It seems to me that Amazon has gone the way of many other businesses, and their original “product” is now a low-priority sideline. I read once that General Motors is a financial institution that makes cars on the side. Saw an article recently that McDonald’s is primarily a real-estate company now, which is why they don’t care whether we buy their over-priced burgers anymore.
I guess that’s why Amazon keeps showing me a hundred versions of an identical product, sold under different names from many different companies.
Yesterday I was looking for a receiver hitch pin lock. There were dozens of identical items from at least 8 different companies, and I’d never heard of most of them. I’ll bet a steak dinner that a similar search in 6 months will produce the same thing, only with a new set of “never-heard-of” companies.
I’ll admit though, that I don’t know what Amazon’s main money maker is now.
I am torn.
Amazon–well, kid in a candy shop, when it comes to books.
But I DO NOT WANT GODDAM KINDLE!
And they keep trying to push that trash down my throat.
I don’t like the Kindle, for a lot of reasons including that any Kindle books you buy can never be used outside that ecosystem. (Unless you count the app as “outside”.) But i do like e-readers. I’m currently using a Kobo, and my next one will likely be a Boox tablet, or similar.
I bought my Kobo from Amazon, after checking that the price was the same everywhere. It felt like a little way to tell Amazon that i really hated the choices they made in their latest generation of Kindles.
I love my Kindle. But, I don’t buy many books. I get them through my library and it works great for that. I resisted an e-reader for a long time and then finally purchased a Paperwhite for $200 a bit over a year ago. Now, I don’t know how I lived without it before. I read way more since it is so convenient and is always with me. If I bought books, I might look for a different device but it works great for checking out and reading e-books from my library.
I used a Kindle for years. I mostly used it for out-of-copyright and library books, and only bought a small number of books. And i agree that it’s great for that. I’ve started buying more books since i got the Kobo. There’s a modest amount of new books that can be purchased DRM-free, including many from TOR. Needless to say, i don’t buy any e-books from Amazon.
But i have bought a lot of “stuff” from Amazon. If it gets less user-friendly, I’ll probably buy less. Walmart has a surprisingly good selection and convenient shipping. Staples has free shipping for all sorts of stuff i might not have expected them to carry. Home Depot is tedious to visit, but has a decent web site.
For me on Gmail, they aren’t really emails and they definitely aren’t useless. It’s like a notification above the emails when the item has shipped. If you click on it, it takes you to a link to UPS or whatever and you can see the tracking. I may have opted into that at some point.
Now? The real estate thing has been the case for decades and they certainly care very much if you buy the food. One does no good without the other
They probably make more PROFIT off AWS, but online and third party sales combined still seem to be by far their largest REVENUE streams at $80B in 2024, AWS bringing in $25B.
$12B is Advertising (I’m betting this is mostly on the online stores), $11B is subscriptions (how this breaks down between Prime and streaming video I do not know) and then $5B in physical stores (which is almost all Whole Foods).
As far as GM is concerned that may have been true before the financial crisis of 2008, but I believe they have sold off the big non-car related finance business as Ally Financial. So the major financial business they now have is financing their own car sales.
There are viral videos and articles about McDonald’s being a real estate business, rather than a food business. But this is just naive reading of financial statements. Pretty much 100% of McDonald’s value as a going concern is derived from people wanting to eat there.
Can someone do financial engineering whereby some insiders are able to monetize the real estate values to benefit themselves, while leaving the franchisees and shareholders holding the bag? Possibly. Kind of like how the Sears scenario played out. But you’re talking about getting a few billion in value out of $200B in current market that is based on150B in system sales. The “rent” they are collecting only exists because franchisees want to operate a McDonald’s, not some generic restaurant or other business.
I’m wondering if Amazon’s change in emails isn’t a privacy issue for the end user, but a privacy issue for the company itself.
If 75% of Amazon buyers are using Gmail, then 75% of Amazon’s exact sales data is being sent directly into Google’s servers for consumption and analysis. The more vague the emails are, the less data Google has to work with.
Reading that article from The Verge that @PastTense linked to way up-thread, about big tech companies trying to navigate how they let their data interact with other companies’ AI, makes me think of I guess what is called the “reseller space” or swap meets or flea markets. So much of it seems like resellers buying from and selling to other resellers. All the junk just gets passed from hand to hand until someone tosses it in a dumpster (but then someone pulls it out of the dumpster and sells it lol)
I still get the normal email when I make the order. Nothing has changed there nor do I expect that it will. In addition to that I get a vaguer shipping notification thing. This is a nonissue.
I check the product reviews on Amazon, it’s pretty easy to weed out the fake ones & find those that have useful information. Then I check Google shopping to see whether the product is available elsewhere.
I like to send revenue to companies that help me shop. So i always click on the links to hotels I’m interested in when i use Trip Advisor, and if the prices are similar, I’ll usually buy from whoever gave me the best information.
I’m not liking Amazon as much because of the cheap-ass, shitty knockoffs they present to me when I try to do a search for a specific name-brand product. It seems I only find the product I want about half the time, and only after wading through a bunch of crap with unpronounceable names. As mentioned above, I’m taking to going directly to better online retailers (like Sur La Table, LL Bean, Penzey’s, etc.) to purchase. It takes longer to get my products, but eh, I’m retired and I’m patient.
We have a lot of books in Kindle format, but we read them on our iPad, laptop, or phones. Similarly, I bought a lot of books many years ago in nook format, and can still go back and read them on my iPad. It’s just very convenient for us, and often cheaper.
This is why my next e-reader will likely be an e-ink tablet, like the Boox.
I don’t like reading long-form literature on a laptop or phone, and i no longer own a tablet, since the iPad i never used became obsolete and stopped working.
I just looked at me email and I had one of those notifications on top for medication from CVS that is being shipped to me. This was done outside of the Amazon ecosystem. Those notifications are apparently for anything that is shipped to you via US Mail, FedEx or UPS and has nothing to do with Amazon at all. I must have opted into that at some point when there was a Gmail update.
So, I think that Gmail only has limited information and is sending that.
Me neither (that’s how my wife reads), but I have resorted to desperate phone reading in airports or other travel venues. I can’t do it for long, though.