You see them building a delivery fleet as a moat: I see it as they've burned through literally every logistics broker in the US and now have no other choice. Their modus operandi to date was to put bids out to logistics brokers who would treat Amazon like any other customer and have some routes that were profitable, and some they'd lose money on in order to win the overall business. Amazon would then use that broker for nothing but the loss leader route and hammer it until the broker fired them as a customer. You can only do that to so many brokers before there is literally nobody left willing to do business with you.

Source: my buddy runs a broker business and will not do business with Amazon under any circumstances nor will any of his peers in this market.

This is pretty amazing (not for the brokers, I’m sure). Amazon just seems to be a hyper optimizing machine, logically stepping through all possible options to every decision.

It's possible because of their scale.

You could drive all over town buying groceries piecemeal at whatever store has the biggest loss leader deal on those particular items, but for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs the savings will be offset by the expense of going to multiple stores. Yet if you are buying 10,000 gallons of milk and 10,000 loaves of bread, it becomes feasible.

>It's possible because of their scale.

It's cultural and it started way before they reached any scale. Bezos famously refused to buy desks and used recycled doors because it was cheaper. This isn't specific to Amazon, pretty much any business involved in distribution will work on ultra thin margins. If they don't penny pinch then they don't survive.

Incidentally this is most of what makes these places so miserable for their employees. They will think about their employees the same way they might consider an order for a million rolls of toilet paper.

Taking advantage of your friends doesn't make you a "hyper-optimising machine", it makes you an ass in the short term and a loner with no friends in the long term. Being a sociopath is not an innovation.

Why isn’t it an innovation? It’s a pretty brutalist view of how the world works, and is arguably optimizing for the short term over the long one. But it seems to work (and quite well at that).

"Why isn’t it an innovation?"

Because mafia has done that and more

"optimizing for the short term over the long one"

A good way to optimise for short term is to become a drug dealer.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to go to absurd examples to just prove a point. Whatever floats your boat, but this has ceased to be a useful conversation so I'm going to step out of it.

Companies are not people, and monopolies (and monopsonies) don’t need friends.

I recently ordered from Walmart+ for the first time.

Order arrived direct from Amazon as a "gift".

You likely didn't order from the Walmart.com retailer. Instead, it was likely from a Pro seller or ordinary 3rd party seller. This is the largest source of confusion for shoppers on Amazon. So much so that Amazon now offers $1000 if a 3rd party harms an individual. [1]

I think the UI that combines the 3rd party sellers with the Walmart/Amazon corporation retailer, is deliberately made confusing. I believe over voice, like when using Alexa, it is even more unclear what vendor is being ordered from.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-compensation-third-pa...

It is Non-Desktop Web Browser interfaces that are the problem.

Mobile Site, Mobile Apps, Alexa, etc make it very hard to see who the vendor it, I do not have this problem on the Traditional Full Size Browser Amazon.com site

It was ordered directly from the Walmart website and arrived in an Amazon package with zero mention of the Walmart "seller". The Amazon product was listed by an actual brand.

IMO it was a clear case of someone doing arbitrage across ecom platforms. As a first time Walmart+ customer it certainly tarnishes my desire to ever order from there again.

It most definitely is arbitrage. The Walmart website supports a marketplace. So ordering from the website doesn't mean much these days unless you specifically look for the caption "Sold by Walmart.com"

Otherwise, like I have realized, you might as well just buy from eBay.

My wife just had exactly the opposite experience. She ordered something from Amazon and it came in a Walmart box, directly from Walmart with no mention of the Amazon seller on the shipping label.

Against Amazon's rules, for sure.

Interestingly, the price was lower on Walmart.com but my wife had not checked first. But it was only $2.50 less. I have no idea how that worked out as profitable for the 'drop shipper' (in quotes because this kind of drop shipping is IMO not legitimate).

I knew a guy a few years ago who was dropshipping like this, making ~$4k/month as a side hustle. He had a couple employees in the Philippines handling the ordering. Basically using Amazon FBA to leverage Amazon's UI/UX to sell people stuff at Wal-Mart prices.

I recently ordered directly from a company's website (it was listed on the product's packaging, so I'm fairly confident it wasn't a third party seller), as it was a little cheaper than ordering from Amazon. It still ended up being delivered directly from Amazon.