Um, which demographic plays Dance Dance Revolution again?
That would be young people, mostly still high school age or younger.
The guy said "techies like us are at increased risk because of our sedentary lifestyles" which is true for lots of techies. Increased risk != destiny. You may be the exception but people who largely sit at their desks and type all day are not as a general rule considered active.
No one cares about nuclear weapons since the cold war ended. Well, no one but old, irrelevant people.
Are you stupid or trolling? You must be a weapons-grade imbecile to not care about nuclear weapons. You seriously think that a device that can fit in the trunk of a car or on the nosecone of a missile, capable of can vaporizing a major metropolitan area in an instant, is not a big deal? That might be the dumbest thing I've ever read on slashdot in the last 15 years and that is saying something.
At some point I realized that nothing serious ever happened, and things kept getting better and I just stopped believing it.
So by your logic because nuclear war hasn't happened yet, it never will? That's... impressively illogical and dangerous.
This is probably why I'm skeptical that global warming will have a serious negative impact on my life.
If you are over the age of 40 and look at actuarial tables, global warming might or might not impact your life greatly. But if you give a crap about those who are younger than you then there is a very real probability it will impact younger folks in very tangible and serious ways. Within my lifetime glaciers have hugely receded, the Arctic ice cap has shrunken to historic lows, etc. If you think those events (regardless of whether caused by man or not) are not having an effect on global climate and weather right now then you either ignorant or have an agenda.
Getting a shiny new car for your first car is typically a symptom of being a spoiled brat.
You apparently don't know many children of wealthy parents. I do. My parents aren't well off but they put me through a private school (with financial assistance) where many of my classmates came from monied families. You know what? Virtually all of them were nice, well adjusted and not at all spoiled. Quite a few got to drive nice new cars while still in high school. And when they did act spoiled their parents usually came down on them like a ton of bricks.
The car is meaningless. It's how much the parents are involved and give a shit about their child's behavior that matters. Sure there are some parents who get it wrong but you're painting with an awfully broad brush there and the actual facts don't support your thesis. It's been my experience (first hand) that on average kids with well off parents tend to be MORE involved in their child's life (car or not) and the statistics on this tend to on average back me up.
Not letting them on the road seems a little extreme but do they have to have a brand new car? What happened to having a beater to putt around in for the first few years?
What does it matter to you? Sure I drove a beater like most of us but if a parent puts their kid in a new(er) car, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with that unless the kid develops an entitlement complex from it. If the money isn't an issue to them it really shouldn't matter to us either.
Wait, what? Did you really just claim that unless Amazon has a monopoly on the entire retail sector it isn't developing a monopoly on certain aspects
I'm claiming that Amazon getting a monopoly is highly unlikely. Name one area where Amazon has a monopoly. Go ahead, I'll wait. Having a big impact != having a monopoly. Amazon has a big impact but no part of their business could reasonably be described as a monopoly at this time.
This is really misleading. Retail is not fungible.
It's not misleading at all. Walmart has a huge impact but it's still not a monopoly. It has some very local areas where it might be considered one (one store towns) but across the retail marketplace it's merely first among many. Amazon can compete with Walmart in many of these one store towns because they don't need a store there. Amazon is highly unlikely to drive Walmart out of any of these and vice-versa.
There are tons of places in America where there is literally one shop (either a dollar store or a Walmart) within a reasonable driving distance.
Which Amazon neatly circumvents by not needing a shop. What's your point?
Could you manage to sell locally video games, DVDs/BlueRays ?
Sony did sell Sony branded video games and DVDs in their own stores. Microsoft too at least for the video games. You definitely can sell your own brand of stuff. I'll say again that there is no fundamental obstacle to a company selling their own branded merchandise in any sector I can think of.
You have a bit of a bias, younger audience will go a long way to save a few pounds and are not as appreciative of the staff skills as you are.
It's not a question of personal bias (which BTW you misunderstand mine badly). Some stores are popular because of the customer experience - they provide extra value and charge for it. People don't shop at the Apple store because they want to be left alone - they go online if they want that. People don't shop at Nordstroms because they want to be left alone. People DO shop at Walmart or Home Depot or Target because they want cheap and don't need/want to interact with someone. And both are fine. But if a company wants to compete on price there really can only be one company with the lowest price whereas companies that compete on differentiation compete (mostly) on factors other than price.
For the record I rarely want to talk to someone in a store - I'm usually looking for a good deal and prefer to do my own research. That's why I do most shopping online - but when I do talk to a sales person I expect them to know their stuff.
my point is that while some shops can survive if they have good staff and sell specialised products, you can't deny that online competition is a strain on their finances.
You could say the same about any competition - online or offline.
I'm kind of surprised they didn't buy into the radio shack storefronts to get every-town distribution locations - even if it's just a "pick up" site.
I'm sure they thought about it but that's a VERY speculative bet, even for Amazon. Radio Shacks are not exactly prime retail space and it's not clear if it makes sense to use it as a sort of post office box. The entire value proposition of Amazon to most of us is that we don't have to go anywhere to get what we buy. Once we have to go somewhere to pick it up there is no longer any advantage in choosing Amazon over say Walmart or Target. Remember that Amazon is a low margin business at least on the physical goods side of things so shipping low margin goods to a tiny retail shop in a non-prime location while destroying the key advantage of your brand doesn't seem like a great plan.
Even though I do think brick and mortar stores should at least be aware of what Amazon is doing.
I assure you that they are acutely aware of what Amazon is doing.
The question still remains if Amazon can actually stop bleeding red and profit.
Amazon could be profitable tomorrow if they chose to be. You only have to look through their financial statements to show that. They reinvest heavily in growing the company and in some pretty speculative projects (Fire Phone) and as long as Bezos is CEO I don't see that changing. And honestly I think that is a good plan at least in principle - and so far the execution has been good. The biggest danger to Amazon is if a company like Walmart figures out a way to use their thousands of existing stores as warehouses in addition to being stores AND get people to think of them for online purchases.
Obviously Amazon is better on consumers and their obsessive need for instant gratification.
Umm, not so much. For most of Amazon's customer base there is at minimum a 24 hour delay before receiving any purchases. I can wander down to my local Walmart in about 15 minutes if I want "instant" gratification.
The advantage for Amazon of course if they can manage to streamline delivery and offer good prices is that they have less physical over head over a Walmart.
That's not really as true as you might think. That's something of a myth left over from the early days of Amazon. Amazon has been busy building warehouses all over the place to facilitate efficient and fast delivery and these incur substantially the same costs as brick and mortar stores. They are doing this so that Walmart and the rest don't steal a march on them and use their stores as warehouses. Remember that your local Walmart is almost certainly closer to you than your nearest Amazon warehouse so this means that Walmart could in theory be able to deliver products quite rapidly if they work out the system for doing so and they are among the best at logistics in the world.
The problem is, that State's are now implementing sales tax requirements and the online merchants may not be able to convince as easily consumers to buy merchandise online vs going to a store.
Again Amazon is actually supporting collection of sales tax now. They believe it actually works in their favor and they are probably right. The sales tax on internet sales was all but inevitable so Amazon is getting ahead of the problem early.
I live in the UK and have cut down on Amazon for nearly 'everything'. I appreciate their efficiency, their systems and their prices but I don't want to live in a world where there's just one shop.
That's highly unlikely. Furthermore you might have that backwards. Think of it like this. Amazon is forcing lots of other companies, big and small, to step their game up with regards to online shopping which is almost entirely to your benefit. I assure you that Walmart and Target and other retailers have no interest in going out of business so shop where it makes sense for you and if the others eventually catch up then switch to them. Think of it like tough love for companies that haven't thought hard enough about how to deliver value to you.
That's the thing for everybody to be afraid of.
Doesn't worry me a bit. The odds of Amazon becoming a monopoly are vanishingly small. See below.
With great power comes great responsibility, with late-stage capitalism comes winner takes all.
That's demonstrably not true in lots of industries, particularly in retail. The retail sector in the US is about $4.5 Trillion. Walmart is the largest and most dominant of these had US sales of $337 Billion last year which is about 7.5% of the market. Amazon had revenue of about $89 Billion over the same period. There is nobody that is even close to becoming a monopoly and none likely to do so any time soon. Plenty of competition out there.
If you have retail experience you will see that many people will come to the shop to try and then buy online.
People do this when your prices are higher than online or when they get no extra value from your "retail experience". People engage in showrooming at Best Buy precisely because their prices have historically sucked compared with online and the retail experience is nothing special. People shop at places like Bass Pro Shops because the retail experience is outstanding for their target audience. It adds value to the trip so people are willing to go out of their way to go there. People shop at Walmart almost entirely because the prices are low despite the fact that the shopping experience is widely acknowledged to suck. People shop at Nordstroms for exactly the opposite reasons - they know the prices are high but the service is generally excellent and that has a value to many people.
You can compete on price or you can differentiate yourself with added value in some way.
One counter is to sell your own products but that does not work in every sector.
Name one please. I can't think of one offhand where it couldn't work.
If I place seven orders a day, I alone have monopolized a driver and his vehicle for an entire work shift if the distribution center is 30 minutes away from me.
Probably not true because the delivery person would probably batch several deliveries into a single run. In fact it would be seem to be economically insane to do otherwise. This only works in high population density locations (presumably) so you aren't likely to be the only person ordering stuff at a given time near your location. It would take some clever software and planning but it's doable. My undergrad degree is in industrial engineering and this is a pretty nifty operations research problem.
Even if there were distribution centers where every Walmart has a store in the US and they had a fleet the size of FedEx themselves (FedEx even just does a daily route), can they really keep the kind of items everywhere that I would order?
Of course not. It will necessarily be a limited menu so to speak. Same reason Walmart doesn't stock everything in their stores that you can buy through their website.
Amazon are single-item-only things from marketplace sellers, very few of whom ship their entire inventory to Amazon for safe-keeping.
I shop a lot through Amazon and only about 20% of what I buy comes from marketplace sellers and maybe 5-10% is stuff Amazon doesn't stock themselves. 90% of the time Prime delivery is an option. In any case this rapid delivery service will almost certainly be for stuff you buy from Amazon themselves only.
It's actually kind of a brilliant idea for the same reason that Walmart opening big stores in small towns is a great idea. If they can get there first and be the first to make it work at scale, it (potentially) takes a lot of the oxygen out of the room for competitors. The biggest threat to Amazon right now is companies like Walmart realizing that their stores can also serve as warehouses and getting their IT up to snuff. Amazon has been building warehouses all over the place to get ahead of this competitive threat. Amazon will have a hard time matching Walmart in small towns but with this Walmart might have a hard time matching Amazon in big cities.
8 dollar to not wait one hour extra? Wow, that's a huge difference.
Might be but I can see cases where it might be worth it to some folks. Honestly pretty much anything I would get in my car to go get would take at least 30-60 minutes of my time + gasoline. In a place like Manhattan I could easily see it taking much longer than in the midwest suburbs where I live. My hourly wages are significantly higher than $8 and the opportunity cost to me and my company if I have to leave for an hour to go buy something could easily justify an $8 delivery charge if we needed it right away.
I buy a lot of stuff through Amazon (and other online vendors) precisely because of the opportunity cost to shop in person. Sometimes shopping is fun but most of the time it's just a chore plus it puts wear and tear on my car and takes up time I could put to better use.
As a ex-owner of a silverado hybrid (totaled in an accident) I found it to be quite a bit faster in the 0-45mpg department compared to a gas only.
"Quite a bit faster"? Quantify please. Are we talking an amount you sort of notice or an amount that actually matters? Also how did you compare the hybrid with a non-hybrid objectively? None of the published data indicates that the differences are anything but minimal in practical terms. If it's 7.5s vs 7.1s 0-60 times, that's not really anything to get excited about.
In the most recent hybrid versions (no longer in production I think) the electric motors added a whopping 30 horsepower or roughly 10% of the total. If memory serves these trucks got somewhere around 22-24mpg highway. Compare that with the Ram 1500 Ecodiesel which gets 28mpg highway without any hybrid technology for comparable power/towing and color me not impressed.
The 15amp inverter-generator mode saved my life in a power failure and I slept in my truck, running my Cpap breathing equipment.
Glad to hear it helped (seriously!) but that's genuinely not relevant to most people.
GM has tried a decent hybrid system on their 1500 Silverados.
"Decent"? It was the biggest afterthought you can imagine. It only improved the fuel efficiency by a few MPG, had a negligible effect on power and was basically a battery box retrofitted under the rear seat. Oh and it added about $7-10K to the cost (I forget the exact number but it was a lot). My current gas only pickup cost almost $15,000 less and has similar features. I looked at the hybrid silverado semi-seriously but decided it was economically insane.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
