Amazon Prime Is a Blessing and a Curse For Remote Towns (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: If access to Prime is reduced, or in some cases, cut off, it can leave many remote towns in the lurch. One dozen five-gallon barrels of hydraulic oil. A 2x4x8 of lumber. A pallet's worth of 10-ply, heavy-duty truck tires. These are just a few of the heavy, cumbersome orders one Redditor on the Alaska subreddit claimed to have ordered from Amazon Prime, with free shipping, before users started to notice difficulty finding eligible products. For many remote and rural communities in the U.S. and Canada, the arrival of Amazon Prime, with its low prices and free, expedient shipping was a boon. Hard-to-get or expensive products were now accessible, and reasonably priced to boot. For the cost of a membership (which now runs $99 per year), residents were able to get deals on everything from food to diapers to truck tires. But sometimes when something seems too good to be true, it is. Prime has proven to be a bit of a double-edged sword for many of these communities. Residents become dependent on Prime as local retailers struggle to compete. If access to Prime is reduced, or in some cases, cut off, it can leave many remote towns in the lurch.

Comments

Construction supplies?

[Gilgaron]

The sorts of things they citing here are prohibitively expensive on Amazon... a 2x4x8 of poplar (didn't poke around long enough to see SPF pine) is around $70 for which I would expect the whole flitched tree. For smaller things that hardware stores can usually wring you for I can see why Amazon is competitive but the examples here seem odd. I've not found anything bigger/heavier than a large sack of dog food that was price competitive.

Re:Amazon's shipping is crazy

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> There's no way Amazon didn't loose money on that.

Read these articles to learn about how/why Amazon does this:
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/03/25/how-prime-makes-amazon-profitable.aspx
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-why-it-works
http://time.com/4084897/amazon-amzn-aws/

In other words, they seem to cover the cost of the occasional dick move (which I'm guilty of too occasionally) by soaking the suckers who overpay for Prime memberships (i.e., who don't fully use their benefits - many subscription models like gyms are also based on this). Then they float in money from their insanely profitable cloud services to make Wall Street happier about the low profitability of their ecomm business, and to keep fueling marketing expansion.

I think someday (dunno when), there will be "peak Amazon" when other competitors (e.g., Walmart) finally figure out how to leverage local store-based distribution and logistics, draining all profits from the retail side and causing it to spin off some weaker bets. I think we also need to keep an eye on Google's cloud platform, which appears to do everything Amazon's cloud does only better and cheaper, and could put a big dent in Amazon's cloud cash cow.

I do

[rsilvergun]

And it was the Music Man. 76 Trombones was one of the songs. God I'm old.