Getting a shiny new car for your first car is typically a symptom of being a spoiled brat.
You apparently don't know many children of wealthy parents. I do. My parents aren't well off but they put me through a private school (with financial assistance) where many of my classmates came from monied families. You know what? Virtually all of them were nice, well adjusted and not at all spoiled. Quite a few got to drive nice new cars while still in high school. And when they did act spoiled their parents usually came down on them like a ton of bricks.
The car is meaningless. It's how much the parents are involved and give a shit about their child's behavior that matters. Sure there are some parents who get it wrong but you're painting with an awfully broad brush there and the actual facts don't support your thesis. It's been my experience (first hand) that on average kids with well off parents tend to be MORE involved in their child's life (car or not) and the statistics on this tend to on average back me up.
Not letting them on the road seems a little extreme but do they have to have a brand new car? What happened to having a beater to putt around in for the first few years?
What does it matter to you? Sure I drove a beater like most of us but if a parent puts their kid in a new(er) car, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with that unless the kid develops an entitlement complex from it. If the money isn't an issue to them it really shouldn't matter to us either.
Wait, what? Did you really just claim that unless Amazon has a monopoly on the entire retail sector it isn't developing a monopoly on certain aspects
I'm claiming that Amazon getting a monopoly is highly unlikely. Name one area where Amazon has a monopoly. Go ahead, I'll wait. Having a big impact != having a monopoly. Amazon has a big impact but no part of their business could reasonably be described as a monopoly at this time.
This is really misleading. Retail is not fungible.
It's not misleading at all. Walmart has a huge impact but it's still not a monopoly. It has some very local areas where it might be considered one (one store towns) but across the retail marketplace it's merely first among many. Amazon can compete with Walmart in many of these one store towns because they don't need a store there. Amazon is highly unlikely to drive Walmart out of any of these and vice-versa.
There are tons of places in America where there is literally one shop (either a dollar store or a Walmart) within a reasonable driving distance.
Which Amazon neatly circumvents by not needing a shop. What's your point?
Could you manage to sell locally video games, DVDs/BlueRays ?
Sony did sell Sony branded video games and DVDs in their own stores. Microsoft too at least for the video games. You definitely can sell your own brand of stuff. I'll say again that there is no fundamental obstacle to a company selling their own branded merchandise in any sector I can think of.
You have a bit of a bias, younger audience will go a long way to save a few pounds and are not as appreciative of the staff skills as you are.
It's not a question of personal bias (which BTW you misunderstand mine badly). Some stores are popular because of the customer experience - they provide extra value and charge for it. People don't shop at the Apple store because they want to be left alone - they go online if they want that. People don't shop at Nordstroms because they want to be left alone. People DO shop at Walmart or Home Depot or Target because they want cheap and don't need/want to interact with someone. And both are fine. But if a company wants to compete on price there really can only be one company with the lowest price whereas companies that compete on differentiation compete (mostly) on factors other than price.
For the record I rarely want to talk to someone in a store - I'm usually looking for a good deal and prefer to do my own research. That's why I do most shopping online - but when I do talk to a sales person I expect them to know their stuff.
my point is that while some shops can survive if they have good staff and sell specialised products, you can't deny that online competition is a strain on their finances.
You could say the same about any competition - online or offline.
I'm kind of surprised they didn't buy into the radio shack storefronts to get every-town distribution locations - even if it's just a "pick up" site.
I'm sure they thought about it but that's a VERY speculative bet, even for Amazon. Radio Shacks are not exactly prime retail space and it's not clear if it makes sense to use it as a sort of post office box. The entire value proposition of Amazon to most of us is that we don't have to go anywhere to get what we buy. Once we have to go somewhere to pick it up there is no longer any advantage in choosing Amazon over say Walmart or Target. Remember that Amazon is a low margin business at least on the physical goods side of things so shipping low margin goods to a tiny retail shop in a non-prime location while destroying the key advantage of your brand doesn't seem like a great plan.
Even though I do think brick and mortar stores should at least be aware of what Amazon is doing.
I assure you that they are acutely aware of what Amazon is doing.
The question still remains if Amazon can actually stop bleeding red and profit.
Amazon could be profitable tomorrow if they chose to be. You only have to look through their financial statements to show that. They reinvest heavily in growing the company and in some pretty speculative projects (Fire Phone) and as long as Bezos is CEO I don't see that changing. And honestly I think that is a good plan at least in principle - and so far the execution has been good. The biggest danger to Amazon is if a company like Walmart figures out a way to use their thousands of existing stores as warehouses in addition to being stores AND get people to think of them for online purchases.
Obviously Amazon is better on consumers and their obsessive need for instant gratification.
Umm, not so much. For most of Amazon's customer base there is at minimum a 24 hour delay before receiving any purchases. I can wander down to my local Walmart in about 15 minutes if I want "instant" gratification.
The advantage for Amazon of course if they can manage to streamline delivery and offer good prices is that they have less physical over head over a Walmart.
That's not really as true as you might think. That's something of a myth left over from the early days of Amazon. Amazon has been busy building warehouses all over the place to facilitate efficient and fast delivery and these incur substantially the same costs as brick and mortar stores. They are doing this so that Walmart and the rest don't steal a march on them and use their stores as warehouses. Remember that your local Walmart is almost certainly closer to you than your nearest Amazon warehouse so this means that Walmart could in theory be able to deliver products quite rapidly if they work out the system for doing so and they are among the best at logistics in the world.
The problem is, that State's are now implementing sales tax requirements and the online merchants may not be able to convince as easily consumers to buy merchandise online vs going to a store.
Again Amazon is actually supporting collection of sales tax now. They believe it actually works in their favor and they are probably right. The sales tax on internet sales was all but inevitable so Amazon is getting ahead of the problem early.
I live in the UK and have cut down on Amazon for nearly 'everything'. I appreciate their efficiency, their systems and their prices but I don't want to live in a world where there's just one shop.
That's highly unlikely. Furthermore you might have that backwards. Think of it like this. Amazon is forcing lots of other companies, big and small, to step their game up with regards to online shopping which is almost entirely to your benefit. I assure you that Walmart and Target and other retailers have no interest in going out of business so shop where it makes sense for you and if the others eventually catch up then switch to them. Think of it like tough love for companies that haven't thought hard enough about how to deliver value to you.
That's the thing for everybody to be afraid of.
Doesn't worry me a bit. The odds of Amazon becoming a monopoly are vanishingly small. See below.
With great power comes great responsibility, with late-stage capitalism comes winner takes all.
That's demonstrably not true in lots of industries, particularly in retail. The retail sector in the US is about $4.5 Trillion. Walmart is the largest and most dominant of these had US sales of $337 Billion last year which is about 7.5% of the market. Amazon had revenue of about $89 Billion over the same period. There is nobody that is even close to becoming a monopoly and none likely to do so any time soon. Plenty of competition out there.
If you have retail experience you will see that many people will come to the shop to try and then buy online.
People do this when your prices are higher than online or when they get no extra value from your "retail experience". People engage in showrooming at Best Buy precisely because their prices have historically sucked compared with online and the retail experience is nothing special. People shop at places like Bass Pro Shops because the retail experience is outstanding for their target audience. It adds value to the trip so people are willing to go out of their way to go there. People shop at Walmart almost entirely because the prices are low despite the fact that the shopping experience is widely acknowledged to suck. People shop at Nordstroms for exactly the opposite reasons - they know the prices are high but the service is generally excellent and that has a value to many people.
You can compete on price or you can differentiate yourself with added value in some way.
One counter is to sell your own products but that does not work in every sector.
Name one please. I can't think of one offhand where it couldn't work.
If I place seven orders a day, I alone have monopolized a driver and his vehicle for an entire work shift if the distribution center is 30 minutes away from me.
Probably not true because the delivery person would probably batch several deliveries into a single run. In fact it would be seem to be economically insane to do otherwise. This only works in high population density locations (presumably) so you aren't likely to be the only person ordering stuff at a given time near your location. It would take some clever software and planning but it's doable. My undergrad degree is in industrial engineering and this is a pretty nifty operations research problem.
Even if there were distribution centers where every Walmart has a store in the US and they had a fleet the size of FedEx themselves (FedEx even just does a daily route), can they really keep the kind of items everywhere that I would order?
Of course not. It will necessarily be a limited menu so to speak. Same reason Walmart doesn't stock everything in their stores that you can buy through their website.
Amazon are single-item-only things from marketplace sellers, very few of whom ship their entire inventory to Amazon for safe-keeping.
I shop a lot through Amazon and only about 20% of what I buy comes from marketplace sellers and maybe 5-10% is stuff Amazon doesn't stock themselves. 90% of the time Prime delivery is an option. In any case this rapid delivery service will almost certainly be for stuff you buy from Amazon themselves only.
It's actually kind of a brilliant idea for the same reason that Walmart opening big stores in small towns is a great idea. If they can get there first and be the first to make it work at scale, it (potentially) takes a lot of the oxygen out of the room for competitors. The biggest threat to Amazon right now is companies like Walmart realizing that their stores can also serve as warehouses and getting their IT up to snuff. Amazon has been building warehouses all over the place to get ahead of this competitive threat. Amazon will have a hard time matching Walmart in small towns but with this Walmart might have a hard time matching Amazon in big cities.
8 dollar to not wait one hour extra? Wow, that's a huge difference.
Might be but I can see cases where it might be worth it to some folks. Honestly pretty much anything I would get in my car to go get would take at least 30-60 minutes of my time + gasoline. In a place like Manhattan I could easily see it taking much longer than in the midwest suburbs where I live. My hourly wages are significantly higher than $8 and the opportunity cost to me and my company if I have to leave for an hour to go buy something could easily justify an $8 delivery charge if we needed it right away.
I buy a lot of stuff through Amazon (and other online vendors) precisely because of the opportunity cost to shop in person. Sometimes shopping is fun but most of the time it's just a chore plus it puts wear and tear on my car and takes up time I could put to better use.
As a ex-owner of a silverado hybrid (totaled in an accident) I found it to be quite a bit faster in the 0-45mpg department compared to a gas only.
"Quite a bit faster"? Quantify please. Are we talking an amount you sort of notice or an amount that actually matters? Also how did you compare the hybrid with a non-hybrid objectively? None of the published data indicates that the differences are anything but minimal in practical terms. If it's 7.5s vs 7.1s 0-60 times, that's not really anything to get excited about.
In the most recent hybrid versions (no longer in production I think) the electric motors added a whopping 30 horsepower or roughly 10% of the total. If memory serves these trucks got somewhere around 22-24mpg highway. Compare that with the Ram 1500 Ecodiesel which gets 28mpg highway without any hybrid technology for comparable power/towing and color me not impressed.
The 15amp inverter-generator mode saved my life in a power failure and I slept in my truck, running my Cpap breathing equipment.
Glad to hear it helped (seriously!) but that's genuinely not relevant to most people.
GM has tried a decent hybrid system on their 1500 Silverados.
"Decent"? It was the biggest afterthought you can imagine. It only improved the fuel efficiency by a few MPG, had a negligible effect on power and was basically a battery box retrofitted under the rear seat. Oh and it added about $7-10K to the cost (I forget the exact number but it was a lot). My current gas only pickup cost almost $15,000 less and has similar features. I looked at the hybrid silverado semi-seriously but decided it was economically insane.
Drop the income tax, make it a flat tax on consumption (both products and services).
Ahh, another person who thinks that everyone paying the same amount means everything is fair. Flat taxes are inherently regressive which means that while everyone is paying the same amount of tax for a given purchase, the impact on their lives is not remotely the same because incomes are not uniform.
You pay tax on raw materials and collect tax when you sell.
This is roughly what a value added tax is. There are advantages and disadvantages to this taxation scheme just like any other.
you can make 100m$ and pay no tax until you spend it
Sounds like a great deal for the millionaires of the world. However for those of lesser means they don't have a lot of disposable income to hold on to it kind of is meaningless.
it would make it easier for everyone to understand, it would be easy to track as tax would happen when money changes hands.
I am an accountant. I think you have no comprehension of the administrative burden you are proposing. Currently my company pays zero sales tax because pretty much everything we sell is resold by someone else or incorporated into another product. This means we also don't have to spend money tracking, a bunch of transactional costs and remitting payments to a government. Tacking a consumption tax onto every transaction we make would cost us a small fortune both in administrative overhead (salary) and needless changes to procedures and software. The conversion cost alone is frankly prohibitive.
You think it is easy to track every transaction and I can assure you that you are wrong. While it is achievable it is very much not trivial to administer.
Users are not gullible if they realize there is a risk of losing their money, and assess that their profit is worth this risk, as AC explained above.
You are seriously going to claim that these guys basically handed an unknown third party what amounted to a pile of untraceable cash trusting that they wouldn't run off with it and that they knew the risk they were taking? They would have to be the dumbest crooks on the planet to do that and you're claiming that they understood what they were doing? Yeah, not buying that argument. This was smart crooks ripping off dumb crooks.
Using bitcoin may still be the most prudent choice, even if it means that there's a chance you'll lose some of your money.
Oh I don't doubt that bitcoin could have some protective value but I very much doubt that all these folks fully understood the risk they were taking.
None of the people who actually use the black markets are surprised. It's a gamble; 9/10 times I get military grade shit, 1/10 i lose money. To me it's acceptable. Nobody points a gun at my head on the Internets, only a bunch of dickheads at Slashdot that think we are all gullible.
You're claiming that people who use black market's are not gullible on a thread about the news that people who use black market's just got ripped off to the tune of an (alleged) $12 million US? Curious logic you have there...
But, but, but... Fiat currencies are evil! Bitcoin uses encryption and encryption = safe! Bitcoin has no risk! I can leave a pile of virtual cash with an untrusted third party dealing in illicit goods and they won't take it right?
Seriously bitcoin sounds awesome to anyone who does not actually comprehend risk adjusted value or transaction friction or exchange rate volatility. I can honestly say that I am glad these idiots got taken advantage of.
I don't have to do any of that to pay with my debit card. I touch my wallet to the reader and I'm done.
And I don't have to do any of that with my phone. Touch and I'm done. PLUS nobody else can use my phone to pay unless they have my fingerprint. Is your wallet secure like that? Plus I'm curious how you would determine which card pays if you have more than one.
Yeah it does.
I didn't say it cannot work, I'm telling you it DOES NOT work at least on this side of the pond because almost nobody has NFC readers and the compatible cards over here.
My wallet is not a farady cage, and I've never been asked to reveal my card. Hell many of the places I use it aren't even manned.
That does not describe the shopping experience anywhere I've ever gone. We get asked to see the signature on the back and/or ID regularly for debit or credit cards. Most places your only option is magnetic swipe. Hell I even have a chipped card and the chip may as well not be there because I have yet to try it in a place where it works, even with major retailers.
Stress is a medical condition that was explicitly mentioned in Prop 215.
So what? That doesn't make weed a medically appropriate treatment for stress that requires a prescription. People drink alcohol to relieve stress too so are you claiming we should start asking doctors to write prescriptions for Jack Daniels?
If you want to smoke weed I have no issue with that but the number of people who smoke weed for any valid medical reason is close to zero. The claim that it is medicinal is a fig leaf people use to circumvent the (stupid) laws regarding marijuana. I think the fact that it is illegal is a huge waste of money, brains and time but please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that it is a medically necessary treatment for stress or glaucoma or any of the other hundreds of "ailments" that people claim so they can get high.
you can be sure that the medical MJ movement would have been totally stalled if an R was in office
The word "medical" has nothing to do with it and never did. The medical thing is a fig leaf to cover people wanting to get high. It's remarkable how many 20 year old glaucoma patients we suddenly have. I have NO problem with someone wanting to smoke weed but the notion that for 99.999% of people it has anything to do with a legitimate medical condition is just ludicrous. I'd be more supportive if they would drop the insulting pretense that it has anything to do with medicine because it doesn't and never did.
The question is, did you learn your lesson? Will you stop supporting the one party Republocrat system next election?
Never supported it in the first place but for better or worse that does not matter. There is nothing I am going to be able to do that will make it go away. Furthermore it's not as if the (theoretical) alternatives are somehow more compelling. Libertarian? Green? There's nothing out there that I think is likely to be meaningfully better even if I could somehow be convinced that a third party somehow had a realistic chance at attaining power.
The ONLY thing that will make our current "two" party system go away is to change the voting system to something other than first past the post. Until that goes away we are stuck with the two party system and I don't think it is likely to go away any time soon.
Nah, what's going to happen is Visa/Mastercard is going to do it themselves, and cut out all of the middlemen (Apple, Google, etc.)
Really? How are they going to get access to the phones without going through Apple, Google or Microsoft? Curious how you think that is going to happen. If you say they're going to do it through an app I'll laugh my ass off.
How on earth does Apple Pay have more simplicity than a credit card?
No swipe. No handing the card to the cashier to verify signatures. No request for ID. No pulling the card out of the wallet. No signature. Takes about 3 seconds for the payment to complete. ApplePay is significantly less hassle than a credit or debit card.
I've actually used ApplePay and there is not a faster or easier payment method out there right now. Not credit cards, no other contactless payment system, not cash, and certainly not checks. They all have their uses and advantages but given a choice and having used all of them I'd use ApplePay preferentially in most cases. I almost always have my phone with me anyway so it works great for me.
1. Touch card or even whole wallet on reader.
Yeah, that doesn't work. Hell, I have a chipped card and most of the places I've tried it it does not work because the merchant disabled the capability. Certainly doesn't work from inside my wallet and even if it did I'd still be asked to show the card and/or my ID.
It doesn't get much simpler than the first one, really. I don't even have to extract my card.
You must not do much shopping in the US because you definitely have to here.
Contactless is pointless and expensive as fuck for merchants.
If your customers like it then it is not pointless. Furthermore most merchants either already have the tech or will have it within the next year. The costs get passed on to customers anyway so the only relevant comparison is if one merchant is getting a better deal than another merchant. If both accept the same methods of payment then there is effectively no cost to the merchant at all. You need to familiarize yourself with the concept of Incidence of Payment.
I can't imagine many businesses where the "neat-o" factor from a few phone enthusiasts to be able to pay with their phones is going to outweigh the costs.
Because it won't be just a few phone enthusiasts. Have you not paid any attention to the effect Apple often has on markets it enters? ApplePay is easy enough my mother can use it and I assure you that she is no "phone enthusiast" and certainly not a techie. If you need an example, walk into any Starbucks and watch how many people pay with their phones. And that process is MUCH harder than ApplePay. People LIKE this tech and they'll use it.
I like the looks of Apple Pay, and think it's a great move forward but even as an Apple fan, it seems bizarre for Apple to move forward on their own payment standard rather than the industry creating one.
ApplePay uses industry standard technology that was not created by Apple. Apparently you were not aware of this. Plenty of merchants already have the necessary tech to use ApplePay whether or not they elect to accept it. The only thing Apple did was to make setting up and using the whole thing FAR easier. I fully expect ApplePay to get copied in part or in whole by the Android and Windows ecosystems.
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Getting a shiny new car for your first car is typically a symptom of being a spoiled brat.
You apparently don't know many children of wealthy parents. I do. My parents aren't well off but they put me through a private school (with financial assistance) where many of my classmates came from monied families. You know what? Virtually all of them were nice, well adjusted and not at all spoiled. Quite a few got to drive nice new cars while still in high school. And when they did act spoiled their parents usually came down on them like a ton of bricks.
The car is meaningless. It's how much the parents are involved and give a shit about their child's behavior that matters. Sure there are some parents who get it wrong but you're painting with an awfully broad brush there and the actual facts don't support your thesis. It's been my experience (first hand) that on average kids with well off parents tend to be MORE involved in their child's life (car or not) and the statistics on this tend to on average back me up.
Not letting them on the road seems a little extreme but do they have to have a brand new car? What happened to having a beater to putt around in for the first few years?
What does it matter to you? Sure I drove a beater like most of us but if a parent puts their kid in a new(er) car, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with that unless the kid develops an entitlement complex from it. If the money isn't an issue to them it really shouldn't matter to us either.
Wait, what? Did you really just claim that unless Amazon has a monopoly on the entire retail sector it isn't developing a monopoly on certain aspects
I'm claiming that Amazon getting a monopoly is highly unlikely. Name one area where Amazon has a monopoly. Go ahead, I'll wait. Having a big impact != having a monopoly. Amazon has a big impact but no part of their business could reasonably be described as a monopoly at this time.
This is really misleading. Retail is not fungible.
It's not misleading at all. Walmart has a huge impact but it's still not a monopoly. It has some very local areas where it might be considered one (one store towns) but across the retail marketplace it's merely first among many. Amazon can compete with Walmart in many of these one store towns because they don't need a store there. Amazon is highly unlikely to drive Walmart out of any of these and vice-versa.
There are tons of places in America where there is literally one shop (either a dollar store or a Walmart) within a reasonable driving distance.
Which Amazon neatly circumvents by not needing a shop. What's your point?
Could you manage to sell locally video games, DVDs/BlueRays ?
Sony did sell Sony branded video games and DVDs in their own stores. Microsoft too at least for the video games. You definitely can sell your own brand of stuff. I'll say again that there is no fundamental obstacle to a company selling their own branded merchandise in any sector I can think of.
You have a bit of a bias, younger audience will go a long way to save a few pounds and are not as appreciative of the staff skills as you are.
It's not a question of personal bias (which BTW you misunderstand mine badly). Some stores are popular because of the customer experience - they provide extra value and charge for it. People don't shop at the Apple store because they want to be left alone - they go online if they want that. People don't shop at Nordstroms because they want to be left alone. People DO shop at Walmart or Home Depot or Target because they want cheap and don't need/want to interact with someone. And both are fine. But if a company wants to compete on price there really can only be one company with the lowest price whereas companies that compete on differentiation compete (mostly) on factors other than price.
For the record I rarely want to talk to someone in a store - I'm usually looking for a good deal and prefer to do my own research. That's why I do most shopping online - but when I do talk to a sales person I expect them to know their stuff.
my point is that while some shops can survive if they have good staff and sell specialised products, you can't deny that online competition is a strain on their finances.
You could say the same about any competition - online or offline.
I'm kind of surprised they didn't buy into the radio shack storefronts to get every-town distribution locations - even if it's just a "pick up" site.
I'm sure they thought about it but that's a VERY speculative bet, even for Amazon. Radio Shacks are not exactly prime retail space and it's not clear if it makes sense to use it as a sort of post office box. The entire value proposition of Amazon to most of us is that we don't have to go anywhere to get what we buy. Once we have to go somewhere to pick it up there is no longer any advantage in choosing Amazon over say Walmart or Target. Remember that Amazon is a low margin business at least on the physical goods side of things so shipping low margin goods to a tiny retail shop in a non-prime location while destroying the key advantage of your brand doesn't seem like a great plan.
Even though I do think brick and mortar stores should at least be aware of what Amazon is doing.
I assure you that they are acutely aware of what Amazon is doing.
The question still remains if Amazon can actually stop bleeding red and profit.
Amazon could be profitable tomorrow if they chose to be. You only have to look through their financial statements to show that. They reinvest heavily in growing the company and in some pretty speculative projects (Fire Phone) and as long as Bezos is CEO I don't see that changing. And honestly I think that is a good plan at least in principle - and so far the execution has been good. The biggest danger to Amazon is if a company like Walmart figures out a way to use their thousands of existing stores as warehouses in addition to being stores AND get people to think of them for online purchases.
Obviously Amazon is better on consumers and their obsessive need for instant gratification.
Umm, not so much. For most of Amazon's customer base there is at minimum a 24 hour delay before receiving any purchases. I can wander down to my local Walmart in about 15 minutes if I want "instant" gratification.
The advantage for Amazon of course if they can manage to streamline delivery and offer good prices is that they have less physical over head over a Walmart.
That's not really as true as you might think. That's something of a myth left over from the early days of Amazon. Amazon has been busy building warehouses all over the place to facilitate efficient and fast delivery and these incur substantially the same costs as brick and mortar stores. They are doing this so that Walmart and the rest don't steal a march on them and use their stores as warehouses. Remember that your local Walmart is almost certainly closer to you than your nearest Amazon warehouse so this means that Walmart could in theory be able to deliver products quite rapidly if they work out the system for doing so and they are among the best at logistics in the world.
The problem is, that State's are now implementing sales tax requirements and the online merchants may not be able to convince as easily consumers to buy merchandise online vs going to a store.
Again Amazon is actually supporting collection of sales tax now. They believe it actually works in their favor and they are probably right. The sales tax on internet sales was all but inevitable so Amazon is getting ahead of the problem early.
I live in the UK and have cut down on Amazon for nearly 'everything'. I appreciate their efficiency, their systems and their prices but I don't want to live in a world where there's just one shop.
That's highly unlikely. Furthermore you might have that backwards. Think of it like this. Amazon is forcing lots of other companies, big and small, to step their game up with regards to online shopping which is almost entirely to your benefit. I assure you that Walmart and Target and other retailers have no interest in going out of business so shop where it makes sense for you and if the others eventually catch up then switch to them. Think of it like tough love for companies that haven't thought hard enough about how to deliver value to you.
That's the thing for everybody to be afraid of.
Doesn't worry me a bit. The odds of Amazon becoming a monopoly are vanishingly small. See below.
With great power comes great responsibility, with late-stage capitalism comes winner takes all.
That's demonstrably not true in lots of industries, particularly in retail. The retail sector in the US is about $4.5 Trillion. Walmart is the largest and most dominant of these had US sales of $337 Billion last year which is about 7.5% of the market. Amazon had revenue of about $89 Billion over the same period. There is nobody that is even close to becoming a monopoly and none likely to do so any time soon. Plenty of competition out there.
If you have retail experience you will see that many people will come to the shop to try and then buy online.
People do this when your prices are higher than online or when they get no extra value from your "retail experience". People engage in showrooming at Best Buy precisely because their prices have historically sucked compared with online and the retail experience is nothing special. People shop at places like Bass Pro Shops because the retail experience is outstanding for their target audience. It adds value to the trip so people are willing to go out of their way to go there. People shop at Walmart almost entirely because the prices are low despite the fact that the shopping experience is widely acknowledged to suck. People shop at Nordstroms for exactly the opposite reasons - they know the prices are high but the service is generally excellent and that has a value to many people.
You can compete on price or you can differentiate yourself with added value in some way.
One counter is to sell your own products but that does not work in every sector.
Name one please. I can't think of one offhand where it couldn't work.
If I place seven orders a day, I alone have monopolized a driver and his vehicle for an entire work shift if the distribution center is 30 minutes away from me.
Probably not true because the delivery person would probably batch several deliveries into a single run. In fact it would be seem to be economically insane to do otherwise. This only works in high population density locations (presumably) so you aren't likely to be the only person ordering stuff at a given time near your location. It would take some clever software and planning but it's doable. My undergrad degree is in industrial engineering and this is a pretty nifty operations research problem.
Even if there were distribution centers where every Walmart has a store in the US and they had a fleet the size of FedEx themselves (FedEx even just does a daily route), can they really keep the kind of items everywhere that I would order?
Of course not. It will necessarily be a limited menu so to speak. Same reason Walmart doesn't stock everything in their stores that you can buy through their website.
Amazon are single-item-only things from marketplace sellers, very few of whom ship their entire inventory to Amazon for safe-keeping.
I shop a lot through Amazon and only about 20% of what I buy comes from marketplace sellers and maybe 5-10% is stuff Amazon doesn't stock themselves. 90% of the time Prime delivery is an option. In any case this rapid delivery service will almost certainly be for stuff you buy from Amazon themselves only.
It's actually kind of a brilliant idea for the same reason that Walmart opening big stores in small towns is a great idea. If they can get there first and be the first to make it work at scale, it (potentially) takes a lot of the oxygen out of the room for competitors. The biggest threat to Amazon right now is companies like Walmart realizing that their stores can also serve as warehouses and getting their IT up to snuff. Amazon has been building warehouses all over the place to get ahead of this competitive threat. Amazon will have a hard time matching Walmart in small towns but with this Walmart might have a hard time matching Amazon in big cities.
8 dollar to not wait one hour extra? Wow, that's a huge difference.
Might be but I can see cases where it might be worth it to some folks. Honestly pretty much anything I would get in my car to go get would take at least 30-60 minutes of my time + gasoline. In a place like Manhattan I could easily see it taking much longer than in the midwest suburbs where I live. My hourly wages are significantly higher than $8 and the opportunity cost to me and my company if I have to leave for an hour to go buy something could easily justify an $8 delivery charge if we needed it right away.
I buy a lot of stuff through Amazon (and other online vendors) precisely because of the opportunity cost to shop in person. Sometimes shopping is fun but most of the time it's just a chore plus it puts wear and tear on my car and takes up time I could put to better use.
As a ex-owner of a silverado hybrid (totaled in an accident) I found it to be quite a bit faster in the 0-45mpg department compared to a gas only.
"Quite a bit faster"? Quantify please. Are we talking an amount you sort of notice or an amount that actually matters? Also how did you compare the hybrid with a non-hybrid objectively? None of the published data indicates that the differences are anything but minimal in practical terms. If it's 7.5s vs 7.1s 0-60 times, that's not really anything to get excited about.
In the most recent hybrid versions (no longer in production I think) the electric motors added a whopping 30 horsepower or roughly 10% of the total. If memory serves these trucks got somewhere around 22-24mpg highway. Compare that with the Ram 1500 Ecodiesel which gets 28mpg highway without any hybrid technology for comparable power/towing and color me not impressed.
The 15amp inverter-generator mode saved my life in a power failure and I slept in my truck, running my Cpap breathing equipment.
Glad to hear it helped (seriously!) but that's genuinely not relevant to most people.
GM has tried a decent hybrid system on their 1500 Silverados.
"Decent"? It was the biggest afterthought you can imagine. It only improved the fuel efficiency by a few MPG, had a negligible effect on power and was basically a battery box retrofitted under the rear seat. Oh and it added about $7-10K to the cost (I forget the exact number but it was a lot). My current gas only pickup cost almost $15,000 less and has similar features. I looked at the hybrid silverado semi-seriously but decided it was economically insane.
Drop the income tax, make it a flat tax on consumption (both products and services).
Ahh, another person who thinks that everyone paying the same amount means everything is fair. Flat taxes are inherently regressive which means that while everyone is paying the same amount of tax for a given purchase, the impact on their lives is not remotely the same because incomes are not uniform.
You pay tax on raw materials and collect tax when you sell.
This is roughly what a value added tax is. There are advantages and disadvantages to this taxation scheme just like any other.
you can make 100m$ and pay no tax until you spend it
Sounds like a great deal for the millionaires of the world. However for those of lesser means they don't have a lot of disposable income to hold on to it kind of is meaningless.
it would make it easier for everyone to understand, it would be easy to track as tax would happen when money changes hands.
I am an accountant. I think you have no comprehension of the administrative burden you are proposing. Currently my company pays zero sales tax because pretty much everything we sell is resold by someone else or incorporated into another product. This means we also don't have to spend money tracking, a bunch of transactional costs and remitting payments to a government. Tacking a consumption tax onto every transaction we make would cost us a small fortune both in administrative overhead (salary) and needless changes to procedures and software. The conversion cost alone is frankly prohibitive.
You think it is easy to track every transaction and I can assure you that you are wrong. While it is achievable it is very much not trivial to administer.
Users are not gullible if they realize there is a risk of losing their money, and assess that their profit is worth this risk, as AC explained above.
You are seriously going to claim that these guys basically handed an unknown third party what amounted to a pile of untraceable cash trusting that they wouldn't run off with it and that they knew the risk they were taking? They would have to be the dumbest crooks on the planet to do that and you're claiming that they understood what they were doing? Yeah, not buying that argument. This was smart crooks ripping off dumb crooks.
Using bitcoin may still be the most prudent choice, even if it means that there's a chance you'll lose some of your money.
Oh I don't doubt that bitcoin could have some protective value but I very much doubt that all these folks fully understood the risk they were taking.
None of the people who actually use the black markets are surprised. It's a gamble; 9/10 times I get military grade shit, 1/10 i lose money. To me it's acceptable. Nobody points a gun at my head on the Internets, only a bunch of dickheads at Slashdot that think we are all gullible.
You're claiming that people who use black market's are not gullible on a thread about the news that people who use black market's just got ripped off to the tune of an (alleged) $12 million US? Curious logic you have there...
But, but, but... Fiat currencies are evil! Bitcoin uses encryption and encryption = safe! Bitcoin has no risk! I can leave a pile of virtual cash with an untrusted third party dealing in illicit goods and they won't take it right?
Seriously bitcoin sounds awesome to anyone who does not actually comprehend risk adjusted value or transaction friction or exchange rate volatility. I can honestly say that I am glad these idiots got taken advantage of.
I don't have to do any of that to pay with my debit card. I touch my wallet to the reader and I'm done.
And I don't have to do any of that with my phone. Touch and I'm done. PLUS nobody else can use my phone to pay unless they have my fingerprint. Is your wallet secure like that? Plus I'm curious how you would determine which card pays if you have more than one.
Yeah it does.
I didn't say it cannot work, I'm telling you it DOES NOT work at least on this side of the pond because almost nobody has NFC readers and the compatible cards over here.
My wallet is not a farady cage, and I've never been asked to reveal my card. Hell many of the places I use it aren't even manned.
That does not describe the shopping experience anywhere I've ever gone. We get asked to see the signature on the back and/or ID regularly for debit or credit cards. Most places your only option is magnetic swipe. Hell I even have a chipped card and the chip may as well not be there because I have yet to try it in a place where it works, even with major retailers.
Stress is a medical condition that was explicitly mentioned in Prop 215.
So what? That doesn't make weed a medically appropriate treatment for stress that requires a prescription. People drink alcohol to relieve stress too so are you claiming we should start asking doctors to write prescriptions for Jack Daniels?
If you want to smoke weed I have no issue with that but the number of people who smoke weed for any valid medical reason is close to zero. The claim that it is medicinal is a fig leaf people use to circumvent the (stupid) laws regarding marijuana. I think the fact that it is illegal is a huge waste of money, brains and time but please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that it is a medically necessary treatment for stress or glaucoma or any of the other hundreds of "ailments" that people claim so they can get high.
you can be sure that the medical MJ movement would have been totally stalled if an R was in office
The word "medical" has nothing to do with it and never did. The medical thing is a fig leaf to cover people wanting to get high. It's remarkable how many 20 year old glaucoma patients we suddenly have. I have NO problem with someone wanting to smoke weed but the notion that for 99.999% of people it has anything to do with a legitimate medical condition is just ludicrous. I'd be more supportive if they would drop the insulting pretense that it has anything to do with medicine because it doesn't and never did.
The question is, did you learn your lesson? Will you stop supporting the one party Republocrat system next election?
Never supported it in the first place but for better or worse that does not matter. There is nothing I am going to be able to do that will make it go away. Furthermore it's not as if the (theoretical) alternatives are somehow more compelling. Libertarian? Green? There's nothing out there that I think is likely to be meaningfully better even if I could somehow be convinced that a third party somehow had a realistic chance at attaining power.
The ONLY thing that will make our current "two" party system go away is to change the voting system to something other than first past the post. Until that goes away we are stuck with the two party system and I don't think it is likely to go away any time soon.
This is not the kind of "hope and change" I voted for, Mr. President.
Apparently he forgot the words of Abraham Lincoln: "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
Nah, what's going to happen is Visa/Mastercard is going to do it themselves, and cut out all of the middlemen (Apple, Google, etc.)
Really? How are they going to get access to the phones without going through Apple, Google or Microsoft? Curious how you think that is going to happen. If you say they're going to do it through an app I'll laugh my ass off.
How on earth does Apple Pay have more simplicity than a credit card?
No swipe. No handing the card to the cashier to verify signatures. No request for ID. No pulling the card out of the wallet. No signature. Takes about 3 seconds for the payment to complete. ApplePay is significantly less hassle than a credit or debit card.
I've actually used ApplePay and there is not a faster or easier payment method out there right now. Not credit cards, no other contactless payment system, not cash, and certainly not checks. They all have their uses and advantages but given a choice and having used all of them I'd use ApplePay preferentially in most cases. I almost always have my phone with me anyway so it works great for me.
1. Touch card or even whole wallet on reader.
Yeah, that doesn't work. Hell, I have a chipped card and most of the places I've tried it it does not work because the merchant disabled the capability. Certainly doesn't work from inside my wallet and even if it did I'd still be asked to show the card and/or my ID.
It doesn't get much simpler than the first one, really. I don't even have to extract my card.
You must not do much shopping in the US because you definitely have to here.
Contactless is pointless and expensive as fuck for merchants.
If your customers like it then it is not pointless. Furthermore most merchants either already have the tech or will have it within the next year. The costs get passed on to customers anyway so the only relevant comparison is if one merchant is getting a better deal than another merchant. If both accept the same methods of payment then there is effectively no cost to the merchant at all. You need to familiarize yourself with the concept of Incidence of Payment.
I can't imagine many businesses where the "neat-o" factor from a few phone enthusiasts to be able to pay with their phones is going to outweigh the costs.
Because it won't be just a few phone enthusiasts. Have you not paid any attention to the effect Apple often has on markets it enters? ApplePay is easy enough my mother can use it and I assure you that she is no "phone enthusiast" and certainly not a techie. If you need an example, walk into any Starbucks and watch how many people pay with their phones. And that process is MUCH harder than ApplePay. People LIKE this tech and they'll use it.
I like the looks of Apple Pay, and think it's a great move forward but even as an Apple fan, it seems bizarre for Apple to move forward on their own payment standard rather than the industry creating one.
ApplePay uses industry standard technology that was not created by Apple. Apparently you were not aware of this. Plenty of merchants already have the necessary tech to use ApplePay whether or not they elect to accept it. The only thing Apple did was to make setting up and using the whole thing FAR easier. I fully expect ApplePay to get copied in part or in whole by the Android and Windows ecosystems.