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Amazon.com Reporting This Holiday Season Their "Best Ever"
In a refreshing break from all the doom and gloom, Amazon.com is calling this holiday season their best ever. Reporting a 44 percent rise in the number of items sold, they are refusing to provide actual dollar amounts, so it is still a very subjective measurement. "Amazon customers ordered more than 6.3 million items on Dec. 15, compared with roughly 5.4 million on its peak day last year, the company said. It shipped more than 5.6 million products on its best day, a 44 percent rise over 2007, when it shipped about 3.9 million on its busiest day. The company did not provide dollar figures and wouldn't say whether the average value of orders had changed, and the jumps it reported Friday are in line with increases Amazon has seen since it started releasing the figures in 2002."
People are going to look for better deals, and when some item can be found for 20 to 50% less online, often with free shipping, of course they are going to turn to the big internet sites.
See Slate's Amazon.con: How the online retail giant hoodwinks the press for details on why this story is idiotic:
Some, but not all, of these accounts went on to concede that Amazon would not provide revenue data for the entire shopping season, or even for its "peak day." Nor would Amazon confirm or deny that one or both of these revenue figures exceeded those for 2007. Without this information, we can't possibly know whether Amazon had a good year in comparison either to other retailers or to its own sales during the previous Christmas shopping season.
The same reasoning or lack thereof applies to the Kindle (which I don't like for its DRM and other problems), since Amazon won't release sales numbers for it.
So, did Amazon have their best ever holiday season? Maybe: but we're unlikely to know enough about the metrics used to make this claim to know.
Another order that I did place from a manufacturer website did come OK and on time, but it was a nail-biting experience. Although the website offered second-day delivery as an option (actually it was one of those outsourced shopping cart sites), the confirmation e-mail that came directly from the manufacturer said "5-7 business days". I replied to that e-mail asking what was up, but never got a response.
I worry about the day when Amazon gets too big and starts becoming evil (e.g. censorship), but for now, I am a happy and loyal Amazon customer.
I love Amazon's sell-your-own-stuff service as much as I do the site itself. I finally decided to get rid of the college books I'm never going to touch again, and Amazon makes the entire process insanely simple. In the past week I've made a few hundred bucks and it took almost no effort.
Also, the Amazon music store is fantastic, there's no way I'm going back to iTunes. Real MP3s, 256Kbps, and they sell long songs individually instead of making you download the whole album.
what? Walmart operates on a 3.4-3.6% net profit margin
are you saying walmart is not doing well?
http://www.hoovers.com/wal-mart/--ID__11600,period__A--/free-co-fin-income.xhtml
10-15% is an average gross margin for non-boutique retail. After overhead, making any money is good, and 3% isn't terrible when your sales number begins with a b.
Back when there were smaller stores, the margin was typically 40%. But those days are over, and why I chuckle every time I hear someone complain about the service at a Best Buy or whatever. America traded in knowledgeable electronics dealers for cheap, plastic, slave-labor constructed garbage that are a tenth of the price and last about as long. That is, if you don't break the connectors that are glued to the pcb instead of screwed to plates, as they used to be. Now those same stores employing kids are charging three hundred dollars to fix the crappy electronics they sold them in the first place.
Ah well. There is no free lunch. But there are a lot of people who aren't smart with their money. What were we talking about again?
With that sort of attitude I would recommend shopping elsewhere until they treat their staff properly.
Have you tried to buy hdmi / dvi cable lately (and by lately I mean this was about 1.5yr ago)?
Local store price for 6' section: $35-45
Online vendor price for 6' section: Bout 7 bucks.
And now I pretty much buy everything online. It's so much better and comparing prices doesn't burn up my time or gas.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I listen to NPR and Rush both. You're right, it's just a matter of understanding the bias -- the sad part is most people can't see the bias (because they agree with it).
And that's not even the worst of it. Would you believe I've actually gotten into arguments with people who vehemently believed that CNN was a right-wing mouthbox? CNN! I can't capitalize it any stronger or I would! I can't even understand what would have led them to think that, but I get the impression they never actually have watched CNN..
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I find it incomprehensible that in the US, your prices don't include sales tax already. OK the tax varying state to state is less odd - after all we have different VAT rates here in Europe. But it's far less hassle to have the VAT already included - no wonder people in the US don't like tax. I won't even start on the whole thing of having to "do your taxes - again, little wonder taxes are unpopular.
Transparency in this case is not beneficial. It is not as if you can't sit down here in Ireland and work out how much tax you pay, if you wish to. Indeed you are still free to work out all the tax schemes, benefits and loop-holes you can make use of, more is the pity (our state is woefully underfunded by a relatively wealthy population).
Anyway - I don't relish next time I have to go to the US and after a nice meal go into "school" mode and have wonderful impromptu calculation sessions afterward to derive the tax and the tip. At least your banknotes aren't quite so indistinguishable from one another now, although the coins are still stupidly awkward for making change.
In case you think I'm singling out the US for criticism - while on the subject of VAT I will say that the United Kingdom are stark raving mad for cutting their VAT to 15%. It will do nothing to get people spending, and leaves a giant hole in the goverment funds - that will have to be filled later with massive tax hikes when things are even worse. It's like a gambler having lost a large chunk of money, and making a similarly sized large bad bet in an act of desperation to try and win back what he has lost. We had it here in Ireland in the 1980s. Admittedly it was rather more insane - abolishing motor taxation for a brief spell, and we still have shambolic local services from underfunded local government since domestic rates were abolished. But sure enough we had to raise taxes again (that was overdone too in over-reaction of course, and we saw massive tax evasion).
To end the ramble - if you live in even a barely organised country, you need taxes. Being anti-taxation is just stupid - it's not even self-serving. It's not like it is better for people to spend crazy money privately on health and education rather than have properly run public services - those are far cheaper and easier to achieve, even just from the economies of scale. Is it better for people to spend money on car repair and depreciation from wear & tear, and pay the price of accidents, rather than collectively spend money on decent roads and public transport?
People get so selfish they end up not actually acting in their own interest. Pay your taxes and campaign for them to be used properly, and where necessary, for more people to pay them (not necessarily for people paying tax to pay more, or for people at the bottom to pay anything).
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Univerity of Marylard has an interesting report where they did a survey of the use of the word recession to describe the economy in the news and found that during the current Bush presidency before the start of the recession it was used 4x as much then compared to during Clinton when we were in an actual recession.