Thread by @modestproposal1

1/ Steve Mandel was an equity research analyst who covered retail. This comment caught my attention:

"It needs to be incrementally better. It does not have to be leaps and bounds better. That was one thing that I learned from Walmart and others in retailing"

2/ There's a scene in Amazon Unbound that talks about Bezos giving marching orders for building a physical store:

"Jeff was very particular that he didn't want to build just any store. He wanted the store to be disruptive - something that no one had attempted before"

3/ In search of a problem to solve, they decide checkout bottlenecks was a major consumer pain point. So they decided to invent "Just Walk Out" technology.

4/ "Bezos had envisioned thousands of Amazon Go stores, in urban areas around the country. Seven years into the project there were only twenty-six"

5/ I'm reminded of this scene because I was just talking to @thenewb yesterday about how it seems like Amazon originally set out to disrupt physical retail, when the world was moving towards, and their assets were best designed for, an incredible omnichannel offering

@thenewb 6/ Looking at the pieces Amazon is putting in place now, with more Fresh stores opening, Whole Foods owned, folding Prime Now into the main app, and some other infra/logistics actions they are taking, a 360 omnichannel same day/physical/next day offering seems to be taking shape

7/ Mandel's observation was also interesting because incrementalism is almost looked down upon now. When in many businesses, compounding an incremental advantage can be enough for dramatically outsized results. And sometimes disruption for the sake of it doesn't create any value.