the same product. It's also a 40-minute round trip, minimum. It's 30 minutes if I go to Target, or Barnes and Noble, and similar times for most other stores I'd go to.
If I could walk to a store to get most of the stuff I'd otherwise get from Amazon, I'd consider it more often. But driving 20 minutes or more to pick up something small is not a good use of my time. It's not enjoyable. It's not a meaningful amount of exercise to walk through a store. And frankly driving for a small item is not very earth friendly. I suspect that it's better for the environment to have UPS add another package to their truck than it is for another car to drive to the store and back, even if you consider the environmental cost of the box.
> aimed at promoting instant gratification and maximizing consumerism
So it's a retail company. I feel like this statement applies to at least 99% of retail companies, likely including the ones you're shopping at instead of Amazon.
Amazon impresses me in solving the problems typical stuffed shirt business people try to run from. AWS is a great example of tech execution, but courier services are probably a more impressive accomplishment objectively speaking.
Sustainability in business comes from being good at products and services you claim to provide. You can game your way up for a bit with good sales and marketing, but if you suck at execution of products and services, eventually you will suffer if someone else does marginally better.
Charlatans violating this simple principle is one of the most frustrating things I've had to deal with in my career.
"The plane is a a Boeing 767-300 operated by Atlas Air, an existing provider of air cargo services for Amazon.com."
So it seems a bit like they are announcing a paint job on a vendor's plane. However, the underlying story reminds me a bit about Sears & Roebuck. That retailer came to dominate the scene by innovating in the logistics of getting material and goods "most of the way" there so that ordering out of the "Sear's Catalog" could be just as good as going to the store.
Interesting. I'd love to see Amazon detail how they plan to fuel hedge. It's a crazy market, to me, but totally fascinating so if they're that bonkers good with algos & tech, they might have statistically significant results! Well, in theory. I get the sense though they're not going to get to that point of direct-employment-purchase and keep things as a sub-contractor / flight supplier relationship (as noted elsewhere).
In the meantime, Prime seems to get less and less available for me here in HI. You go to a product that says "Prime", but then when you attempt to check out it says "actually, this can't be shipped to your destination". This only used to happen with large shipments, but lately it's been happening with small parts as well. It really makes me wonder when it will no longer be worth it to have Prime.
Amazon's long-term play in this area seems to get clearer everyday. It will build services to retail what it has done for compute. They are building an operating system for a retail company. They provide the IT, management services, logistic services, marketing and advertising services. Eventually if 3D printing catches on, you can even get your stuff manufactured and sold using Amazon's services.
This article is pretty misleading. Amazon contracts a 3rd party logistics provider (who owns the aircraft). They've already been doing this for years. Only difference now is the plane is painted. A bit click-baity if you ask me.
A retired air mechanic told me this a while ago. We could not figure out why they need their own fleet (40 ish planes when they come off existing carriers) of so many planes
Hubris. Amazon thinks they can do every other industry better than the status quo. Let's see what happens when Amazon tries to assign pilot scores and account for fuel by the liter. Amazon is going to have to deal with real unions now too.
Hubris? I can name off a number of industries Amazon has, nearly singlehandedly, disrupted: online retail, shipment subscriptions, low cost electronics, VPS web hosting, scalable database storage, transactional emails apis. And this is just off the cuff. I suspect the actual list is far longer.
Amazon is not run by arrogant morons. You don't invest in Boeings with hubris. You invest after having crunched more numbers and built more models than we can realistically imagine.
Yeah, well maybe there is a lot of slack that could be taken up in those other industries. Air transportation does not seem like one that needs disrupted or should be disrupted. The fact that it works at all is amazing.
Amazon is under almost zero plausible threat of monopoly issues outside of niche categories like e-book readers (which would end in fines rather than traditional broader anti-trust punishment).
Amazon will never acquire a greater dominance in retail than what Walmart had at its peak, and Walmart was never under serious anti-trust threat. Walmart also once owned an extremely large hauling business (eventually mostly sold off to Berkshire Hathaway), and operates a large private-label Great Value brand.
Not a monopoly but Amazon Basics products are copies of Amazon's best selling products at a much cheaper price. This makes third-party vendor competition pretty harsh. I can buy a Rain Design mStand Laptop Stand for $40 or buy the Amazon clone for $20.
I have the Rain Design stand, and out of curiosity I checked those just now on Amazon. Seems Rain Design has suffixed their product with (Patented) now. I'm guessing they are less than thrilled with Amazon at this point.
The Amazon Basics items I've seen could be described as "the minimum acceptable". It's better than the typical Chinese junk, but anyone upmarket shouldn't have to worry.
Then it was a genius idea. There's tons of awful, broken stuff for really cheap on Amazon. With basics you get something you can at least know it works and if not can complain to someone.
These are planes that were going to fly anyway. As another poster said - the only really new thing is the paint scheme. The planes are still owned by the same firms, and still contracted to Amazon for carrying their parcels.
Not to be snarky, but to reduce your environmental impact in this area, you'd have to stop buying things from far away places -- only buying locally produced goods. Which for parts of the world that aren't China, would be hard to do.
Amazon really is like the amazon river, branching out in so many areas that are still related with it, all the while improving the found methods and technology.
They could do what, exactly? Slash their prices and run themselves into the ground? Who knows how much money Amazon is sinking into this venture and running it at a loss, hoping to make it up in other areas.
There's no way "free shipping" isn't costing them a mountain of money, but they can just blend it into other operational costs. Logistics companies make all their money on this stuff, they can't afford to subsidize.
For FedEx to do Amazon a "favor" by matching prices is suicidal. It sucks they lost the business but there's nothing they can do.
Supposedly, Amazon does tons of backend real world optimization on shipping.
Say you, a SF resident, look at a book today on Amazon.com. Based on your past actions, Amazon knows very well how likely you are to purchase right away, or tomorrow, etc.
Now imagine the book isn't in a warehouse close enough to you for prime, but Amazon's data tells them you are much more likely to buy it when you come back to Amazon tomorrow if Prime is offered.
They'll ship the book to the warehouse in case you come back tomorrow to look at that book. Of course there's tons more modeling behind it to make sure they have very accurate estimates of the cost to pre emptively ship vs the payoff of you buying it, but that's the gist of it.
That was a few years ago, and it blew my mind at the time to think of all the optimization you can do in shipping to individuals when you're working at scale.
Amazon is more and more essentially running a CDN, but for the real world.