Thus far, Amazon Go pilot stores are enjoying lots of walking-in and walking-out. As shown in the RBC chart below, their sales per square foot areroughly $1,275, nearly three times the national retail average and almost 50% above that of Whole Foods [1], which Amazon purchased last year. Not surprisingly, rumors are running high that Amazon will roll out as many as 3,000 physical storesby 2021. With much less labor and superior sales per square foot, Amazon could be poised to disrupt traditional convenience stores. Imagine a corner bodega with the quality and pricing of supermarkets, but without the wait to check out! [1] With Whole Foods at $874 per square foot per eMarketer.
HQ2 fight continues as NYC, Seattle officials hold anti-Amazon summit On Monday, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union hosted a briefing in which labor officials, economic development analysts, Amazon employees and elected New York State and City representatives further underlined concerns around the HQ2 process, the awarded incentives, and the potential impacts Amazon’s presence would have on city workers and residents. (TechCrunch)
I think him being "elegible" may have played a part. Wonder if there are clauses against major shareholder spouses unloading their half after a divorce? Wouldn't be the first lady scorned that decides to destroy the guy's world (if she initiated and is in fact scorned).
Their NYC stores will probably have the highest shrinkage rates. Creative people are going to be getting lots of free stuff there, especially the creative homeless in the winter. Facemask, hoodie, fake phone, grab n' go, into the subway tunnels, gone. Zip zip zip, finished. If there is ever a loophole to be had in anything physical, New York's less desirables will find a way to discover and exploit it. Guaranteed.
THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR What Amazon’s Rise to No. 1 Says About the Stock Market The biggest companies are the still the most dominant. The biggest companies today make up less of the overall market than those in the past. And the biggest companies can still be toppled. ILLUSTRATION: ALEX NABAUM 25 COMMENTS By Jason Zweig Jan. 11, 2019 12:04 p.m. ET On Jan. 7, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.95% became the world’s largest company by market capitalization. Its rise might make you think today’s biggest technology companies are turning into unstoppable juggernauts of growth, or that turnover at the top is only accelerating. First, consider the history of all the companies that have ranked No. 1 by market size. It’s full of surprises. From the beginning of 1926 through the end of last year, only 10 companies have ever ranked No. 1 among all U.S. stocks by market capitalization. Amazon has just become the 11th, succeeding MicrosoftCorp. , Apple Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp. , General Electric Co. , WalmartInc., Altria Group Inc., International Business Machines Corp. ,DowDuPont Inc., General Motors Co. and AT&T Inc. Some, including AT&T and IBM, spent years at the top. Others, including Altria, DuPont and Walmart, were No. 1 for less than a month; Walmart was the biggest U.S. stock for only three days in late 2002, according to the Center for Research in Security Prices, or CRSP, at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “Never spend any time thinking about the daily stock price. I don’t.” —Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO However, companies have been holding on to the No. 1 position by market value for about as long as they used to. Hendrik Bessembinder and Goeun Choi, finance researchers at Arizona State University, calculate that the largest company in the U.S. clung to that spot for an average of 20 months from the late 1920s through the late 1950s—although it was nearly always either AT&T or GM. From the 1960s through the end of the 1990s, the top company held the No. 1 position for an average of 12 months. From 2000 through mid-2018, the average tenure at the top was 15 months. Historical PerformanceThe top stocks of today make up less of the overall market than did the top stocksin earlier eras.Share of U.S. market value in top stocksSources: Dimensial Fund Advisors (1927 to 2017 data); Russell 3000 (2018 data) Top 1Top 5Top 101935’50’65’80’95’100510152025303540 Over the past month, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, all with market values of $700 billion or more, have each been No. 1 for several days at a time. Still, Warren Buffett’s old-school conglomerate, Berkshire HathawayInc., hovers not far behind at nearly $500 billion in market value. Is Amazon Going to Rule the World? Amazon wants to deliver everything you want to your doorstep, anywhere in the world. But the e-commerce giant faces several challenges in its pursuit of a global empire. WSJ's Karan Deep Singh breaks down the basics with the help of an Amazon delivery box. Talk to any professional stock-picker and you will get an earful of whining about how today’s market is “narrow” or “concentrated” or “top-heavy,” with the largest stocks accounting for an unusually large share of total value. That’s historical hogwash. Amazon, at less than 3% of the total value of all U.S. stocks, is a minnow alongside the leviathans of the past. AT&T was 13% of total U.S. stock-market value back in 1932; General Motors, 8% in 1928; IBM, 7% in 1970. The single largest stock has made up about 3% of total U.S. market capitalization for the past 20 years, according to Savina Rizova, co-head of research at Dimensional Fund Advisors, an investment firm in Austin, Texas, that manages $517 billion. That’s down from the earlier average, since the late 1920s, of nearly 6%. MORE OF THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR Have I Got a Fund For You! Why Brokers Push Some Investments January 4, 2019 What You Can Learn From One of Warren Buffett’s Smartest InvestorsDecember 21, 2018 When Mutual-Fund Values Get MuddyDecember 14, 2018 When Your Neighbors Move In to Your Investment Portfolio December 7, 2018 Companies tend to become the largest by market value after their stocks have done well. Over the 12 months ended Jan. 7, Amazon’s shares outperformed the S&P 500, including reinvested dividends, by about 38 percentage points. And Amazon’s shares jumped after the company became the biggest, as if some investors had taken that as a sign of approval from the market gods. Likewise, the 10 companies that preceded Amazon tended to be on a hot streak before they became the biggest U.S. stock. Counting all the times they reached the No. 1 position, they outperformed the market by an average of 48 percentage points cumulatively over the preceding five years, based on the available data, according to CRSP. The catch: Over the five years after they hit No. 1, they underperformed the overall U.S. stock market by an average of 6 percentage points. What if you just bought the largest stock in the month after it became No. 1 and held it so long as it remained there? You would have earned an average of 7.3% annually from January 1926 through November 2018, calculates Rui Dai of Wharton Research Data Services. Over the same period, the full U.S. stock market grew at an average of 9.7% annually. All these figures include reinvested dividends. While such numbers confirm the conventional wisdom about how market leaders are likely to perform, they come with a caveat. So few companies have ever occupied the No. 1 position by market capitalization, often for such short periods, that you can’t draw statistically valid conclusions from such a small sample. Newsletter Sign-up Amazon declined to comment. In a recent interview at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., the company’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, invoked the great investor Benjamin Graham’s saying that in the short run, the stock market is a voting machine, but in the long run it’s a weighing machine. “What you need to do,” added Mr. Bezos, “is to operate your company in such a way knowing that it will be weighed one day and just let it be weighed. Never spend any time thinking about the daily stock price. I don’t.” (This week, Mr. Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced they are divorcing.) All in all, Amazon’s ascendancy is a reminder not of how new this era is but how old the dominance by big companies is. In some ways, these are the good old days: The top stocks account for less of the total market, and the giants don’t appear to be much easier—or harder—to topple than they used to be.
I wonder why they wouldn't capture and kill this story as they did with that infamous character in the WH? This couldn't possibly be a political hit job could it? #sarcasm
Amazon is offering cheaper shipping rates Online retail behemoth Amazon has started offering merchants cheaper shipping rates for its Amazon Shipping program by eliminating certain surcharges. Amazon appears willing to stomach lower profit margins on parcel deliveries than UPS and FedEx to try and woo merchants to use its suite of business services. (Business Insider)
Amazon India Amazon has had to withdraw loads of products in India due to new rules that forbid online retailers from making deals with sellers to offer products exclusively on their platform, and from selling vendors' products where the retailer owns a stake in the vendor. So, Echo speakers and Amazon Basics batteries have vanished from the company's Indian shelves, for example, as have items sold by vendors in which Amazon holds a stake. BBC