Which day?
by
Albinofrenchy
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
From what I've seen, Amazon won't say which day the record was set, or why they won't say which day the record was set. Why the secrecy?
-- "A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes."
-Mahatma Gandhi
Re:Which day?
by
Attar81
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It says Thanksgiving Weekend, so I would guess that's it that Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.
Re:Which day?
by
jedidiah
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's the biggest shopping day for brick and mortar. If everyone is out at the malls, they are far less likely to be at home plugged into the computer.
-- A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Which day?
by
jellomizer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It could be Friday as well for some reasons...
Most people have that Friday off from work.
After looking at the sores they couldn't find what they wanted.
They found what they wanted and went online to buy it at a better price.
To stuffed with turkey to go out.
Don't like the crowds of Black Friday but still want to finish their shopping early.
Unable to find a parking spot and went home
Finish talking to friends and relatives and have a fresh memory on what they want so you buy as much as you can online then shop later.
Stuck at home to clean after Thanksgiving
Wanted to get the online stuff early before the inventory ran out.
No Car
-- If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Re:Which day?
by
jedidiah
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Your best bet would be the last gauranteed shipping day before xmas. This would cover your "last minute online shoppers". 'Cause after that you don't know if your orders will get to their recipients in time and who really wants that?
It sounds like Amazon was being overly optimistic.
-- A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually, Black Friday is not the busiest shopping day of the year, even for Brick-and-Mortar. The two weekends before Christmas almost always push the day after Thanksgiving to fifth-busiest. See Snopes.
Re:Which day?
by
microTodd
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Perhaps on the day last week when Harry Potter Book 6 became available for pre-order. Wouldn't that book alone perhaps count for a million or so of the 2.8 million sales? Especially since Book 5 sold 5 million copies in the first 24 hours?
-- "You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
Re:Which day?
by
furball
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Black Friday was the busiest shopping day of the year. The recent trend has consumers shifting their shopping closer and closer to Christmas. This causes the retails a lot of worry as you can imagine. They can't really plan and respond in such a narrow time frame when 40%+ of their sales happen in such a short time period. Forecasting sales and predicting if you'll meet your Q4 sales (and annual targets) becomes a right utter bitch.
Re:Which day?
by
Keighvin
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Oh yeah, Friday's big, no question - but it's a far cry from the next Monday, when everyone gets back to work (access to broadband) and begins hunting online for those things which they did not get over the weekend.
That's when the trend starts, and beyond that marketing has a larger impact than predictable human behavior; so it could have been any time from then until the last week before Christmas when it begins to peter out.
I work for a significant online competitor of Amazon's and am citing personal experience from having reviewed our bandwith, order rate, and income over the same key points of the holiday season.
-- Any spoon would be too big.
One-click
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Is there any way I can buy all items on said list with One Click, considering it is their novel patented original technological innovation?
SEATTLE (AP) - Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) on Monday said sales of consumer electronics surpassed book sales for the first time and was its largest sales category over the Thanksgiving weekend, launching the online retailer's busiest holiday selling season in 10 years.
So, erm, they had a bigger day back in like, 1994?
Funny coincidence?
by
AndreyF
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I bought 5 books on Amazon that day-- I used up my gift certificates from Christmas and ordered a textbook for next semester.
Re:Funny coincidence?
by
Wordsmith
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· Score: 2, Funny
I hear the rainforest is still in need of saving, if you'd like a cause celebre...
-- For more information, click here.
32 items per second? Wow!
by
mOoZik
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't mean to be a KW (Karma Whore), but that is a staggering amount. Looking at it from a geek perspective, their system has to be such to be able to handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous surfers and dozens of simultaneous buyers. They clearly have managed to scale-up their operations in such a way that does not negatively impact the operation of their site to the detriment of sales. Way to go, Jeff & Co!
Re:32 items per second? Wow!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'll let you in on a little secret -
Amazon.com's codebase was C (now most likely migrated to C++, to take advanatge of things lik OOP among other reasons). It consisted of a gazillion modules which compiled to give you ONE BINARY, called obidos - check out the URL then you'll see what I'm saying. This one binary is then tied to Apache, and then fed out to their 500+ webservers. But the beauty of it is there redundancy measures. At any given time there are 3 copies the binary, a, b & c. a = The latest code. b = yesterday's stable build. c = another stable build. In case there's a bug in some build, they simply have to flip the switch to get an up and running site. It was great, but the part that's a BITCH is developing this stuff. Imagine having to re-compile all of Amazon, just to FIX A BLASTED TYPO. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...
Re:32 items per second? Wow!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Here's another secret: Amazon is mostly migrated to a better system, called Gurupa (any page with 'gp/' in it), where thigns are actually modular and more maintainable. Obidos will eventually be removed. The redundancy measures are completely different now too.
(yeah, I know, not actually a secret).
Re:32 items per second? Wow!
by
nsuccorso
·
· Score: 2, Funny
As far as the US Patent Office is concerned, you just did. Now it's just a matter of paperwork...
Profitability?
by
jacobcaz
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I wonder what the profit on those 2.8 million items was? It would be interesting to know if it was just a huge pile of loss leaders or bigger ticket items (which might shed some interesting light on the economy and holiday season in general).
I'm still hearing conflicting reports on the holiday season overall - it was great, it was terrible, it was tepid... I'm still not sure how things went down; I know this year my wife and I probably spent a little less than last year despite our earning over 40% more than last year.
This is great news...maybe. I would just like more context.
Re:Profitability?
by
garcia
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm still hearing conflicting reports on the holiday season overall - it was great, it was terrible, it was tepid... I'm still not sure how things went down; I know this year my wife and I probably spent a little less than last year despite our earning over 40% more than last year.
I'll tell you how it went for me... Fucking incredible. We basically bought DVDs (used mostly) and candy. After Christmas (yesterday) we did our most shopping.
I went to Old Navy armed with holiday gift cards. They were having 75% off sales. I got a fleece, a hooded sweatshirt, a nice sweater, a winter hat, two shirts for the fiance, and a scarf for $50. The sweater alone would have been $65 at AF or AE.
We then went and raided Half Price Books during their 20% off sale. We picked up two DVDs, seven books, and two magazines for $25. If you have one of these in your area I really suggest at least visiting once. Head right for the back and clear out their $1 clearance racks (there are some pics on my mobile pics from yesterday if you're interested;))
We have already decided that we are not going to be doing any clothing shopping prior to Christmas next year. Why bother when I can save 75% afterwards?
Are you kidding me? You do not actually suggesting using MySQL for this kind of task on that scale, do you?
How are you going to do hot backups? Lock the whole db for the duration of this backup? This might be sufficient for your "me and my family" homepage but it's certainly impossible for Amazon. Hell they have just introduced Views and "Initial support for rudimentary triggers".
I use MySQL exclusively and like it but even I know that it isn't suitable for the really big stuff...
One way round I've thought of is have a minimum of two MySQL DB servers. One being the "Master" and the other the Slave via replication. When backup time comes around, stop the replication, make a backup of the Slave DB then restart the replication (the Slave will then catchup to the Master).
Of course, in a "industrial" setting, you'll have multiple Slave servers to help spread the load and keep everything on RAID systems with extensive MySQL logging as well...
iPods lead electronics sales
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"The top selling electronics products were the Apple iPods and a Phillips DVD player. "
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/27/tech/m ai n663270.shtml
Way to go Apple! Flash iPod is coming!
Darn there goes my non-disclosure agreeemnt, oh well I felt like getting sued anyway.:)
Amazon will rule the world.
by
AndreyF
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Not only that, most of the pages on the site are either encrypted or customized (via datamining), or both. I wonder what kind of servers they're running?
Re:Amazon will rule the world.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The customization takes place using "macros" embedded in the HTML/XML of their web pages. These macros are actually C functions, which are called at runtime on the webserver - which runs a single binary called obidos.
Does anyone have any statistics on how many items say, a single retail store (like Wal-mart) sells in a single day? How about all of the stores in a chain. Data like that would help put things in perspective.
Re:For comparison?
by
jacobcaz
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Does anyone have any statistics on how many items say, a single retail store (like Wal-mart) sells in a single day? How about all of the stores in a chain. Data like that would help put things in perspective.
Well, Wal-Mart has about 3500 stores (give or take a few) and 2.8 million items over 3500 stores is only 800 items per store. A Super Wal-Mart could do this in a few hours per store.
I would bet that what Wal-Mart does on an average day makes this look like peanuts in comparison. Not to take anything away from Amazon's one-day record, but it's not really a drop in the bucket for Wal-Mart. Remember, they have annual revenues of ~$250 Billion-with-a-B. That's an average daily reveue of $680,000,000.
What is it about that site...
by
abirdman
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
What is it about the iWon.com site that makes me feel all slimy and dirty? Is it the fact that they're major purveyors of spam? Or could it be all the "popup blocker" ads they run to fund their site, duping the rubes into thinking there's a downloadable software solution to the problem that they and their ilk are doing everything to promote--the indiscriminate installation of spyware, malware, and popups.
It's mildly interesting that Amazon is breaking sales records, but I don't believe a word from that awful site... and as another poster already mentioned-- there's damn little content in the article.
-- Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
good
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Good for them. I am not located in the US and I have bought from Amazon for years.
It is the only store that I can buy from without getting into problems with the CC validation using an international credit card not from the US but from a *"third-world country"*.
OneDay(tm) Shopping
by
SuperBanana
·
· Score: 5, Funny
From what I've seen, Amazon won't say which day the record was set, or why they won't say which day the record was set. Why the secrecy?
OneDay shopping. You don't tell anyone about something you're patenting until AFTER you patent it! Jeez, pay attention.
Meanwhile, let's get some prior art going, people! I've got Monday.
Re:I'll bet...
by
Haydn+Fenton
·
· Score: 4, Informative
As the article says, 32 items per second were sold on average during the day. So that would mean a store with, say, 16 tills, would all need to be processing more than two items per second every second.. I find that a little hard to believe.
2.8 Million, at 32 Items per second
by
Mean_Nishka
·
· Score: 5, Funny
How does this compare to retail giants?
by
Luscious868
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I wonder how this compares to the total sales of bricks and mortar retail giants like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. Does anybody have any idea?
How to calculate rough per store sales
by
sjbe
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm too lazy to dig through the reports but you can calculate a rough per-store sales number from the financial reports of any of the big retailers. Get a copy of their income statement and the number at the top will be Revenue. (might be called Sales or something else but it's the same number) Dig through a copy of their annual report to find the number of stores the firm has and divide revenue by the number of stores and then divide that by 360 (allowing for holidays) which should give you a rough per-day sales number
If you want to be a little more sophisticated, you can get last year's report and find the number of stores and revenue figures for the previous year. This lets you average the current and previous year figures which will give a slightly better estimate. You also should look through the financial statements for non-retail revenues and subtract those from your starting revenue figures. For example if the company has a financing arm, you might want to back those numbers out before starting. Also you need to be careful with companies like WalMart or Dayton-Hudson (Target) or May Company (Famous Barr, Lord & Taylor) since they actually own several different types of stores. You may or may not be able to isolate the number for a given type of store. Please remember however that this number does not represent what any given store is doing, just what the average store within the firm is selling.
Re:How to calculate rough per store sales
by
LetterJ
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Dayton-Hudson (Target)"
Not to nitpick, but you may want to update your records. Dayton-Hudson is now just "Target Corporation" and they sold off the Daytons/Marshall Fields chain to May Company. They are also getting rid of the Mervyn's chain as well.
So, business is good, but some didn't get their gifts in time for the holidays. This kind of begs the question as to what the percentage of on-time deliveries were. Was this a worldwide issue or was it mainly in the UK only?
There's a reason why Old Navy is so cheap -- it's frigging disposable clothing!
Wash that Old Navy sweater twice and it will melt away in the dryer -- and you probably thought your neighbors were stealing your shit.
-- Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Oranges to apples
by
Guillermito
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think it wouldn't be fair comparing an online shop to a traditional one, at least from the IT perspective.
When customers purchase at WalMart, they only "hit the database" at check-out at the cash registrar. (OK, maybe they can check prices with a barcode scanner, but that's marginal)
In an online shop, the whole process is supported by the aplication: searching for items, showing images, specifications, recommendations, and of course, also the check-out.
Moreover, Amazon.com is a particularly complex online shop. They support things like wish lists, recommendations based on your purchase history, they even keep track of the items you have seen in your current session ("The page you made"), etc.
All of this add complexity, and that complexity must reflect in the IT infrastructure they're using. Not to mention that they have to support not only the customers that purchase items, but also those who just visit the site, browse for items, but choose not no buy anything.
Re:No, the parent doesn't have a point.
by
dorsey
·
· Score: 3, Informative
He had a point, you just missed it. He was pointing out the sloppy writing by whoever wrote that article. Saying "busiest... in 10 years" implies that they were busier 10 years ago. If it was absolutely necessary to point out that Amazon has been in business for that long, they should have said something like "busiest... in their 10 year history".
-- hinderfreude ('hin-dur-"froi-d&), n. The feeling of joy derived from being in the way.
Re:2.8 Million, at 32 Items per second
by
ch-chuck
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That was true in 1998 but now you're way out of date:
A survey by Thomson First Call put analysts' average estimates at earnings of 39 cents a share on revenue of $2.42 billion.
In the fourth quarter of last year, the Seattle online merchant earned 17 cents a share on $1.95 billion in revenue.
32 per second? Whoop-de-doo!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ever been in a Walmart? How many times to you hear a 'beep' as an item is registered at the checkout?
I suspect most large, busy stores clock around 20-30 items sold per second on a regular basis. An enterprise the scale of WalMart might clock in thousands per second for all stores on exceptionally busy days.
This might be a 'record day' for Amazon, but it's hardly news.
It's a secret because it's bad for profit!
by
bazily
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Amazon.com strategy: sell everything at a loss and make it up in volume.
Yes, they sold 2.8 million units, but since it was the day after Thanksgiving, I'm sure most of those qualified for free shipping which can't be a good for the bottom line.
So why didn't Amazon make a bigger deal out of it? Because at the end of the quarter someone's going to want see some profit, and that isn't going to happen unless the accountants and marketing people get together.
-- Why cut IT when your office space costs $3/sf? gibso
Re:And its all in Perl
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Perl is only a small part of their system. All the old code is in C or C++, and there's a fair bit of Java these days. The fun part is that they are using perl at all, and that they use linux for pretty much everything.
They also have insanely high standards for getting hired. Bleh.
As usual, no context for the numbers
by
wealthychef
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
SOUNDS like a lot of business, but how much is a lot nowadays? I'd like to know if they are doing twice as much as their nearest competitors, or how many sales per second Home Depot does, etc. Instead we report a large number and stand back to wait for the ignorant people like me to go "wow." This looks like another case of lazy reporters basically forwarding press releases by position advocates and calling that a news article. No wonder blogs are taking over the world!
Amazon and the GOP
by
anechoic
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I visited a website shortly before Xmas: BuyBlue http://www.buyblue.org/ which published stats stating that Amazon donated 60% of their political contributions to the GOP. Not that one should base buying decisions on a corporations political contributions alone but it does make one think a little harder about what buying from Amazon really means.
Re:Too bad they...
by
spilich
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I couldn't agree more. I placed a pretty big order of christmas presents for my family on Dec 6, and all of my items had a projected delivery date of Dec 20. When I complained on the 19th that a lot of my stuff hadn't shipped, they still told me that I'd be delivered by the 24th but tried to extort more money out of me to upgrade my shipping to priority. Finally, on the 22nd they sent me an email saying that because of problems with the supplier, they won't deliver some of my stuff till mid Jan. I understand that if the supplier runs out of stock it's not their fault, but it really pisses me off that they waited untill two days before christmas to tell me I won't be getting my stuff. I'll probably still buy from amazon, but NEVER during the christmas season again.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I've seen, Amazon won't say which day the record was set, or why they won't say which day the record was set. Why the secrecy?
"A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -Mahatma Gandhi
Is there any way I can buy all items on said list with One Click, considering it is their novel patented original technological innovation?
SEATTLE (AP) - Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) on Monday said sales of consumer electronics surpassed book sales for the first time and was its largest sales category over the Thanksgiving weekend, launching the online retailer's busiest holiday selling season in 10 years.
So, erm, they had a bigger day back in like, 1994?
I bought 5 books on Amazon that day-- I used up my gift certificates from Christmas and ordered a textbook for next semester.
What they neglected to mention was that this is because of patent pressure, they are now the only online-store in the united states.
I don't mean to be a KW (Karma Whore), but that is a staggering amount. Looking at it from a geek perspective, their system has to be such to be able to handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous surfers and dozens of simultaneous buyers. They clearly have managed to scale-up their operations in such a way that does not negatively impact the operation of their site to the detriment of sales. Way to go, Jeff & Co!
A blog like any other.
I'm still hearing conflicting reports on the holiday season overall - it was great, it was terrible, it was tepid... I'm still not sure how things went down; I know this year my wife and I probably spent a little less than last year despite our earning over 40% more than last year.
This is great news...maybe. I would just like more context.
I'd like to point out that Amazon DOES NOT use MySQL before the MySQL kiddies say "see, it can scale!"
I don't respond to AC's.
"The top selling electronics products were the Apple iPods and a Phillips DVD player. "
m ai n663270.shtml
:)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/27/tech/
Way to go Apple! Flash iPod is coming!
Darn there goes my non-disclosure agreeemnt, oh well I felt like getting sued anyway.
Not only that, most of the pages on the site are either encrypted or customized (via datamining), or both. I wonder what kind of servers they're running?
Does anyone have any statistics on how many items say, a single retail store (like Wal-mart) sells in a single day? How about all of the stores in a chain. Data like that would help put things in perspective.
What is it about the iWon.com site that makes me feel all slimy and dirty? Is it the fact that they're major purveyors of spam? Or could it be all the "popup blocker" ads they run to fund their site, duping the rubes into thinking there's a downloadable software solution to the problem that they and their ilk are doing everything to promote--the indiscriminate installation of spyware, malware, and popups.
It's mildly interesting that Amazon is breaking sales records, but I don't believe a word from that awful site... and as another poster already mentioned-- there's damn little content in the article.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
Good for them. I am not located in the US and I have bought from Amazon for years.
It is the only store that I can buy from without getting into problems with the CC validation using an international credit card not from the US but from a *"third-world country"*.
OneDay shopping. You don't tell anyone about something you're patenting until AFTER you patent it! Jeez, pay attention.
Meanwhile, let's get some prior art going, people! I've got Monday.
Please help metamoderate.
As the article says, 32 items per second were sold on average during the day. So that would mean a store with, say, 16 tills, would all need to be processing more than two items per second every second.. I find that a little hard to believe.
And not a dime of profit :).
www.lonseidman.com
I wonder how this compares to the total sales of bricks and mortar retail giants like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. Does anybody have any idea?
I'm too lazy to dig through the reports but you can calculate a rough per-store sales number from the financial reports of any of the big retailers. Get a copy of their income statement and the number at the top will be Revenue. (might be called Sales or something else but it's the same number) Dig through a copy of their annual report to find the number of stores the firm has and divide revenue by the number of stores and then divide that by 360 (allowing for holidays) which should give you a rough per-day sales number
If you want to be a little more sophisticated, you can get last year's report and find the number of stores and revenue figures for the previous year. This lets you average the current and previous year figures which will give a slightly better estimate. You also should look through the financial statements for non-retail revenues and subtract those from your starting revenue figures. For example if the company has a financing arm, you might want to back those numbers out before starting. Also you need to be careful with companies like WalMart or Dayton-Hudson (Target) or May Company (Famous Barr, Lord & Taylor) since they actually own several different types of stores. You may or may not be able to isolate the number for a given type of store. Please remember however that this number does not represent what any given store is doing, just what the average store within the firm is selling.
Similar story has been running on CNN for a couple days now.
Nightly News reported that (for the first time) electronic items outsold books.
It seems that Amazon did great business this holiday season, but they also seem to have miseed some delivery dates.
So, business is good, but some didn't get their gifts in time for the holidays. This kind of begs the question as to what the percentage of on-time deliveries were. Was this a worldwide issue or was it mainly in the UK only?
Score:-1, Bad at math
There's a reason why Old Navy is so cheap -- it's frigging disposable clothing!
Wash that Old Navy sweater twice and it will melt away in the dryer -- and you probably thought your neighbors were stealing your shit.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I think it wouldn't be fair comparing an online shop to a traditional one, at least from the IT perspective.
When customers purchase at WalMart, they only "hit the database" at check-out at the cash registrar. (OK, maybe they can check prices with a barcode scanner, but that's marginal)
In an online shop, the whole process is supported by the aplication: searching for items, showing images, specifications, recommendations, and of course, also the check-out.
Moreover, Amazon.com is a particularly complex online shop. They support things like wish lists, recommendations based on your purchase history, they even keep track of the items you have seen in your current session ("The page you made"), etc.
All of this add complexity, and that complexity must reflect in the IT infrastructure they're using. Not to mention that they have to support not only the customers that purchase items, but also those who just visit the site, browse for items, but choose not no buy anything.
He had a point, you just missed it. He was pointing out the sloppy writing by whoever wrote that article. Saying "busiest... in 10 years" implies that they were busier 10 years ago. If it was absolutely necessary to point out that Amazon has been in business for that long, they should have said something like "busiest... in their 10 year history".
hinderfreude ('hin-dur-"froi-d&), n. The feeling of joy derived from being in the way.
That was true in 1998 but now you're way out of date:
A survey by Thomson First Call put analysts' average estimates at earnings of 39 cents a share on revenue of $2.42 billion.
In the fourth quarter of last year, the Seattle online merchant earned 17 cents a share on $1.95 billion in revenue.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Ever been in a Walmart? How many times to you hear a 'beep' as an item is registered at the checkout?
I suspect most large, busy stores clock around 20-30 items sold per second on a regular basis. An enterprise the scale of WalMart might clock in thousands per second for all stores on exceptionally busy days.
This might be a 'record day' for Amazon, but it's hardly news.
Yes, they sold 2.8 million units, but since it was the day after Thanksgiving, I'm sure most of those qualified for free shipping which can't be a good for the bottom line.
So why didn't Amazon make a bigger deal out of it? Because at the end of the quarter someone's going to want see some profit, and that isn't going to happen unless the accountants and marketing people get together.
bazily
------------
http://www.gibsoncompany.com/ - Office space for profitable companies!
Why cut IT when your office space costs $3/sf? gibso
Perl is only a small part of their system. All the old code is in C or C++, and there's a fair bit of Java these days. The fun part is that they are using perl at all, and that they use linux for pretty much everything.
They also have insanely high standards for getting hired. Bleh.
SOUNDS like a lot of business, but how much is a lot nowadays? I'd like to know if they are doing twice as much as their nearest competitors, or how many sales per second Home Depot does, etc. Instead we report a large number and stand back to wait for the ignorant people like me to go "wow." This looks like another case of lazy reporters basically forwarding press releases by position advocates and calling that a news article. No wonder blogs are taking over the world!
Currently hooked on AMP
I visited a website shortly before Xmas: BuyBlue http://www.buyblue.org/ which published stats stating that Amazon donated 60% of their political contributions to the GOP. Not that one should base buying decisions on a corporations political contributions alone but it does make one think a little harder about what buying from Amazon really means.
I couldn't agree more. I placed a pretty big order of christmas presents for my family on Dec 6, and all of my items had a projected delivery date of Dec 20. When I complained on the 19th that a lot of my stuff hadn't shipped, they still told me that I'd be delivered by the 24th but tried to extort more money out of me to upgrade my shipping to priority. Finally, on the 22nd they sent me an email saying that because of problems with the supplier, they won't deliver some of my stuff till mid Jan. I understand that if the supplier runs out of stock it's not their fault, but it really pisses me off that they waited untill two days before christmas to tell me I won't be getting my stuff. I'll probably still buy from amazon, but NEVER during the christmas season again.