Actually, I believe that was Walmart as well: >TIMMER: I used to ask my class, I’m talking 1985, “Where is the world’s largest supercomputer?” And the correct answer was, “It’s at the Pentagon.” Okay. “Where is the world’s second largest supercomputer?” Bentonville, Ark. Home of Walmart. They used that computer to track every single item on every single Walmart shelf. That information technology is what revolutionized food marketing. And it was pretty much invented by Walmart.
Source: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/farms-race/#:%7E:text=where...
At first I placed online orders with them, but once moving to online shopping at all, it was clear that Amazon had even better selection, prices, shipping, etc.
But I still enjoy a good physical bookstore. I might still shop there in person today if their stock was more interesting, even if the prices were a little higher.
Yeah this annoyed me to no end, however after a few shops I realized the only reason these are even open right now is because of the high margin gift section. Check the prices on their plushies when you are there. $35 for a small rabbit! and people buy them.
Yes, you should allocate a larger share of scarce resources (in this case, floor space) to high-margin product...
... but not at the expense of the central thesis of why customers actually come to your store.
B&N was able to sell high margin gift shop items because traffic was already there as a bookstore... and there as a bookstore because they had reading areas and a coffee shop.
Imagine a virtualized army of engineers that the AI or brain upload future may bring. Maybe that won't happen in our lifetimes, but it will happen at some point if we don't manage to nuke ourselves.
There are probably a handful of other trends that will cause instability and salients to develop in the fitness gradient.
They're still in business. I browsed one last month. I was amused that one entire rack, 6 shelves, was filled with "Trump is Evil" books. Somebody at that store doesn't like Trump :-)
Plus, I'm sure some have their own niches (satire, exposés like "Frankly we won this election" that have new reporting, etc) and many have their own historical value. I saw an ant-Tom DeLay book in the wild a few years ago well after his fall from grace and considered buying it just as a keepsake of the era.
What's sad is that there probably is some interesting IT story behind Walmart scaling, but not using supercomputers and using PCs or somethign instead.
My first job out of college in 1989 was to go to work in the basement of The Pentagon for the Defense Communications Agency, as an Analyst/Terminal Operator for those old pre-Multics Honeywell WWMCCS mainframes. One of my first jobs there was to help modernized the classified Airfields database from COBOL 66 to COBOL 77.
At the beginning, we used glass tty terminals that were wrapped in faraday cages, and all local printing was done via a screen print function to local thermal paper printers. We could use the line printers, but those were not directly accessible to us, and we had to go up to the Operator window to ask for our output.
They later upgraded the terminals to EMF-hardened IBM PC XT computers with removable 5GB hard drives, known as WIS-CUC terminals. That was like 1991. Note that this was PC XT technology from like 1984, not PC AT.
The unclassified PC AT type computers we used outside of the classified environments probably had more RAM, larger hard drives, and more I/O capacity than those ancient Honeywell mainframes.
So, no, there weren’t any supercomputers at the Pentagon in 1985.
Now, if you want to talk about NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, then that’s a different story.
/s
Amazon has only recently pioneered last mile logistics. It still isnt that great. I’m in a large metro area and 25-50% of my packages do not meet the prime delivery dates. I’d argue Walmart is still the king of logistics, for now.
Losers for me were Home Depot and Canadian Tire. They iterated slowly and when they did, made things worse it seemed.
Home Depot on the other end was great. When there was a shortage of disinfectant (and government mandated clean hands before allowing people into stores) they just added actual washing basins with regular soap and paper towels and I could go get stuff to do projects. I have never been to HD as often as during 2020.
I used online ordering literally once at HD and CT each during that time. HD made me call/text a number with my order# when I arrived and they brought the items out for me but I really only used that because something was low stock in the one of many HD stores I could go to that had any of the item at all and I wanted to "reserve" it. No app needed which is a big big plus for me. I abhor all these apps for everything.
CD wasn't bad either. Same deal, reserving an item with low stock until I could go get it. I just picked it all up at the online order desk where it had already been put in a cart.
I don't like ordering food online. Had to do it once while waiting for a negative covid test result. You don't get to pick the actual items you want (fruits/veggies). Not great. I already don't like how cashiers throw your sensitive veggies around all the time. Never mind how they're being handled in the rest of the chain. Before anyone asks, yes I do choose which line I choose by who is the cashier/packer over length of line.
Walmart doesn't "try" where they have to compete with upscale options because even if they do good the rich people will still shop there.because of the Walmart stigma. And the poor people only care about price so they won't be turned off if Walmart doesn't try hard.
Also, there are some really crappy Home Depots out there. In my experience they're the ones without appreciable competition.
If anything more people touch your items in this system or its on par. Sure there's no cashier/packer touching your items at checkout. But the equivalent has to happen internally. I have no idea how it actually works but I gather since most stuff goes directly into the store and not the warehouse someone walks through the store and picks the order like you would exposing themselves to the Covid risks and then potentially someone else packs it all up and yet another person delivers it to your car as this happens asynchronously and there might even be a shift change in between.
FWIW my Costco didn't pretend the pandemic didn't happen. I still sometimes have to wait to get into the fruit/veggie or dairy coolers, with someone making sure that not too many people are in there at the same time. They applied the limits intelligently (only allowing one person per membership into the warehouse at all at a time when the government limits were very low) so as to allow more people to shop without having to wait outside for ages (which happened in the first 'panic buying stage' of the pandemic). They have less produce in the cooler too to allow more space for passing (even to the detriment of the produce. I just don't buy some stuff any longer as its no longer cooled and there are quality issues). They also rearranged some other stuff to make it easier to access without bumping into each other. None of the other stores I have been to have done this at all.
I think we're beyond that now. I really do.
We thought we were going to get Weyland-Yutani, but I think we're going to end up with Bezos-Walton instead.
The only government responses we need here are better labor laws and maybe a few tax code changes.
Unfortunately, that cuts both ways. There are a lot of ways to be exploitive, to your and your customers' benefits, when you're a $113 B revenue/quarter company, that simply aren't available when you're a startup.
Hell, Walmart pioneered the "How'd you like to sell in our stores?" + "You need to reduce prices, or it'd be a shame if we, your biggest customer, had to drop you" two step. And Amazon pioneered hyperscale logistics efficiencies. Both of which only work if you're giant.
If we want a return to competition of yore, I think it's only going to happen if we (a) prevent "extra-large" companies from having in-house logistics & (b) prevent predatory contracts and pricing when a size disparity exists (e.g. Walmart/supplier).
And given both of these are pretty fundamental to the way many companies work, I'm not even sure they'd be feasible.