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A comment on Amazon to close all of its physical bookstores and '4-star' shops. Parent comment

Re:Amazon to close all of its physical bookstores and '4-sta... by mikepurvis on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @05:21PM (#30534060)
I was an intern at Amazon in Seattle in 2008 and was ordering groceries and beer from Fresh. It looks like it's a pretty big deal now in most major US cities, but I remember being surprised that year after year after year it seemed to just.... continue existing. Not going huge, but also not getting canned.

On the other hand, maybe that's the real lesson of Grocery Gateway and "dot coms" who tried to do a hard burn on this back in the day— it's a really hard thing to get right, and getting it right requires an extremely long horizon of slow and steady growth.

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Re:Amazon to close all of its physical bookstores and '4-sta... by mabbo on Thursday March 03, 2022 @02:35AM (#30538196)
For a long time, Fresh did not directly make a profit. That wasn't it's purpose.

The goal of Amazon fresh was to say "hey UPS! Looks like we can do deliveries all by ourselves without you! Give us a better deal or we'll become your competitor". Because all those deliveries were on Amazon trucks.

Then one day Amazon's delivery needs scaled beyond what UPS was willing to take on. And so Amazon Logistics became a major thing.

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Re:Amazon to close all of its physical bookstores and '4-sta... by xdeepak81 on Thursday March 03, 2022 @05:14PM (#30547768)
Amazon logistics actually started first in India because India was an unorganized section and there was no other company that can support Amazon. Almost every startup in India had to make their own logistic network.
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