Here is an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal about the struggles of scaling Automation at UPS. (An interesting tidbit: UPS says about half its packages are processed through automated facilities today. At FedEx, 96% of ground packages move through automated…
In 2013, a guy who was trying to pitch a company, called DoorBot, that sold security doorbells, went nowhere on Shark Tank, as the sharks rejected his offer. The founder Jamie Siminoff positioned the idea at $7M. Here is the…
I wrote about Workampers, old retirees that move around the country in search of work, in my earlier blog post that discussed the excellent book, Nomadland by Jessica Bruder. In that post I mentioned that: So, it is very likely that it…
For long time e-commerce and operations observers, it was no surprise that Amazon was opening its “shipping” business: It was as predicable as a bowling ball on the lane slowly rolling to the pins. Much earlier, in 2014, Amazon had…
In my earlier post on the Brief History of Amazon Prime, I had mentioned about the stickiness of Amazon Annual Prime Pricing. An issue with scaling revenues this way is stickiness of prices. It took a whole nine years for Amazon…
An Amazon worker at Chattanooga, Tenn., fulfillment center in August. Photo Credit: Doug Strickland/Associated Press A fascinating article by Laura Stevens on WSJ (Subscription required) talks about how Amazon sets its third-party “deal of the day”. The first compelling fact…
The above chart from Quartz shows how much e-commerce sales in the US have grown because of the low price. In fact, the price level is now comparable to 2000 prices. In short, many goods on e-commerce are being sold…