Results for “amazon” 5126 found
Amazon search is getting worse, especially for classic books
Just type in “Gulliver’s Travels,” and the first page will not show any editions you actually ought to buy. And there are so many sponsored ads for mediocre, copyright-less editions. If you type in “Gulliver’s Travels Penguin” you eventually will get to this, a plausible buy for the casual educated reader. And wouldn’t it be nice if someone told you the $156.31 Cambridge University Press edition is by far the best choice? — full of marginal annotations!
What Do We Learn from Amazon and the Minimum Wage?
Amazon’s widely touted increase in its minimum wage was accompanied by an ending of their monthly bonus plan, which often added 8% to a worker’s salary (16% during holiday season), and its stock share program which recently gave workers shares worth $3,725 at two years of employment. I’m reasonably confident that most workers will still benefit on net, simply because the labor market is tight, but it’s clear that the increase in the minimum wage was not as generous as it first appeared.
What lessons does this episode hold for minimum wage research? Amazon increased its wages voluntarily but suppose that the minimum wage had been increased by law. What would have happened? Clearly, Amazon would have, at the very least, eliminated their bonus plan and their stock share plan! In this situation, researchers examining employment data would discover that the increase in the minimum wage did not much lower employment. Such researchers might conclude that minimum wages don’t reduce employment much because the demand for labor is inelastic. The conclusion is correct but the reasoning is false. The correct conclusion and reasoning would be that the minimum wage didn’t reduce employment much because the minimum wage didn’t increase net wages much.
Amazon is a big and newsworthy employer so its actions have been closely monitored but in most cases we never know the myriad ways in which firms respond to a law. Even using administrative data it would be difficult to pick up changes in a stock share plan or a pension plan, as this compensation doesn’t show up in earnings until years after the work is completed. Even a simple employment contract is a complicated bargain with many margins. During the holiday season, for example, Amazon hires a CamperForce of workers who live in RVs and it pays their campsite fees–no big deal, but that is a form of compensation that is hard to find on a W-2. More generally, firms can respond to a minimum wage by changing compensation on non-wage margins, adjusting working conditions, reducing benefits, changing wage growth patterns, and adjusting the type of workers they hire, to give just a few examples–and notice that all of these changes are difficult to measure and none of them have a first-order effect on employment.
Does Amazon monopsony lead to higher prices?
A number of you have questioned that point I made yesterday, arguing that a standard monopolist that becomes a monopsonist will restrict output by hiring less labor, for fear of driving up the price of that labor.
I don’t think Amazon has significant monopsony power in many if any labor markets, but it does have some monopsony power over say book publishers. Amazon uses this power to force down book prices and that in turn forces down author advances to some degree. Amazon sells more books and that does mean higher output and lower prices, contrary to what the critics are charging.
Keep in mind also that Amazon is (mostly) a platform company. It’s not their goal to someday put all their competitors out of business and jack up the price of paperbacks to $35. Rather, they seek to flood the market with output, investing in brand name, better data, talent hiring, acquired logistics skills, and so on. To the extent Amazon has monopsony power (again, fairly limited outside of books), they can bargain down costs and flood the market even more, playing into this core strategy, again involving lower rather than higher prices.
The rant against Amazon and the rant for Amazon
Wow! It’s unbelievable how hard you are working to deny that monopsony and monopoly type market concentration is causing all all these issues. Do you think it’s easy to compete with Amazon? Think about all the industries amazon just thought about entering and what that did to the share price of incumbents. Do you think Amazon doesn’t use its market clout and brand name to pay people less? Don’t the use the same to extract incentives from politicians? Corporate profits are at record highs as a percent of the economy, how is that maintained? What is your motivation for closing your eyes and denying consolidation? It doesn’t seem that you are being logical.
That is from a Steven Wolf, from the comments. You might levy some justified complaints about Amazon, but this passage packs a remarkable number of fallacies into a very small space.
First, monopsony and monopoly tend to have contrasting or opposite effects. To the extent Amazon is a monopsony, that leads to higher output and lower prices.
Second, if Amazon is knocking out incumbents that may very well be good for consumers. Consumers want to see companies that are hard for others to compete with. Otherwise, they are just getting more of the same.
Third, if you consider markets product line by product line, there are very few sectors where Amazon would appear to have much market power, or a very large share of the overall market for that good or service.
Fourth, Amazon is relatively strong in the book market. Yet if a book is $28 in a regular store, you probably can buy it for $17 on Amazon, or for cheaper yet used, through Amazon.
Fifth, Amazon takes market share from many incumbents (nationwide) but it does not in general “knock out” the labor market infrastructure in most regions. That means Amazon hire labor by paying it more or otherwise offering better working conditions, however much you might wish to complain about them.
Sixth, if you adjust for the nature of intangible capital, and the difference between economic and accounting profit, it is not clear corporate profits have been so remarkably high as of late.
Seventh, if Amazon “extracts” lower taxes and an improved Metro system from the DC area, in return for coming here, that is a net Pareto improvement or in any case at least not obviously objectionable.
Eighth, I did not see the word “ecosystem” in that comment, but Amazon has done a good deal to improve logistics and also cloud computing, to the benefit of many other producers and ultimately consumers. Book authors will just have to live with the new world Amazon has created for them.
And then there is Rana Foroohar:
“If Amazon can see your bank data and assets, [what is to stop them from] selling you a loan at the maximum price they know you are able to pay?” Professor Omarova asks.
How about the fact that you are able to borrow the money somewhere else?
Addendum: A more interesting criticism of Amazon, which you hardly ever hear, is the notion that they are sufficiently dominant in cloud computing that a collapse/sabotage of their presence in that market could be a national security issue. Still, it is not clear what other arrangement could be safer.
Dulles Amazon northern Virginia cricket fact of the day
Loudoun County’s growth over the past three decades has been driven in part by Asian Americans, who have flocked there to work for AOL and other tech companies that have set up shop in the area. Today 18 percent of the district’s residents are Asian American. Nearly half of those are Indian American; between 1990 and 2010, the number of Indian Americans in the county grew by a factor of fifty. Drive past a park on a summer evening, and you’ll see cricket matches under way—the Loudoun County Cricket League has forty-eight teams and more than 1,200 players.
Here is more, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Amazon arbitrage, money laundering edition
The impersonator priced the book at $555 and it was posted to multiple Amazon sites in different countries. The book — which as been removed from most Amazon country pages as of a few days ago — is titled “Lower Days Ahead,” and was published on Oct 7, 2017.
Reames said he suspects someone has been buying the book using stolen credit and/or debit cards, and pocketing the 60 percent that Amazon gives to authors. At $555 a pop, it would only take approximately 70 sales over three months to rack up the earnings that Amazon said he made.
“This book is very unlikely to ever sell on its own, much less sell enough copies in 12 weeks to generate that level of revenue,” Reames said. “As such, I assume it was used for money laundering, in addition to tax fraud/evasion by using my Social Security number. Amazon refuses to issue a corrected 1099 or provide me with any information I can use to determine where or how they were remitting the royalties.”
Reames said the books he has sold on Amazon under his name were done through his publisher, not directly via a personal account (the royalties for those books accrue to his former employer) so he’d never given Amazon his Social Security number. But the fraudster evidently had, and that was apparently enough to convince Amazon that the imposter was him.
Here are additional points of interest, as the practice is more common than you might have thought. Via the estimable Chug.
Buy at Amazon: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
Ben Thompson on the Amazon consortium and health care
What would make more sense to me is that, having first built an interface for its employees, and then a standardized infrastructure for its health care suppliers, is that Amazon converts the latter into a marketplace where PBMs, insurance administrators, distributors, and pharmacies have to compete to serve employees. And then, once that marketplace is functioning, Amazon will open the floodgates on the demand side, offering that standard interface to every large employer in America…
This is certainly ambitious enough — basically intermediating U.S. employers and the U.S. healthcare industry — but in fact this only sets the stage for the wholesale disruption of American healthcare. First, Amazon could not only open up its standard interface to other large employers, but small-and-medium sized businesses, and even individuals; in this way the Amazon Health Marketplace could aggregate by far the most demand for healthcare.
And to close the piece:
My expectation, then, is not that the Internet methodically disrupts industry after industry in some sort of chronological order, but rather that the entire edifice lasts far longer than technologists think, only to one day collapse far quicker than anyone expected.
The ultimate winners of this shakeout, then, are not only companies that are building businesses predicated on the Internet, but just as importantly, are willing and able to build those businesses with the patience that will be necessary to wait for the old order to collapse, particularly if that collapse happens years or decades after the underlying business models are rotten.
Here is more, and I do hope you are all subscribing to Stratechery, which is one of the very best regular reads, worth the money.
Why Amazon will and should choose Montgomery County, MD, and *also* Northern Virginia
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit about why they might not:
In any of these Washington area locations, Amazon is taking an implicit stance on the nature of talent and education. It’s well known that the D.C. area has high education levels, including in science and technology fields. At the same time, it has not bred a lot of rapidly scaling, dynamic startups comparable to, say, Silicon Valley or Austin, Texas. The work ethic and competition here are strong, but the orientation is too much toward the government as customer and arbiter. If Amazon settles in or near Washington, the company is betting that educated human beings are flexible and can reorient their priorities and ethos to a changing business environment. If there is any argument against Amazon picking the D.C. area, it’s this one.
There are many more points at the link.
My visit to an Amazon bookstore
My commentary here is late to the party, but I had not visited a branch before. Here are my impressions, derived from the Columbus Circle outlet in Manhattan:
1. It is a poorly designed store for me, most of all because it does not emphasize new releases. I feel I am familiar with a lot of older titles, or I went through a more or less rational process of deciding not to become familiar with them. Their current popularity, as measured say by Amazon rankings, does not cause me to reassess those judgments. For me, aggregate Amazon popularity has no real predictive power, except perhaps I don’t want to buy books everyone liked. “A really smart person says to consider this again,” however, would revise my prior estimates.
2. For me, the very best bookstore and bookstore layout is Daunt, in London, Marylebone High St. You are hit by a blast of what is new, but also selected according to intellectual seriousness rather than popularity. You can view many titles at the same time, because they use the “facing out” function just right for their new arrivals tables. Some of the rest of the store is arranged “by country,” much preferable to having say China books in separate sections of history, travel, biography, and so on.
3. I am pleased that fiction is given so much space toward the front of the store. I do not see this as good for me, but it is a worthwhile counterweight to the ongoing tendency of American book markets to reward non-fiction, or at least what is supposed to be non-fiction.
4. I have mixed feelings about the idea of all books facing outward. On the positive side, books not facing outward tend to be ignored. On the downside, this also limits the potential for hierarchicalization through visual display. All books facing outwards is perhaps a bit too much like no books facing outwards.
Overall I am struck by how internet commerce is affecting Christie’s and Sotheby’s in a broadly similar fashion. The auction houses used to put out different genres, such as Contemporary, European Painting, 20th Century, and so on, for 3-4 day windows, and then they would display virtually everything up for auction. Now they have a single big display, with highlights from each area, and the rest viewable on-line. That display then shows for about three weeks. Like Amazon, they are opting to emphasize what is popular and to let on-line displays pick up the tails and niches. In all cases, that means less turnover in the displays. That is information-rich for infrequent visitors, who can take in more at once, but information-poor in relative terms for frequent visitors. As a somewhat infrequent visitor to auction houses, I gain, but for bookstores I would prefer they cater to the relatively frequent patrons.
5. I am most worried by the prominent center table at the entrance, which presents “Books with 4.8 Amazon stars or higher.” I saw a book on mixology, a picture book of Los Angeles, a Marvel comics encyclopedia, a book connected to the musical Hamilton, and a series of technique-oriented cookbooks, such as Harold McGee, a very good manual by the way. Isabel Wilkerson was the closest they had to “my kind of intelligent non-fiction.” Neil Hilbon represented poetry, of course his best-known book does have a five-star average, fortunately “…these poems are anything but saccharine.”
Unfortunately, the final message is that Amazon will work hard so that controversial books do not receive Amazon’s highest in-store promotions. Why not use software to measure the quality of writing or maybe even thought in a book’s reviews, and thereby assign it a new grade?: “Here are the books the smart people chose to write about”?
6. I consider myself quite pro-Amazon, still to me it feels dystopic when an attractive young saleswoman says so cheerily to (some) customers: “Thank you for being Prime!”
7. I suspect the entire store is a front to display and sell gadgets, at least I hope it is.
8. I didn’t buy anything.
Amazon’s new customer, and the economics of scale in groceries
Ben Thompson writes:
…you can see the outline of similar efforts in logistics: Amazon is building out a delivery network with itself as the first-and-best customer; in the long run it seems obvious said logistics services will be exposed as a platform.
This, though, is what was missing from Amazon’s grocery efforts: there was no first-and-best customer. Absent that, and given all the limitations of groceries, AmazonFresh was doomed to be eternally sub-scale.
WHOLE FOODS: CUSTOMER, NOT RETAILER
This is the key to understanding the purchase of Whole Foods: to the outside it may seem that Amazon is buying a retailer. The truth, though, is that Amazon is buying a customer — the first-and-best customer that will instantly bring its grocery efforts to scale.
Today, all of the logistics that go into a Whole Foods store are for the purpose of stocking physical shelves: the entire operation is integrated. What I expect Amazon to do over the next few years is transform the Whole Foods supply chain into a service architecture based on primitives: meat, fruit, vegetables, baked goods, non-perishables (Whole Foods’ outsized reliance on store brands is something that I’m sure was very attractive to Amazon). What will make this massive investment worth it, though, is that there will be a guaranteed customer: Whole Foods Markets.
…At its core Amazon is a services provider enabled — and protected — by scale.
Here is the full piece, with many more background and points.
Amazon is buying Whole Foods
Matt Yglesias: “A big city daily newspaper, physical bookstores, a supermarket chain. Bezos’ futuristic vision is all coming together.”
Alex T. tweeted: “I already do 80% of my shopping at Amazon and Whole Foods. I am beginning to get worried.”
Ross Douthat: “What if Bezos intends to turn Whole Foods into a Mormon-style charitable storehouse …”
Me: “Perhaps preserving my favorite brands of Whole Foods dark chocolate is Jeff Bezos’s plan for short-run public charity.”
@JesalTV: Jeff Bezos: “Alexa, buy me something from Whole Foods.” Alexa: “Sure, Jeff. Buying Whole Foods now.” Jeff Bezos: “WHA- ahh go ahead.”
Here is an earlier Conor Sen piece on Amazon acquisition strategy.
And above all else: “Dow opens down 10 points. Amazon jumps 3% after deal to buy Whole Foods. Walmart slumps 7%, Kroger plunges 16%”
Here are more retail share price declines.
Amazon plans hundreds of brick and mortar stores
The Seattle company plans as many as 400 bookstores, Sandeep Mathrani, chief executive of large mall operator General Growth Properties Inc., said on an earnings call with analysts Tuesday.
“You’ve got Amazon opening brick-and-mortar bookstores and their goal is to open, as I understand, 300 to 400,” said Mr. Mathrani in response to a question about mall traffic.
That compares to the 640 stores Barnes & Noble Inc. operates and the 255 locations Books-A-Million Inc. said it had as of last summer.
The WSJ story is here, here are others. What is the underlying business plan? To make these iconic locations like Apple stores? To treat all future business, in all sectors, as depending on the focality of the company behind it? To start with books, move on to other items, and eventually steal middle-class and upper-middle class consumers away from Walmart? Somehow use these stores to lock people in Amazon Prime? Do you have other hypotheses? Is this overconfident folly, or is it the “for good” return of brick and mortar bookstores to our lives?
Amazon eBook questions that are rarely asked
Why are Amazon ebook reviews from US readers more important than reviews from international readers?
Have you noticed that reviews from Amazon.com are aggregated across all other international Amazon sites, but that the reverse is not true? If someone kindly posts a review of a book on Amazon.co.uk, it is stuck there, and not aggregated to Amazon.com. Why? Is a UK review less valuable than a US review? Are reviews from Canadians, Australians or India inferior to US reviews?
Source here, via Sofia Tania.
The Amazon bookstore (hi, future!)
Every book is tagged with a custom label featuring its aggregate rating on Amazon.com, along with a review from the website. There are no prices. To get a book’s price, you must use the Amazon app on your smartphone to scan the barcode. This act will provide you with the product listing, all the title’s reviews on Amazon.com, and the price. If you don’t have a smartphone or the app handy, associates are on hand to assist.
An associate at the store also confirmed what many news reports about Amazon Books have stated, that the store only stocks books with Amazon.com ratings of four stars and above [TC: is this really wise?]. The associate also confirmed that prices for books in the store are identical to those of the books sold online. And, since book prices on Amazon.com can fluctuate regularly, so can prices in the store. The associate said one thing they are vigilant about in the store is ensuring customers don’t get confused by receiving different price quotes at different times.
The store, which aims to seamlessly transition the online shopping experience to a real world scenario, allows you to use credits associated with your account at the register. However, you cannot order merchandise online and have it delivered to the store.
There is more here, interesting throughout, via M. Can anyone from Seattle report on this?