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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.
So what happens to many remote towns if access to Prime is reduced, or in some cases, cut off?
Anyone else remember the song about the "Wells Fargo Wagon" from 76 Trombones? That was the end result of a remote order business hooked up to a rail-backed transportation system.
See also "Sears Catalog Home":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home
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.
This is an old trick: sell goods/services below their cost until you drive out competition. You have to swallow some massive losses at first, but in the end you'll secure yourself a monopoly.
>> 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.
Years ago, not long after becoming a Prime member, I was renting a cottage in a very remote location in the middle of a national forest for a couple weeks. This location was without mail delivery. Population density of the county is maybe two dozen per square mile, so not the sparsest but fairly low density.
I ran an experiment, set that as my main address in Prime, and ordered something (I don't even remember what.) Imagine my surprise two days later when I heard the delivery truck hustling down the country road 4 miles away!
If only that place had consistent, reliable internet service (Verizon worked if you held your phone just right in certain places and the cottage was equipped with Wild Blue? satellite internet) I could see setting up shop semi-permanently, provided I could find a job that allowed me to work remotely.
But I was always concerned about dependency on delivery service, it seemed like a fluke that it worked, there's no way that was economically viable for Amazon.
Actually, the story is telling a very different story. Amazon Prime endangers local stores. They will close shop, making you fully dependent on Amazon Prime in the end. Which is of course when they'll yank that carpet out under your feet and charge you through the nose for ... well, anything you might want or need.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I ordered a water heater via Prime this year. Saved a good amount of money on the heater itself, and got the free shipping where every big box in town wanted to charge >$50 to deliver one. That one transaction payed for half a years worth of the prime membership.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Amazon Prime does more for northern food security than federal subsidies, say Iqaluit residents
Amazon is the new Walmart, it's been happening for decades just with a different store name.
At a certain point if all local competition is forced to close and Amazon yanks that carpet out, some local entrepreneur will find a way to purchase goods in bulk and sell them cheaper than Amazon but still at a profit. There will be some growing pains but I think this is a case where competition can never be completely removed and prices will remain reasonable.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
And it was the Music Man. 76 Trombones was one of the songs. God I'm old.
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The small-town lifestyle is not sustainable, and only works when it's being subsidized by the cities. Most of these dying towns don't have any real industry left anyway, so it's time for the people there to pack up and leave.
That seems rather simplistic, since cities are not self-sustainable at all - they're entirely dependent on products and supplies from the outside. Wall off a city, and people there will starve really fast. Wall off a farming community, and they'll probably last a while.
There is a balancing act at play here. You need some percentage of your population to work the farms needed to feed everybody. You can certainly talk about automating much of that... but frankly most city jobs are capable of being automated away as well.
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Let's not forget Amazon Fresh, which is next level grocery shopping. Have you heard of Prime Now? They delivered diapers to me while I was in Disney World and saved my marriage.
If your spouse can't handle the fact that sometimes you shit your pants, they don't really love you.
Amazon is a boon for rural folk. There are NO stores in our town.
Drive further to the next towns beyond that and there is only an expensive gas station with a very limited and high priced selection chips, soda, milk, candy, ice cream, etc.
If you drive for about 60 minutes round trip there is a town with limited selection of goods in stores, a hardware store, a lumber yard, a few restaurants and grocery store.
My purchases on Amazon are not taking dollars away from local stores, not even stores within an hour of me. Rather I'm buying things I simply can _NOT_ buy here. I would have to drive another hour to get even a quarter of the things I get on Amazon and even then there are many things I simply could not get.
This is very common in rural areas. Urbanites, who make up most of Slashdotters, don't understand this so they are not likely to appreciate just how wonderful Amazon is for rural folk.
The other issue on this topic is that many people seem to think that Amazon is some monolithic seller. Amazon is not. Amazon is more like a mall filled with many small and larger sellers. Amazon helps some of those sellers with fulfillment but most of all Amazon offers search features, product description and reviews. All of these are valuable and NOT available through local or even regional stores in the brick-and-mortor world.