Random thoughts about Amazon

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-I noticed they recently changed their free return policy (shipping) to about $7.00 unless you bring your item to Kohls. This didn't surprise me at all; returning any item was too painless.

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I drop my items off at Whole foods and it's free returns unless that has changed in the last month.

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-how in the world are they profitable??

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I believe they make the majority of their money on the subscriptions. I'd love to know the percentage of customers who buy a ton of stuff online though.

Don’t forget about Advertising revenue ($35B) and subscription services ($37B). Amazon is not just an e-commerce company.

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The overwhelming majority of Amazon’s profit comes from AWS. Almost all other business segments are losing money.

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Totally. I was focusing on just that side of the business.

Once that is ran by robots it'll be fine...I kid...sorta.

with retailers closing down, particularly in larger cities (recently due to billions in theft), this is and expanding horizon for Amazon. i am pretty bullish on it when you couple that with their other services, but im an idiot, so take that for what its worth.

Amazon treats its customers like God and its sellers like crap.

Sellers are desperate for a better-managed platform.

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I heard they sell their books for a loss on purpose

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That's called a loss leader. Sell something at a loss that brings in customers who will then buy other, more expensive shite.

For a long time the strategy was to price according to competitors and undercut where possible. Most of the pricing decisions aren't actually Amazon Retail decisions - at least that used to be the case

1). ecommerce - Wal$mart is better. Often items can be found cheaper on Walmart website, plus, you can return items to any walmart service center, and for delivery, they can "door dash" items from local stores, often within hours. Also, GameStop is now in on the game and offers 2hour delivery on many items. They are also no longer just games.

2). Cloud - they lost a lot of their luster when they killed Parlor - a growing conservative alternative to twitter. They killed them in less than a week at the urging of other tech tyrants. This has sent many looking for alternatives (Azure, Google - although part of the dangerous tech tyranny, they haven't killed off major clients, yet)

3). Prime - lots of people dropping this last year because of woke policies.

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4th Quarter 22 loss of $2.7 billion!
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-reports-net-loss-of-2-7-billion-for-2022/

I think it was first quarterly loss in years. Meanwhile, supposedly going bankrupt GameStop surprised most with a positive 4th quarter.

4th quarter (Christmas) is supposed to be big bucks for retail so the big surprise was Amazon's loss. Article gives several reasons they gave like a failing ev car investment.

2.3B of that 2.7B was a Rivian write down, right?

And yeah, peak represents like 1/3 of Amazon's volume or something like it. Q4 they invested 100s of millions in excess capacity in all parts of their trans network (SC, ZL, Air, MM) to protect Speed. Then in the face of consciously running high buffered capacity they dealt with volume coming in light all year and having to feed 3rd party carriers to meet contractual commitments. So all this excess capacity was unused because they essentially had too many mouths to feed.

Here's your answer, it's 6 AM on the West coast on Sunday am, I am drinking coffee and eating breakfast and I have already made 2 purchases from Amazon today. Probably not done.

I drive to work during the weekdays and during my trip if the timing is right, I usually pass no less than 3 DOZEN Amazon trucks headed out for deliveries.

I went to Wal Mart yesterday to buy a simple 20W square for an iPhone charger. This item was of course locked in glass. Spent ten minutes looking for someone to open the case. Finally said f it. Ordered same item for $1 cheaper from Amazon delivered today.

I think Amazon will continue to grow as consumers get frustrated having to find a store employee to unlock a case for what appears to be an increasing amount of inventory.