BrowntownNewbie

I agree with this statement. A reckoning is coming for Amazon, and I don’t have a clue what the government will try and do, but Bezos is not going to be allowed to control large swaths of the american economy. The government wouldn’t allow UPS, FedEx or anyone else too either.

I give credit to Amazon for being an innovated and forward thinking company. Their success is something to marvel at, but like dozens of other companies before them, they will plateau and become what they become.

V12Merlin

They have a collection doing their lift, but prime air 76’s are coming and going steadily, right across the runway from us in AFW.

At their new cargo facility.

Somebody should look out the window!

wjcandee

You guys are completely confused about what it is that Amazon decided to stop. This has nothing to do with the organic delivery that currently has more than 50 767s flying for them. It has to do with one little experiment where they would pick stuff up from a small number of volume parcel shippers in exactly two cities, only one of which was in the US, and deliver it through their organic Network. It was a small volume of stuff. It was an experiment, because they experiment a lot. Their volumes are so high, now, that they wanted to use every inch of their Network for stuff being ordered that is shipped from Amazon fulfillment centers. As to The Postal Service losing money because of Amazon, the postal service was highly competent at losing money long before Amazon ever started using them. The major issue with the postal service is an enormous amount of overhead, including pension obligations that Congress never took care of when converting the government-run post office to a quasi-private company. So the Postal Service is saddled with enormous losses regardless of how efficiently it operates. Amazon, like Netflix when it mailed things, is something of a savior of the Postal Service, certainly of jobs there.

iPilot

Yep I don't think we've seen the last of this test. If anything it just proves to Amazon the need to have a robust transportation network that they tightly control. This virus is turning out to be a really good stress test with what little they've built out so far. I bet their only regret is not having the CVG sort building. It would of been interesting to see what this situation would of looked like had they been fully operational instead of simply making do.

wjcandee

Agreed. However, the place that is facing the stress test right now is ILN, where Amazon runs the sort. This should give them a lot of experience and tribal knowledge that they're gonna need trying to run their own humongous sort at CVG. So they're getting the "benefit" of this stress right now, which will serve them well in the long run.

C17B74

Gov may step in on Amazon, then again they may not since their kind of busy right now. Amazon is more like Microsoft than FedEx as far as the acquisition game. Microsoft acquires nearly 240 other companies within their lane businesses since 1987 or so, Amazon just crested 100 since 1997 perhaps and definitely not staying within their original lane (Books was it). Cat and Mouse with FedEx, OK Cat vs Big Dog Shipper is that better. It’s not like anyone thinks for a second that Fred and Jeff are best friends or even mild acquaintances. Amazon can never be like FedEx or better shipping wise and maybe that’s very true, but they have been acknowledged by all parties as a competitor so it seems and everything starts relatively small for the most part and they have grown faster than most, especially on the ground and the air is following suit it seems. Whether or not a viable competitor they see the value in controlling their destiny and then offering others space on board as others have said previously. Primary competitors are Alibaba definitely, Microsoft, Apple, etc selling products and cloud space you bet. Shipping is a small part of their grand venture and testing everything is a part of their science. As things grow they normally are harder to manipulate/monitor/manage so there will be give and take in many areas competition wise. They relentlessly keep throwing this and that out there, most of it sticks some doesn’t and they come back at it another way or don’t. Has it reached its plateau - that’s open for endless discussion, but time will tell.

I prefer competition, it’s normally good for the consumer unless their all in cahoots...

iPilot

Amazon can’t be allowed to have its own distribution network? Someone better tell Walmart to stop driving all those trucks around.

GoodRide

Amazon Shipping and Fulfillment by Amazon are services that take advantage of excess capacity in Amazon's fulfillment network. That's how they're able to produce strong profit margins for the company. But that capacity no longer exists because demand for Prime shipments is off the charts. There are no profits in shipping out of network freight if Amazon can't leverage existing costs of operating warehouses and delivery trucks. This isn’t the last we’ve seen of this experiment.

Sluggo_63

But Amazon abhors competition. They want it all.

One of the biggest complaints of small business owners who use Amazon Marketplace as their online store is that when one of their items starts selling well, boom, the next week the exact same item is being sold with a "made by Amazon" label. The Amazon item will get top billing and the "Amazon recommends" tag and all of a sudden, your good selling product is no more.

Once small businesses realize that the can move over to Wal-Mart marketplace online (as it matures) and Wal-Mart has no desire to start producing items you're going to see more and more businesses leaving Amazon and their extremely predatory business practices.

flugenmachen

It wasn't all that long ago that expressions such as "extremely predatory" were being used to describe Wal-Mart and it's impact on main street America. Now they are being touted as the alternative that will SAVE those same small businesses from Amazon. Not disagreeing with you, just remembering all the protests and campaigns under the banner "NO WAL-MART IN OUR TOWN!!".