Passed some time today reading online articles about amazon between year 1999-2000.
Scathing Report of Amazon Is a Must-Read for Stock Owners / Analyst builds powerful case against company
"
While stock analysts generally focus on the income statement, Suria concentrates on cash flow, a complicated analysis that most investors ignore.
"During the fourth quarter of last year, Amazon evolved from a virtual business to a real-world retailer," he writes. "While the operational characteristics of Amazon are not that different from an online retailer, they are a lot more distressed than even mediocre real-world retailers."
The "fundamental problem," he continues, "lies in the fact that Amazon does not generate positive net cash flow per unit of product it sells.""
Amazon.bomb
“"Once Wal-Mart decides to go after Amazon, there's no contest," declares Kurt Barnard, president of Barnard's Retail Trend Report. "Wal-Mart has resources Amazon can't even dream about.””
I don't know why I thought it was relevant to a tesla investing forum though..
Wal-mart? WAL-MART? Oh lord. They've been working on their online presence for
how long? and it still looks like caca. I try to order various things from their site and iOS app, and get random errors here and there.
Bonus: Order 10 different things from Wal-Mart, food, video discs, and some other random consumables. It will come in 4 different packages. They are most certainly losing money on their online sales in shipping alone.
Amazon deals in the full spectrum of consumers, high end to low end. Everybody buys stuff from Amazon. Wal-Mart deals primarily in the low end, and it shows when you buy things from their site. The experience is decidedly low-end. Doing store pickup is a miserable experience, doing a store return is an even more miserable experience.. Unless Wal-Mart decides to upgrade to a high-end experience, they will never compete except in the more rural areas where there simply aren't other choices.
Whole Foods spoils me every time I step in the door. I loathe shopping at Wal-Mart now. Whole Foods has people checking out my groceries, properly packaging meats together and away from my fresh fruits and veggies, offering small bags of ice to keep my meat cold on the way home. Wal-Mart has their employees throwing bloody meat packages alongside my leafy greens that may or may not get cooked, how do they know?
Certainly I pay more for that Whole Foods experience, which is why Amazon did well to purchase a high profit margin business, instead of the cut-throat commodities business that Wal-Mart engages in. There's also a big culture difference between Wal-Mart and Amazon/Whole Foods. Amazon and Whole Foods embrace much greater diversity in thinking than Wal-Mart, in my opinion. (Which is based merely on articles discussing Amazon where actively disagreeing with coworkers in order to point out flaws is encouraged, versus my interactions with Wal-Mart corporate on a number of occasions where group think appears to still run rampant, especially when ideas are presented by people high up the chain. Example: Who thought it a good idea to have random Wal-Mart employees do home deliveries from stores? I would NEVER want a Wal-Mart employee knowing what I ordered AND delivering it to my home. NEVER. But this idea was dreamed up by some executive who thought it a brilliant solution, and I guarantee it was like George Lucas in doing the prequel movies, nobody stepped up to say "umm, that's not a good idea.")
