"When it comes to the ultra-fast convenience wars, it's too early to write off Amazon. Based on recent job posting uncovered by HNGRY, [Amazon] plans to 4x its network of 17 Sub-Same Day facilities w ~100k of the fastest-moving SKUs in under 5 hours this year and 10X it by '22"
Matt continuing to do great work on the same day/sub same day wars
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.
Amazon Unbound is obviously a must read. So many different topics are touched on consistent with Amazon’s sprawling nature. But feels appropriate given today’s news to dive in today on one very important for the future: grocery and last mile. This will be long and meandering…
Throughout both the Everything Store and Amazon Unbound, the importance of Bezos as a driving force behind new initiatives is clear. AWS, Kindle, Alexa all seem almost willed to be by him.
“But for years he took a more passive approach to home delivery of food”
The guy in charge of Amazon Fresh kept pushing to go faster. But “Consumer adoption of hike grocery delivery, Bezos believed, was going to be a more gradual process”
some personal news, I will be selling adults only breakfast foods content...
smart launch strategy to go with existing creators. assume they will steadily lower the follower thresholds to allow newer creators to participate once the product is up and running and proved out.
Whether Super Follows, Spaces, Revue, Scroll, Blue, etc I'm more focused on engagement opportunity for Twitter than direct revenue opportunity. Help users get more utility, creators build audiences and get paid, make it a true platform . Optimizing for revenues would be silly.
People think Twitter needs alt monetization means because historic ad performance sucked. But with new tech stack and products, they too will be able to monetize engagement.
I mean, 25% higher CTR from carousel ads! This is like ads 101. Maybe remedial!
The rejoinder is going to be "if they couldn't afford those buffer stocks and redundancies, maybe they shouldn't be in business or should raise prices!".
Reminds me of people like "why didn't the airlines have resilience against a greater than 100% decline in revenue??".
Amusing:
"In the story of how the modern world was constructed, Toyota stands out as the mastermind of a monumental advance in industrial efficiency. The Japanese automaker pioneered so-called Just In Time manufacturing"
"The automaker least affected by the shortage is Toyota"
JPM revising SPX earnings estimates to $200/$225 for 2021 and 2022
Empirical writes: “We’ve thought for some time that the earnings estimates for this year were too low, in part because the analyst community, while well acquainted with busts, has never lived through a real boom”
Rapid NGDP growth yields massive incremental margins for traditional businesses that are asset intensive and/or high fixed cost. The argument for the level of growth mattering more than rate of change is that high absolute levels mean earnings estimates remain too low.
"Mr. Zaslav has been one of the highest-paid CEOs in American corporations... His median annual compensation over the past 10 years has been $42 million"