There are now over 2,300 cities and towns across the US where Amazon offers free same-day grocery delivery for Prime members. This means a 2-hour delivery from an Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods Market. And apparently, 90% of what people buy this way is perishable, namely, fruit. Perishable food purchases also increased 30x this year, according to the company.

When it comes to online grocery shopping, this falls under what is typically referred to as the "delivery" bucket. There are three main shopping categories. The delivery bucket, which is now the largest category, gets fulfilled through a local grocery store. It's an Instacart worker or someone else collecting your food and delivering it to your home.

The next largest bucket is pickup, or click-and-collect. This is where a consumer buys what they want online and then picks it up in person. Lastly, there's the ship-to-home category. This is typically for non-perishable products, and the difference here is that the goods are coming from a distribution center, as opposed to a local grocery store. Think of it like a typical purchase from Amazon.

The grocery model continues to evolve rapidly. But local stores — and the real estate that houses them — seem to be remaining central to it. In Toronto, I don't normally shop at Whole Foods Market, but there is one very close to Parkview Mountain House that I like shopping at when I'm in Park City. And every time I go, it feels more like an Amazon store.

There's special pricing and deals for Prime members. The Amazon One palm scanning technology is at every register. And there's an Amazon return facility in the store to deal with that thing you erroneously ordered from China. It's all becoming seamlessly integrated with the broader Amazon ecosystem.

So from a real estate standpoint, the brick-and-mortar store is not being supplanted in the way that people once speculated. The physical store is just continuing to evolve to meet a changing omnichannel landscape, acting as a grocery store, distribution center, physical customer service center, casual restaurant, and more.

If anything, this makes the real estate more, rather than less, valuable.

Cover photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

I've been having more coffee meetings over the last few weeks. And one of the things they are doing -- besides making me jittery -- is reminding me that at least two things happen during bear markets:

1. Conviction gets tested.

2. People get really creative.

Let's start with number one. It's easy to have conviction in something when it's obviously working and lots of other people are doing it. But what about when that is no longer the case?

Take the example of Amazon. In this 2018 post by Fred Wilson, he reminds us that at the peak of the internet bubble in 1999, Amazing was trading at around $90 per share. Two years later it was somewhere around $6 per share. And it was not until 2007 that Amazon would start trading above its peak again.

In hindsight, holding on was very obviously the right thing to do. But to do that from 1999 to 2007, you would have needed patience. And to have patience, you would have needed a high degree of conviction in Amazon as a company and in the internet as the harbinger of an important societal shift. That wouldn't have been easy -- just like many things today are not easy.

At the same time, bear markets force people to get really creative -- we're now onto thing number two. In this case, it's not a question of patience. It's, "the thing I was doing before no longer works and I don't know if/when it will work again, so I'm going to get creative and try something new." Bear markets give you this wonderful opportunity because the opportunity cost of not doing the status quo disappears (or greatly reduces).

On some level, though, these are two contradictory things: are we sticking to our guns or are we trying something new? But in my mind, you want both. This is not about saying, "lots of people used to want to buy cryptocurrencies and condominiums, but now a lot of people don't, so I'm going to move onto the next hot thing." It's something more calculated than this.

To return to Amazon, I think it's akin to Jeff Bezos' old mantra that you want to be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details. Right now, lots of people are being forced to be flexible. But the vision part is what you still need conviction around. Otherwise, how will you get to where you want to go?

One of the important things that I remember them drilling into our heads in business school was about how to write a business memo. This might not seem like a big deal, but it is. Emails, decks, and recommendations are ubiquitous in business.

I remember three main points.

One, use clear and concise writing. If you can use fewer words, do that. Two, be decisive. In fact, they used to tell us that being decisively wrong was always better than being vaguely correct. And three, be as quantitative as possible.

If you can replace words with numbers, you should do that. For example, instead of saying that something recently increased significantly, it is far more effective to say that something increased by 27% over the last 18 days.

I was reminded of this earlier today when I came across this:

Supposedly, it is what Amazon used to tell its employees back in 2018. I don't know the source, but the tips sound right and make sense. Be concise. Use data. Eliminate weasel words. And make sure you're communicating a "what". In other words, be decisive.

There are now over 2,300 cities and towns across the US where Amazon offers free same-day grocery delivery for Prime members. This means a 2-hour delivery from an Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods Market. And apparently, 90% of what people buy this way is perishable, namely, fruit. Perishable food purchases also increased 30x this year, according to the company.

When it comes to online grocery shopping, this falls under what is typically referred to as the "delivery" bucket. There are three main shopping categories. The delivery bucket, which is now the largest category, gets fulfilled through a local grocery store. It's an Instacart worker or someone else collecting your food and delivering it to your home.

The next largest bucket is pickup, or click-and-collect. This is where a consumer buys what they want online and then picks it up in person. Lastly, there's the ship-to-home category. This is typically for non-perishable products, and the difference here is that the goods are coming from a distribution center, as opposed to a local grocery store. Think of it like a typical purchase from Amazon.

The grocery model continues to evolve rapidly. But local stores — and the real estate that houses them — seem to be remaining central to it. In Toronto, I don't normally shop at Whole Foods Market, but there is one very close to Parkview Mountain House that I like shopping at when I'm in Park City. And every time I go, it feels more like an Amazon store.

There's special pricing and deals for Prime members. The Amazon One palm scanning technology is at every register. And there's an Amazon return facility in the store to deal with that thing you erroneously ordered from China. It's all becoming seamlessly integrated with the broader Amazon ecosystem.

So from a real estate standpoint, the brick-and-mortar store is not being supplanted in the way that people once speculated. The physical store is just continuing to evolve to meet a changing omnichannel landscape, acting as a grocery store, distribution center, physical customer service center, casual restaurant, and more.

If anything, this makes the real estate more, rather than less, valuable.

Cover photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

I've been having more coffee meetings over the last few weeks. And one of the things they are doing -- besides making me jittery -- is reminding me that at least two things happen during bear markets:

1. Conviction gets tested.

2. People get really creative.

Let's start with number one. It's easy to have conviction in something when it's obviously working and lots of other people are doing it. But what about when that is no longer the case?

Take the example of Amazon. In this 2018 post by Fred Wilson, he reminds us that at the peak of the internet bubble in 1999, Amazing was trading at around $90 per share. Two years later it was somewhere around $6 per share. And it was not until 2007 that Amazon would start trading above its peak again.

In hindsight, holding on was very obviously the right thing to do. But to do that from 1999 to 2007, you would have needed patience. And to have patience, you would have needed a high degree of conviction in Amazon as a company and in the internet as the harbinger of an important societal shift. That wouldn't have been easy -- just like many things today are not easy.

At the same time, bear markets force people to get really creative -- we're now onto thing number two. In this case, it's not a question of patience. It's, "the thing I was doing before no longer works and I don't know if/when it will work again, so I'm going to get creative and try something new." Bear markets give you this wonderful opportunity because the opportunity cost of not doing the status quo disappears (or greatly reduces).

On some level, though, these are two contradictory things: are we sticking to our guns or are we trying something new? But in my mind, you want both. This is not about saying, "lots of people used to want to buy cryptocurrencies and condominiums, but now a lot of people don't, so I'm going to move onto the next hot thing." It's something more calculated than this.

To return to Amazon, I think it's akin to Jeff Bezos' old mantra that you want to be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details. Right now, lots of people are being forced to be flexible. But the vision part is what you still need conviction around. Otherwise, how will you get to where you want to go?

One of the important things that I remember them drilling into our heads in business school was about how to write a business memo. This might not seem like a big deal, but it is. Emails, decks, and recommendations are ubiquitous in business.

I remember three main points.

One, use clear and concise writing. If you can use fewer words, do that. Two, be decisive. In fact, they used to tell us that being decisively wrong was always better than being vaguely correct. And three, be as quantitative as possible.

If you can replace words with numbers, you should do that. For example, instead of saying that something recently increased significantly, it is far more effective to say that something increased by 27% over the last 18 days.

I was reminded of this earlier today when I came across this:

Supposedly, it is what Amazon used to tell its employees back in 2018. I don't know the source, but the tips sound right and make sense. Be concise. Use data. Eliminate weasel words. And make sure you're communicating a "what". In other words, be decisive.