Who better to talk about on Black Friday than Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Supposedly he’s now worth $100 billion.
I just finished watching this short 60 Minutes clip about Amazon from 1999. If you can’t see it below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjjUOemW-_Q?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
Amazon was founded in 1994, so this was 5 years in. Already the company had gone public and had a market cap of somewhere around $30 billion.
Now, keep in mind that this was right in the middle of the dot com bubble, but already Bezos was a billionaire on paper.
What is clear from the above clip is just how obsessed Bezos was and is on the long game (”I don’t go in for carpe diem”) and on his customers. Here he is worth quite a bit, but driving around in a Honda Accord.
Bob Simons, the interviewer, pokes fun at him a few times for his reluctance to spend money. But Bezos says that it’s all about spending money on things that matter to customers and not spending money on the things that don’t.
That’s customer obsession.
P.S. The title of this post will make sense once you watch the video.
When I was in graduate school in the U.S., I remember it being a pain having to always sign a 1 year lease. I only wanted 8 months so that I could take off during the summers. Too bad Flip wasn’t around back then.
Flip is a startup that I just discovered, which is positioning itself as the “easiest way to sublet or get out of your lease.” It’s all about reconciling the conflict between lease and life, which don’t always match up.
The platform is free to listers. So you don’t get charged to post a lease or to flip a lease. Renters get charged a service fee equal to 5% of one month’s rent.
It’s interesting to think about the surge in short-term rentals and platforms such as Flip that are effectively helping to reduce lease terms by way of streamlining the “flipping” process.
Are millennials ushering in a new era of mobility and transience?
One feature that I think is neat and that I would like to point out is “Bounties.” The platform allows listers to attach a bounty ($) to any listing. Users are then able to grab a unique URL that can be shared around online. If someone takes over a lease via one of your links, you get paid the bounty. Smart.
In case you’re curious – I certainly was – here’s a ranking of all 50 U.S. states according to how friendly they are to subletters. It also summarizes how to legally sublet. On the friendly side is New York and on the less friendly side is Wyoming.
The big news on Friday was that Amazon has agreed to buy grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.4 billion.
Some people – such as Bruce Berkowitz, who manages the $2.3 billion Fairholme Fund and who is the second largest shareholder of Sears Holdings Corp. – believe that this says to the market that “there is a need for physical space in retailing.” Everything can’t be online.
I obviously agree that there’s value in real estate / physical locations, but I don’t see this as Amazon capitulating in any way. This is not Amazon saying to itself: “Well, AmazonFresh hasn’t grown as quickly as we’d like, so let’s forget this ecommerce thing.” No, Amazon is determined to win.
Indeed, the fact that shares of supermarket operators tumbled across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, probably signals that the market is expecting something other than the status quo following this acquisition.
All of this is a big deal because grocery is a big deal.
There’s a reason Wal-Mart ramped up grocery (and now derives over half of its revenue from it). There’s a reason why drug stores are proliferating across our cities (and expanding their grocery offerings). In Toronto it’s Shoppers Drug Mart and Rexall. In New York it’s Duane Reade.
We buy groceries frequently and we overwhelmingly still buy them in person. So online grocery is the holy grail of ecommerce of right now. Everyone wants to nail it first.
How does this acquisition help Amazon do that? Here are two thoughts.
1) The real estate still matters.
Even in a world where most groceries are purchased online, you need still need physical distribution centers in close proximity to lots of customers. Whole Foods has more than 460 stores across the U.S., Canada, and Britain. Their formatting would obviously evolve, but the bones are there for Amazon to leverage.
Startups such as Instacart have tried to circumvent this requirement by fulfilling only the delivery portion. And arguably their pitch to other grocers may now be stronger: “You need to offer this to compete with Amazon/Whole Foods.” (Instacart currently provides this service Whole Foods.) But you can bet Amazon will want to squeeze/control this part of the supply chain.
2) The data.
Many analysts are already assuming that Amazon will work to automate away cashiers, similar to what it’s trying to do with its Amazon Go concept store. If you combine this with other offerings such as 15 minute pickup (Amazon Fresh PIckup), you can easily imagine a world where us customers get weaned off of in-person shopping.
For example, if my regular grocery store made better use of its data, it would probably come to the conclusion that I generally buy things like orange juice, milk, and avocados (I’m a Millennial) every X days. I’m sure if you look at my shopping habits, I’m pretty predictable. Whenever I go to a new store it always takes me 100% longer to shop because I don’t generally wander. I target my stuff.
Now if I could get somehow prompted to re-order my regular items every X - 1 days, chances are I would gladly tap order. And now I’m shopping for groceries online. Get ready for the grocery wars.