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Walmart Buys Jet For $3 Billion, Hopes To Turbo Charge Ecommerce (venturebeat.com)
Walmart says it has agreed to acquire online retailer Jet.com for $3 billion in cash. As a promise, Jet.com says it will deliver cheaper prices on a range of goods by encouraging users to buy more items at the same time or to purchase products located in the same distribution center -- thereby cutting collection and shipping costs. ZDNet reports:Overall, it's clear that Wal-Mart has Amazon envy and needs to scale its e-commerce operations. The Jet management team has had experience battling Amazon through Quidsi and its brands such as Diapers.com. As for the deal, Wal-Mart said some of the $3 billion for Jet will be paid over time and $300 million of Wal-Mart shares will also be part of the transaction over time.
Walmart doesn't need to turbo charge its commerce site. It needs to rewrite it? Have you tried searching for something in its online catalog? It's like a trip to Altavista circa 1995.
They have no warehouses, they are just a paper storefront to the cheapest seller for that particular item. You never know who is actually sending you the products. Seems way overvalued.
Poor A/C, are you certain it's us, and not you?
Shopping this weekend took me there, and something about it felt like a scam, I paid 30% more somewhere else rather than give them my payment info (I was worried I'd get subscribed to something).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
"The Jet management team has had experience battling Amazon through Quidsi and its brands such as Diapers.com."
They failed to mention that Amazon now owns Quidsi and the sub brands since 2010
.
That's so much better than Amazon's having to wait three days to a week before it is even shipped if you opt for free delivery. (I'm not talking about amazon prime's free shipping, I don't pay $100 per year for free shipping when the product price already has shipping charges baked in. So you amazon prime fanbois don't have to post how great prime is.)
They could have saved themselves some money and bought a whole airline - Air France-KLM has a market cap of less than $3 billion, and it's not an overvalued dot-com. They could get same-day service for packages anywhere they fly - their own captive cargo carrier, with passengers and other cargo paying the freight.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Sears.com is, bar none, the most crufty and crappy e-commerce site I have ever seen. When you combine that with their high prices and poor customer service, it's a wonder they haven't folded already.
It's especially pathetic when you consider that Sears used to be synonymous with shopping from home in America. They let Montgomery Ward's consume their mail-order business, and then Ward's was consumed by the proliferation of cheaper shop-at-home options; they died off before the web even became a serious force there. They have the shipping lines and the will call facilities to be the name in home shopping, but they don't seem to have the supplier networks any more. Literally everyone else has better prices.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I am confused. First, you seem to say it was a bad idea (someone got snookered), then you say it was a good idea (sounds like AOL+TW all over again). Or maybe you forgot that AOL bought Time Warner not the other way around.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I saw this in my RSS feed and thought, "$3 billion is a lot of money to pay for one jet"
Sears.com is, bar none, the most crufty and crappy e-commerce site I have ever seen. When you combine that with their high prices and poor customer service, it's a wonder they haven't folded already.
It's only a matter of time I think. Sears (and Kmart - same company now) have been in a seeming death spiral for quite a while now. Stunningly badly managed. I actually worked for Kmart for a brief time and my experience working there was so bad I've been rooting for them to die in a fire ever since.
What I liked was the ability to ship to to a local store (5 miles away) and pick it up there for zero shipping charge.
Zero shipping charge but you spend 30+ minutes (minimum) of your time plus gas going to pick it up. It might be cheaper depending on what you are having sent to you but the price isn't zero. Plus you have to actually go to a Walmart which is something I'd actually pay to avoid. My nearest Walmart is about 8 miles away so with my truck I'll spend roughly 3/4 of a gallon of fuel to get there and back. At local fuel prices as I type this (around $2.25) that is about $1.68 per trip in fuel alone for "free" in store pickup. Not even counting the value of my time either. Not bad but not great either. See below.
That's so much better than Amazon's having to wait three days to a week before it is even shipped if you opt for free delivery. (I'm not talking about amazon prime's free shipping, I don't pay $100 per year for free shipping when the product price already has shipping charges baked in.
You are aware that Walmart has their own version of Prime, right? Whether Prime is a good deal depends on how you shop. For me I buy a LOT through Amazon so on a per transaction basis it would be substantially more expensive (not to mention time consuming) for me to go pick something up at Walmart every time I placed an order. I placed 154 orders through Amazon in 2015, so the freight cost per order was $0.65 per order. That's less than the cost of gas to my nearest Walmart and back AND I didn't have to waste my time traveling to Walmart.
Drove to the local Walmart 5 miles away. I needed to pick up some stuff from Home Depot, so I was going to be in the area anyway.
Walk in. There are no obvious signs saying where to pick up Internet orders. I ask an employee (there are a lot of them near the front). He says I need to go to a counter near the back of the store.
Walk to back of the store and find what looks like the right counter. Nobody is there.
Wait 3 minutes in case the person had just stepped away for a bit. Finally decide there's really nobody there.
Spend 5 min wandering around trying to find a Walmart employee (not so many of them near the back). Finally find one. She says that's not her department, but she'll page the guy who's supposed to be there.
Wait at counter for 5 more minutes. Just as I decide the lady lied to get rid of me, two other Walmart employees walk out a door next to the counter. I ask them for help. They say the guy who works the counter is eating lunch. One of them helpfully says she'll tell him someone is waiting, and goes back in. She walks back out a minute later and says he'll be right out.
Wait 5 more minutes. Just as I'm about to go in search of another employee, the guy comes out still chewing (apparently finishing what he was eating was more important than a waiting customer). I show him my Internet purchase receipt. He walks to the back of the room and starts digging through mounds of haphazardly piled items.
After 5 minutes of searching, he finds my item, brings it to me, has me sign saying I've received it.
I walk out wishing I'd ordered on Amazon so I could have the last half hour of my life back.
I've done ship to local store at a lot of places. Staples, Office Depot, Home Depot, Lowes, Fry's (their prices for small items tend to be better than Amazon's). All of them get it right - in and out in less than 5 minutes. Not so for Walmart. If it's not on their store shelves, or they won't ship it for free or a reasonable cost, I get it elsewhere. I'm never doing a local Walmart pickup again.
And here I was thinking: what does an expensive airplane got to do with e-commerce?
People please. There is a difference between "Jet" and "Jet.com". Especially since other countries (with Walmart acquisitions present) also have retailers named "Jet".
they're another in a long line of companies that got "Bained". They owned a ton of property (it's how they survived so long, they could weather down turns in the economy because they weren't saddled with expensive leases). They got bought out and liquidated for the short term gains selling their property. I miss them. They were a few steps above Walmart/Target without the crazy expensiveness of a Men's Warehouse. I've got a 40 year old freezer bought from them that still works great.
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So when I read the headline, my head said "Wait what?! 3 billion for a plane? WTF did they buy, a B-2 and 2 F22's??!"
Then I realized this will be a hopeless play at trying to play catch-up after 15 years of staying still.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Retail is a brutal industry. Just look at retailers in the U.S. over the last century -- it's like the rise and fall of great empires. Again and again, dominant incumbents are unable or unwilling to innovate and stay ahead...or they blow money on expensive but useless projects like the Sears Tower.
While I don't follow Walmart closely, a few business sources I read summarized the company's recent strategy as cost-cutting and aggressive inventory management (keep fewer items in-store) to generate more free cash for share repurchases.
Share repurchases can absolutely be a productive use of free cash relative to other options, but Walmart needed to aggressively pursue ecommerce and other innovations *years* ago. Some ideas: improved self-checkout, better in-store navigation, easy way to order shit automatically and have it ready for pickup in-store, RFID tags, etc. Creating a hassle-free and brutally efficient way for customers to buy boring shit at good prices -- and defending that position against Amazon and the like -- seems like a better use of shareholder dollars than share repurchases, or Johnny-come-lately-oh-shit-let's-overpay-to-get-something-going acquisitions like Jet.com. At least they're trying something.
Walmart already has the hard parts in place: stores, logistics, leverage over suppliers. But they couldn't handle the pile of front-end code and in-store operations? (And by operations I mean designing stores for order pickup. Reflecting on my visits to Walmart, there's nothing that screams, "Hey, you can order shit online and go to this clearly-marked area in the front of the store for pickup!")
The strategy of aggressive share repurchases seems like slow capitulation in an industry like retail, especially when cost-cutting creates shitty in-store experiences for customers. I used to shop at Walmart, but in recent years the lines have ballooned and there's a non-trivial chance an item I want won't be on the shelf. WHAT'S THE POINT OF B&M STORES IF YOU DON'T KEEP SHIT ON-HAND? Simply put, any dollar savings I get from shopping there are wiped out by the cost in sanity and time.
Walmart is subsidized by your's truly - the US taxpayer. Will that subsidy now increase to afford this acquisition?
And, $300M in stock is not cash - until it is cashed.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Yes, and they had three levels of quality, "Good," "Better," and "Best." The Better quality was usually truly excellent, with Best only having a few more bells and whistles. I really miss them. But I'll never shop at Sears again, online, or in person.