Posted on 08/21/2021 6:18:56 AM PDT by NOBO2012
This week’s theme is plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose…the more things change, the more they stay the same. That surely covers the Afghanistan situation, which I need to take a break from. It also sums up rather concisely this story, which literally made me laugh out loud when I read it: Amazon Plans to Open Large Retail Locations Akin to Department Stores. What a concept: bricks and mortar stores, the very thing Amazon set out to kill
Sears, reimagined
Amazon started 27 years ago as an online bookseller but from the start founder Jeff Bezos intended it to become “an everything store” and planned for its explosive growth and ecommerce domination. Amazon’s virtual business model for discount books quickly killed every other major bricks and mortar bookseller in the country other from Barnes and Noble. As others followed suit, creating their own ecommerce businesses, traditional retail of all sorts fell victim. Today, from coast to coast, whole malls sit abandoned.
Rolling Acres Mall, Akron, Ohio, before/after closing
Gen Z doesn’t even know a time when Amazon wasn’t the ecommerce behemoth it is today. They, and for the most part Millennials as well, can’t conceive of needing something that you would have to spend days or weeks trying to locate in actual stores around town and even then often have to settle for something else because nobody carried what you wanted. They never new a time when the entire world wasn’t your oyster, when things didn’t just show up on the front porch a day or two after it was ordered. Bezos’ business model, based on price and convenience, became the market in less than a generation.
And here we are today:
Amazon plans to open several large physical retail locations in the U.S. that will operate akin to department stores…The plan to launch large stores will mark a new expansion for the online-shopping pioneer into bricks-and-mortar retail…
Amazon executives have felt that bricks-and-mortar stores would enable better engagement with customers and provide a showcase for its devices and other products to shoppers who otherwise might not have tried them, a person familiar with the matter said.
Ironically, the first bricks and mortar retail store Amazon opened, in 2015, was a book store in Seattle.
Looks like it could be an old Borders Bookstore
The company has sought to innovate in bricks and mortar while building a network of stores that could glean insightful customer data and provide new shopping experiences. [ed. “gleaning” customer data has always been a big part of Amazon’s business plan.]
An expanded store footprint would enable Amazon to offer consumers a bevy of items they could try out in person before deciding to buy. That would be particularly beneficial in apparel, which can often be a guessing game for customers shopping online because of size and fit concerns. It would also give customers even more instant gratification than the quick shipping offered by Amazon for online purchases.
I guess you can call it what you like: instant gratification, boomerang business models, ‘everything old is new again’, plus ça change…the truth is it’s all premised on a form of predatory pricing, the illegal act of setting prices low in an attempt to eliminate the competition. It’s technically a violation of antitrust law as it makes markets more vulnerable to a monopoly”" (can you say “Amazon” - I know you can) However, like anything else involving crony-capitalists, don’t expect there to be any interest in such things at the Justice Department, they’re too busy not investigating the non-existent voter fraud in the last election. You know, the election where the guy who was going to clear the swamp of crony capitalists lost “fair and square.”
The only trouble with capitalism in America today is…we don’t have capitalism in America today.
Capitalism = Free Market; Capitalism + Government = Crony Capitalism: NOT Free Market. It’s that simple.
Posted from: MOTUS A.D.
“Today, from coast to coast, whole malls sit abandoned.”
Thus has been the way of malls since about 20 years after malls started.
Because malls invariably become night time hangouts for gangs and the Supreme Court has ruled that anti-loitering laws are unconstitutional.
I still use amazon, but I compare against brick and mortar stores for the best deal for the same product.
I recently bought a chain saw and I bought it Home Depot.
I compared it on amazon and four other locations and it was 18% less expensive {exact same product, same model} at Home Depot.
I did drive over and pick it up, but the round trip is less than 15 miles so that is not a real issue.
If amazon would have been 18% less expensive, I'd have bought it there.
Why pay more for the exact same product, unless you absolutely must have it immediately for a project you are currently working on. If that's the situation, price becomes a secondary consideration, and you just go and buy it where it is available.
Bezos is a kid of a CIA father. He was groomed as a Wall St hedge fund trader at DE Shaw where he was quickly promoted to SVP ostensibly due to his CIA family.
In 1994 Bezos was set up to start Amazon in Seattle. Seattle’s metro area touched Bellevue Redmond where today’s psychopath Bill Gates III was greased by his mother’s IBM connections to dominate the microcomputer software space. It was the ‘thing.’
Bezos’s mission was to dominate e-commerce but he couldn’t make a profit for 17 years. From 1994 to 2011 Amazon floundered.
Bezos was told by his central banking CIA buddies that they could fund him to the moon if he could just turn a profit. Amazon’s accountants cooked the books and cranked out a quarterly profit in 2011. Presto! The 1st 10 billion arrived to Amazon as a CIA contract for “Cloud Services.”
Many more ten billion dollar contracts followed.
If Sears and Roebuck had a fraction of Amazon’s Wall Street banking funny Fed money, they would have made Nordstrom’s look like a garage sale.
Bezos is now 100% controlled by the Davos gang.
And he was never a genius, he just had the connections.
Same as Bill Gates, not a genius, just a phone talker while Paul Allen was the code master. All of Microsoft’s products were stolen, first from Xerox, then Apple.
Jobs had vision but had Wozniak as code genius.
Among Jobs, Allen, Wozniak and many others including Ellison, Bezos doesn’t even make the list.
What’s happening here is something I’ve predicted for several years. Amazon is opening retail stores because they’ve finally figured out that making deliveries to every home and business in America is very costly and makes no sense for many types of purchases.
“first from Xerox, then Apple”
Actually Bill and Paul just bought it from Seattle Computer Systems which was just making a version of Digital Research’s DOS product which of course was just an evolution of CP/M...which the actual smart guy Gary Kildow thought up in ‘72.
It was Jobs who went over to Xerox PARC and toured Adelle Goldberg’s lab, who was furious that the idiot management there let him in. He stole everything...and called it the Mac. After a misstart with the ridiculous Lisa box.
But most everything you say is true. Gates is filthy rich cuz Mommy was on the board of IBM. If he had been anyone else doing compilers at the time, he would still be a small operation somewhere in the trees of Redmond.
The ruling class keeps the cash in the gang. Our cash.
Sorry, Kildow s/b “Kildall”.
Just doing things from memory...
They bought DOS yes, I know the story very well as I’m a very few miles from the groups involved.
But word processing, spreadsheet, graphics, WYSIWYG OS adaptations were stolen from Xerox, and later from Apple.
Well actually spreadsheets were Dan Bricklin’s idea when he was at Harvard...remember VisiCalc? Ended up Lotus 1-2-3. PARC didn’t really have any analogous idea, they were more about the GUI and Object Oriented programming.
MS had Multiplan which was boring but they copied 1-2-3 to put on the MAC platform in ‘85 IIRC and then used their hardware sales growth to burn down Lotus. Excel was never the market leader until the early ‘90s.
As for word processors, I really think they did a creditable job there. Remember Apple used to bundle MacWrite with the early Macs, and MS came up with Word for Mac. They read the Mac Programmers standard book end to end and did a fabulous job of adhering to it, and I honestly think that doing that is where they learned to do GUI’s. It showed in everything they did after that.
It was essentially a better version of MacWrite. You could say that came from Xerox since PARC really did come up with that concept and Jobs stole the idea. But MS just worked off the Apple template to come up with Word. It’s not a criticism, that was a great product.
It’s funny. Back in the ‘70s we shared code all the time over the old ARPA net. Nobody thought code was anything worth selling. I remember when Gates wrote the article castigating people for doing that. We all thought he was a jerk for writing it. Stallman got mad and wrote the CopyLeft to try to prevent him from monopolizing the world and realeased GNU to start that ball rolling. And of course Torvaldis went one step further with Linux, again to undermine Bad Bill. But they haven’t been that successful in burning down the MS universe...only Apple.
It’s hard to say what’s “stealing” versus just “competing”, but it’s pretty clear that MS never came up with a paradigm product on their own, they just produced/bought copies and then used platform dominance to make product dominance.
Gates and his family just used Ruling Class connections to make that happen.
“From 1994 to 2011 Amazon floundered”.
I don’t know what alternative reality you are living in, but I hope you’re having a good time there. From 1994 to 2011 Amazon built the worlds leading cloud platform (AWS), and a unparalleled logistics and distribution network. Two TOTALLY different businesses that came to dominate their particular businesses.
The reason Amazon didn’t show a profit was because they were pumping the profits back into the business. And it clearly worked.
IN TERMS OF PROFIT!!!
Can you not READ??? AMZN was a Wall St failure in terms of the bottom line. 17 YEARS WITHOUT PROFIT UNTIL BEZOS CIA BUDDIES BAILED HIM OUT.
No business in America gets that kind of favoritism. And if they ever did, they would do a lot better than Bezos.
AWS path to profitability was financed via CIA contracts. Profits from the proceeds were channeled into logistics of the retail platform. The retail platform never had the funds to build the logistics. It came from CIA proceeds.
How is it that a largely mismanaged unprofitable ecommerce retailer lands CIA contracts worth tens upon tens of billions?
Why was the CIA interested in what goes on INSIDE American homes?
How do you get the names, addresses, payment bank information, patterns of purchasing on Americans without breaking laws?
Do you think Alexa is a privacy protector?
The two enterprises are intertwined, joined at the hip.
Why is it that AWS deplatformed Parler? Do you know the real reason?
Before you cheerlead a globalist clown like Bezos for being a connected child of the CIA, consider that the CIA took over the FBI HQ pursuant to the Patriot Act’s JTTF and gave us monsters like Brennan and his pet Snowden, Comey and his Strzok, lying and pinwalling our President into endless harassment and persecution.
Americans do not need Amazon, they certainly do not need Bezos.
The only people to whom profits matter are investors. Amazon stock holders are its investors. Now why don’t you go find an Amazon stock holder who is not happy with their return over the past 20 years.
You’re focused on individual weeds and not the historical picture.
What happened in the ARPA net days is irrelevant as it proceeded the positioning of those that were set up to dominate.
The tools that were were FTP’d around came with legal protections which were ignored. That’s called piracy.
Gates stole the tools and had Allen adapt them. Gates was not the visionary. He had others around him put together popular user experiences. The point is any number of talkers could have CEO’d others into doing the same thing as Gates. He was nothing special, not even unique except he grew up in a family of Eugenicists who think your life should be snuffed.
The point is that lionizing clowns like Bezos and Gates is an insult to history and intelligence, and perpetuates the danger posed by these monsters..
One might as well conclude a certain megalomaniac and child rapist was a promising poet and possibly a visionary urban planner. The person in mind was actually all four.
Bezos is linked and bound by the Davos gang of Satan Worshippers.
Gates spiritual Advisor is Marina Abramowitz, a Satan worshiper.
But go ahead and talk ARPA net, and all the yesteryears of tech BS, as if that is somehow relevant.
What’s relevant are the monsters allowed to run rampant today and how they should not be allowed to be falsely described and celebrated through their PR minions.
Jeff Bezos: Visionary ..... Barf
Joe Biden: 81 million votes ..... Barf
I am happy!
Do you have links to these allegations?
You’re conveniently ignoring the 17-year span when AMZN was not profitable and when investors were heaping mad at their lack of response.
Go ahead and ignore as the ignorant will do naturally. No one awake can help you.
Amazon, along with Twitter, Facebook, Google will be gone in ten years and impotent in five.
Yeah, right, we’re all unaware that we’re ruled by propaganda flacks for a gangster state of psychopaths who do sidegigs as satanists.
Yawn.
What’s new in history? Nice guys finish last. Old news.
You should read Davos’page (World Economic forum). Bezo’s is not a member, nor is he a member of supporters. However, I think you would be surprised who supports the agenda.
Clearly my error. I made the mistake of arguing with someone who has no idea what he’s talking about.
INVESTORS invest for the long term. And even between its IPO in 1997 and 2011 Amazon did extraordinarily well for its investors. Go check the chart. And recently its gone parabolic.
And Twitter, Facebook and Google are TOTALLY different businesses than Amazon. They may very well be on the downward slope in 5-10 years. Amazon? They have built a fantastic business that I suspect will be around quite awhile.
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