And when they pull the plug?

Confession time.  I’m almost exclusively buying on Amazon now, from goods to food. Part of that is heart, part covid/jab nazism, partly that I can better control my personal space.

However, I have no illusions:

https://voxday.net/2022/12/31/the-coming-big-tech-implosion/

Amazon’s model was to sell the hardware at or below cost and make the revenue from content and services. It’s a perfectly good model, if those services and content are as engaging as video games, or user data can be folded into ad targeting. None of this is true for Alexa, and it never will be. But if Amazon cuts and runs, hundreds of millions of users have had an intimate part of their life ripped out. One, furthermore, they considered paid for when they bought the gadget in the first place. How badly does Amazon want not to do that? It costs billions. It can’t keep paying. But it can’t just let it go.

Google is in an even worse position, not from the amount of red ink currently bleeding from its Cloud division, but because of its room to manoeuver is far less. There are around 4 billion email accounts in the world, and around 1.8 billion of those are Gmail. When you run a service for that many users, they run you.

Amazon is also getting absolutely hammered by the increase in transportation costs. Given that its core business runs on very thin margins, there is no way it’s not running in the red now.

I remember clearly what Svali said in 2000 in that Centrex interview (Toronto) … that the artificial support is going to be suddenly withdrawn at some point.  She was referring to fiat money, stocks and bonds, I’m referring to Big Firm services such as what I’m using.

If people stop visiting stores such as Morrisons, then what do they do the moment Amazon or the stores drop deliveries?  When the costs to them far exceed the revenue from us?

There is a box of cheese and chutney bites which costs a fair(ish) … well look at it for yourself:

Given the costs to them leading to delivery and given that it certainly saves pensioners who would usually phone for a car there and back, I consider those prices not unreasonable.  I calculate that I save from £10 to £20 per week on food … that money goes towards lekky.

And if it all suddenly stops?