I now trust Walmart [jet.com] and Bestbuy more than Amazon. Walmart / Jet have made great strides in their online experience and I trust them more than Amazon now. I don't really care about the branding Jet or Walmart is fine.
And for my rant/last straw with Amazon: My most recent Amazon frustration: I ordered a Ryzen processor "shipped and sold by Amazon" and got an opened and obviously installed processor. Pins were bent. I have had a few other bad items like that in the last year. I just don't trust them any more.
I want actual single source suppliers that vet their suppliers and supplies. Microcenter is great for a small range of computing products, but you have to go to the store to pick many things up [at least you can see what you are getting and don't have to wait for weeks of turn around]. Amazon's current solution is just automated returns with no acknowledgement they did something really shady. Guess it is time to vote with my wallet.
I was with you on walmart for awhile but now they're doing the same marketplace bullshit that amazon is doing and all expectations of quality and authenticity are lost again. If I want something used I'll go to ebay and if I want something drop-shipped from china I can go to aliexpress myself. So now I'm using Target.com whenever possible. It's often cheaper than amazon anyway.
I actually started using walmart.com over amazon a number of years ago when two things I ordered on Amazon arrived in walmart.com boxes. The resellers were just doing arbitrage and sure enough my $20 orders were an average of $6 cheaper at walmart.
The marketplace is the reason I don’t use Walmart. The marketplace and commingled stock is Amazon’s biggest problem and Walmart appears to be playing catch-up rather than forging their own path. We don’t need another Amazon. I’ve been using Target, eBay, Best Buy and random sites lately. The Target experience is great even if they don’t have the same selection Amazon does.
Yeah, I have noticed that as well. Newegg is another one that went down the "Market place" approach and is why I didn't list them. I just use Micro center now. A little bit less selection, but not much and they will order almost anything for you and get it quickly.
Funny that TigerDirect is now the solid alternative to Newegg. Ten years ago it was the complete opposite. Sad to see how Newegg have destroyed themselves.
TigerDirect has a terrible interface for trying to find the product you want. For instance, if you are looking for a laptop you can filter by price and by brand--that's it.
MicroCenter has sophisticated filtering ala Newegg, but in laptops for example, there is exactly 1 model that sports any AMD processor at all.
After more than 20 years of ecommerce growth, it is discouraging how bad things are.
Agreed on Newegg. I am currently dealing with two separate issues for items sold by 3rd party. Thankfully, both items were low cost so even if it ends up being a loss, it is not the end of the world, but I used to swear by Newegg. By comparison, Ebay is all third parties, but they have some way to discourage bad actors. Newegg and Amazon are a disappointment lately.
I never thought I would not say it these days, but Ebay has gotten better ( comparatively speaking; maybe others just gotten worse ).
I think the US site doesn't, but the Canadian one does. If you follow the link below, you'll see there's a Best Buy Only toggle. That being said, it's nice that the let you quickly hide third party items.
Walmart has a quick option to filter out marketplace items. On the desktop site, on the left hand site, just select retailer = Walmart and it will only show Walmart items .
> I want actual single source suppliers that vet their suppliers and supplies.
I bought a beard trimmer, at a local Walmart store, in an unopened package. And found hairs and grime on the blade. Bought new DJI goggles from B&H Photo. Which turned out to be a DJI factory refurb. But it also turned out there were then only refurbs in the supply chain for that being-phased-out model.
So no-surprises supply is perhaps more nuanced and difficult than 'avoid Amazon'.
With my own taste in tech becoming more esoteric, less Amazon or AliExpress and more Alibaba, I've been feeling that personal supply chain quality management is becoming my new normal. Hmm, perhaps, just as we should be teaching personal financial management in school, we should also be teaching supply chain management? :)
B&H shipped me used Anton Bauer 90Wh batteries when I bought new ones at the tail end of that particular model. So I imagine thats what they end up doing.
The real fun was when I ranted about it on Twitter, their director of social media tried to shame me by saying I was being "too picky" or something.
Because I really don't like the idea of a 90Wh+ battery having some unknown issue that happened before I owned it and catching fire in the most gloriously explosive way.
The whole lithium ion battery industry kinda drives me up the wall. I'd love to just order some cells from Digikey, but no can do.
I do agree, but the prevalence of Amazon's practices are very well known. Returned products being put back on a shelf or back into supply will obviously happen, but I have seen it happen almost zero with the retailers I mentioned (We have also been using target.com, costco.com, etc.). It definitely takes some effort and a little more shopping around, but it has mostly been working for us (in my household).
Both got in this weird state where the tracking showed they were shipped. Great, then they both hit this location where they were "delayed". I got a notice about that.
Then Amazon has this weird status where Amazon says "You can request a replacement or refund in X days." then it says something about "It might be lost." And it stays in that state for days ... But only if you check app do you see any of this additional status do you know any of this.
Otherwise for all I know this stuff would just sit in that state forever, they keep my money, and just roll on...
I had yet another shipment that entered the same state but obviously had NEVER been shipped, there was no tracking, the tracking number was generated but it was never picked up. It also entered the same limbo state where Amazon doesn't tell me anything, but hey they took my money so I guess they don't care.
Having said all that I'm less interested in Amazon BECAUSE their site seems more like Walmart every day. Pushing items that are a dollar cheaper but clearly garbage quality.
At this point I'm just hitting up Target and other random online retailers to compare / use more often.
With Amazon this exact chain of events happened to me. And also confirmed that they don't really give you that status unless you click through the app. In the end, it took five days to get something I ordered as same day delivery.
There has to be _someone_ who wants to be the high-quality seller. Even Newegg went down the eBay path. I understand it's profitable, but surely being a very successful #2 is OK too?
I think this might be Shopify's play, at least it would be what I would do if I was them.
Enable high quality sellers to have their own branded website to sell their own product directly.
Then make it easy to find the Shopify sites via some general search or directory.
You're able to slowly build up power this way without it being too obvious, and you provide an immediately valuable service to sellers that aligns incentives from the beginning.
Unless they're hiding it well (always a possibility...) Target is that retailer for me. Of course they don't have anywhere near the selection of Amazon, but for the regular essentials I need their free two day delivery does a fantastic job.
I could name a hundred niche sellers too, but the allure of Walmart and Amazon is that they sell basically everything. I can buy a Macbook and Gatorade plus some brand name AA batteries for my RC car that I bought all in the same shopping trip.
IKEA has good products but they don't come close to general merchandise stores like Amazon or Walmart.
Costco is the opposite of Walmart; they're more like Trader Joe's. They sell hardly anything. The idea of Costco is "if you find it here, it's a decent product", not "if you want it, you can find it here".
The same is true of Amazon, but in Amazon's case it doesn't make a difference because of inventory commingling. It looks like Walmart just launched its third-party fulfillment service a few months ago [0], but if they don't explicitly commit to not commingling inventory with third-party sellers, they'll have all the same issues as Amazon.
Amazon's current solution also includes shutting down your account, even if it's prime, and telling you to fuck off because you returned too many of its fake or garbage products.
It’s their loss. Eventually the momentum will build up and Amazon will loose a big chunk of their customers, and these door slammed customers will never go back no matter what Amazon will be trying to do. It seems to me
Amazon is on its path to self destruction and will rip of a lot of their customers on the way, because it still so large and the numbers are still good to them. That is bound to change sooner or later. I personally avoid them at all costs.
So what happens when you've basically stored your digital life on Amazon's accounts, many times with purchases from their own site?
I've got tons of music - mp3 songs and albums, hundreds of both purchased Kindle books and uploaded personal ones, Audible audio books, years worth of pictures that was part of some hardware deal, etc?
Its even worse than the problem of Google just shutting down your account since most of these victims weren't paying for anything.
I think the kindle books are still available if you login at the right url. They were for a bit, long enough for me to download them. It's difficult though. You're just fucked. I have like four kindles though and they work fine without an Amazon account. Never even need to turn the wifi on. Getting books on there with a USB cable is slightly annoying but not really. I don't know about any other product. I recommend avoiding all drm content for this reason. Luckily kindle books can have their drm easily removed. Not that I'd ever do that cause it's illegal. Lol.
> I want actual single source suppliers that vet their suppliers and supplies.
This is particularly ironic given that Jet's original premise was to be _entirely_ a marketplace which did not complete with the merchants on it. That plan was soon abandoned however and the warehouse network and first-party products introduced.
I switched to Walmart after Amazon’s recent knuckle headed moves.
Unfortunately, the Walmart app is not as good. Even worse, it connects to the following trackers: doubleclick.net, app-measurement.com, braze.com, googlesyndication.com, google tag services.com. This is shocking and super scary and Walmart needs to get some decent tech talent to fix their junk.
I can anecdotally confirm that the Walmart Grocery website has improved steadily over the last few years. They got hammered with disrupted supply chains, the collapse of just-in-time inventories, staffing shortages and irrational consumer behavior just like everyone else in the pandemic. They also responded quickly with new services, a functionally redesigned website and much tighter control of out-of-stock handling. Had the joy with my last order of zero substitutions and zero unavailables...
I am sure Walmart did the requisite analysis to figure out it was a smart move to shut the brand down. Cost to maintain brand, trajectory, number of loyal customers, etc. That isn't to say they couldn't have made a mistake, but this isn't their first rodeo, so I think you can assume some smart people looked at a bunch of angles before making the decision.
Nah. Walmart totally makes multi-million dollar business decisions with less diligence and critical analysis than random HN posters.
I think of this as the social media Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. You see comments from folks with zero insight and no doubt no specialized knowledge of the relevant industry, recognize that they are likely just making an off-the-cuff comment without any value, open the next thread where it's less obvious how little industry knowledge the posters have, and resume giving their comments the benefit of the doubt.
I fall victim to it with some frequency. Almost any comments here about the medical industry, of which I'm a veteran, are just wildly ignorant - and spoken with the same strident confidence as comments about the airline industry (for example), about which commenters are likely just as profoundly ignorant. But then I don't know they're profoundly ignorant, and suddenly I think, gosh, that person has some incisive insights.
I've seen several people make pretty glaring mistakes based on their nuanced understanding of the details of some situation, when an idiot off the street who knew only the basic, surface-level facts would have gotten things completely correct.
Thanks for your perspective. I think this makes sense, and is probably often true. That doesn't necessarily mean the comments have no value -- often they elicit discussion that makes the behavior make more sense.
Multi-million dollar decisions (taken literally it means several million, not hundreds of millions) equate to small projects for Walmart. This is a multi-billion dollar decision. But yes, I am speaking speculatively, so take it with a grain of salt.
There are class complications that make using the Walmart brand potentially problematic, though. People with college degrees who would shop at Whole Foods or Costco or boutique retailers look down on Costco but wouldn't have those associations with Jet.com. I'm sure Walmart has researched this but keeping both brands would seem worth it from that angle.
The first time I saw jet.com, I assumed it was for Jet Magazine. Maybe someone things it has to do with jet planes. I wouldn't want to have to do brand marketing for such an ambiguous name.
It works both ways though. People who would never set foot in a Walmart might order from walmart.com for convenience or price or because they don't really think about it when ordering online.
If they have a positive experience online, that could affect their impression of the Walmart brand in general.
No. People who shop at Costco tend to have the spare cash to buy lots of stuff at once and have lots of space to put it and so draw from a very different demographic than Walmart does, mostly. It's a bit of a Sam Vimes boot theory thing.
Exactly. This is the first time I’ve ever heard the name.
Like the post above said, much of the Jet acquisition was likely really just to absorb the IP and expertise, anyway.
That said, we recently ordered some patio furniture from Walmart.com after comparison shopping on Amazon and Home Depot. And I suppose next month we’ll find better deals on yet another site. Don’t get too cozy with any of these companies and keep your eyes open for price and quality drift.
Facebook keeps Instagram (and Whatsapp) as a form of market segmentation. Just like how Proctor & Gamble sells eleven (!) different brands of laundry detergent:
Yeah, it was explained to me once by a bid for shelf space. If there are 2 brands, a new one gets 1/3rd of the space, if there are 15, then a new one gets 1/16.
At the time of acquisition, I think the Instagram brand was more popular and recognized among users than Jet.com. Jet.com didn't become a phenomenon before Walmart acquired it. Instagram was already extremely popular when FB bought it.
Instagram had like less than 20mn users when FB acquired it.
If you peruse the HN comments from the time, many of them were convinced that this was a waste of money (though not the top comment, interestingly enough): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840
It seems plausible that as walmart.com becomes better known as a good alternative to amazon for straightforward items, it might actually make people trust the walmart brand more - and put more shoppers in stores.
I don't think it's a matter of trust so much as classism. I know some people who simply won't go into a Walmart because they don't see themselves as the kind of people who would shop at Walmart.
Different situation. Facebook and Instagram are social brands that signal which demo you'll find on each platform (at least at the time of acquisition).
Instagram's branding/demo was a big part of what FB was after.
Forbes ranks it as the #26 most valuable brand in the world: https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/. Just because it's an almost entirely American brand doesn't change anything GP said.
So is it NOT one of the most valuable brands in the world then? Despite Forbes' list of valuations? What exactly in the original comment about the strength of the brand do you even think is incorrect?
Depends how you look at it. I'd say that if you value brand based on its recognition and not on its revenue/profit then Walmart is not one of the most valuable brands in the world. Just looking at the Forbes list i really doubt that MasterCard is less recognised around the world as SAP or Walmart, or Home Depot (operates in 3 countries) is more recognisable as Gillette or Ford... Forbes list should really be called "Worlds most valuable companies" not brands.
The original comment isn't about the value of the brand according to Forbes, but the strength of the brand.
I just say that the brand is strong only in USA but not so much outside. Not many people care about or even know the brand in most countries. So it's not a lot of strength worldwide even though it's valuable in Forbes and very strong in USA. Coca-Cola or Apple are much more strong worldwide.
I'm not upset, I'm just absolutely baffled that there's such disagreement with the idea that you can be one of the best in the world at something without doing it all over the world.
Who cares? Countries are not all equal. This is one of those "Either the sun will come up in the morning, or it won't. Two choices; fifty-fifty" arguments.
No one even said "strong brand worldwide" they said "one of the strongest brands in the world". Does a professional athlete have to compete overseas to be recognized as being exceptionally good at their sport, if they absolutely dominate in their home country, and their home country happens to be very significant in that sport? If you're going to get hung up on details, don't reword them.
Would someone who qualifies for the Olympics for the first time from a powerhouse country not qualify as "one of the best in the world"?
Yes I wish they would have maintained Jet.com as their marketplace brand (i.e. e-Bay competitor) and left walmart.com as the place you can buy Walmart sourced, un-comingled, fulfilled, guaranteed merchandise.
> it seem like a waste not to continue the jet.com. its a simple domain that is easy to remember.
Seems like it would be useful to market to other demographics or customers that don't have positive associations with Walmart.
I already have a preference for Target, Walmart's competitor, because I associate Walmart with prioritizing cheap over everything, including quality and style.
They're a pretty strong brand in their home country of Japan and I guess they'd rather be known as Rakuten worldwide rather than different names in different countries.
Yep, Kobo is now "Rakuten Kobo". I haven't yet seen this on OverDrive, which they also own. To my ear, the names don't go together quite as well, since one sounds very American/English, and the other sounds very non-English (and Americans seem to have difficulty figuring out how to pronounce it).
When Rakuten released a commercial devoted to explaining how to say their name, I wondered if their marketing dept realized what a terrible idea the name change was.
Rakuten is very big in Japan, pretty established. Like Amazon/eBay, but a bit different. They've also got global but quite cautious ambitions.
Interesting trivia from a friend working there, and quite unusual for a Japanese company: most (Project Management, Development, Management) internal communication above a certain job-grade level is conducted in English, including in Japan.
We saw a Rakuten building from the freeway during a visit to SV, and we wondered what they did. Found out on Wikipedia. Que the Bader-Meinhof effect, we started noticing the ads on TV.
It’s also interesting they decided not to keep it as luxury brand selling upscale stuff, leveraging Walmarts infrastructure but with differently targeted marketing, loyalty programs, etc. Seems it would have been perfect for that.
As a former Jet employee, this makes me pretty sad.
I took the job at Jet because I wanted to learn more about F#, coming from a Haskell background, and I was happy to find that my coworkers were all really smart people and the codebase, while far from perfect, was written using functional concepts, and avoided the "writing C# in F#" trap.
I left Jet partly because there had been talks of absorbing Jet into Walmart, which was fine, but also moving everyone to a JVM stack and off of F#, and I'm not a huge fan of Java. This, in combination with an offer from one of the big "brand name" tech companies, gave me an impetus to move on.
Still, I will always miss my time at Jet. It was an incredibly fun work environment that fostered learning and was typically very good to its employees.
Repeat after me: "JVM is not Java." Clojure and Kotlin are the perfect proof of that. If you actually look closer, JVM is a pretty cool piece of technology. Too bad that it is doomed to be associated with Java forever.
I should have clarified; they were moving mostly to Kotlin and Java.
I don't have a problem with the JVM; virtually all my personal projects nowadays are in Clojure, and I actually gave a talk at Conj last year....so yeah, I'm a fan :).
If Java had been able to provide it historically, "cross-platform sandboxed acceptable-to-high-performance execution of untrusted code" effectively describes WASM, which seems to be a fairly major emerging technology these days.
Perhaps JVM bytecode is arguably just too complex for safe verification... (although JavaCard interpreters manage to do it for a restricted subset (with similar restrictions to WASM!) without too many problems)
And the limitations too. If something (for example, unsigned numbers) is not provided by the JVM because it was declared useless for Java, most languages running over the JVM won't implement it either (and otherwise it would often mean resorting to a layer of more or less dirty and slow workarounds to circumvent the limitation).
In the context of the original comment, aren't the performance characteristics of .NET pretty similar to the JVM (though I have no experience with the former)? I don't see big reasons why someone who likes C# would hate Kotlin. F# is pretty different from the available JVM languages though.
Only to an untrained eye. F# is a firmly rooted in ML language family history, only making concessions where necessary due to the fact it's running on the CLR. Scala is a random walk of language design space, with different ideas either working or ending up complete trainwrecks, and the fact it's missing this clean ML core makes it a painful language to pick up coming in from F# (or in fact most other statically typed FP languages).
I mean, considering that Scala has a much more powerful type system than F# and you can actually implement FP concepts like monads, functors, etc makes it arguably more FP than F#.
While I haven't used F# much, as a professional OCaml and Scala dev, Scala is hands down the more powerful language. OCaml isn't bad, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
A little offtopic, but if OCaml got rid of its module system, added type classes, polymorphic functions, higher-kinded types, multi-core support and removed objects (not that it matters that much), it would be my dream language.
Basically, I want Haskell without the dogma. Though, I guess that's what unsafePerformIO provides!
Sure, Scala has fancier stuff on the high end of things, but it doesn't nail the basics the way F# does. I don't feel like sacrificing day-to-day productivity so I can skip duplicating some code with recursion schemes.
Your dream language sounds a lot more like F# than Scala tbh.
F# doesn't have (easy to use) type classes or higher kinded types, but has simplified modules and full access to .NET object system for all your polymorphism needs, and a much more seamless interop with the platform it's running on as there's significantly less "magic" happening in the compiler compared to Scala.
Of course not, but it means that there is no type that abstracts upon all of them. For example, in Haskell, you can >>= and >> just about everything and it'll work. In OCaml (and I assume F#), you have to import the right kind of >>= and >>. This is quite burdensome and creates a lot of repetitive and nasty code. The lack of polymorphism in ML languages is such a bummer.
Ostensibly yes, but F# has limited and clunky compile time ad-hoc polymorphism mechanism that can be used to implement "type classes" - which however can be abused to great effect if you really want generalised binds
https://github.com/fsprojects/FSharpPlus.
Not to mention it has subtype polymorphism on par with what you get in C# that you can really get a lot of mileage from (and which gets too easily glossed over by some FP neophytes), AND an extensive reflection API to bridge the gap if you have nothing else to fall back to.
You must be running an old version of .NET or running a computer from 2007. I just created Hello World with .NET Core 3.1 on my 2014 iMac and it's instantaneous first time and subsequent.
This is disappointing to hear. When Jet was acquired, I thought a significant motivation (and justification for acquisition price) was to give Walmart access to the Jet’s tech stack. Apparently this was not the case.
Walmart's a big place, so I don't mean to contradict my sibling comment.
Across the Walmart.com websites I didn't see anything from jet tech. The only thing I heard talk of was essentially reporting to push Marc's basket economics passion.
I believe Jet's acquisition was essentially a way to buy Marc Lore as eCommerce CEO.
I've met with many Jet folks and they are an awesome crew to work with, but Jet didn't really operate at Walmart scale.
I think that's still kind of true; a lot of the infrastructure was lifted or fitted into Walmart's stack, and IIRC the algorithms for the web scraping and indexing team was used.
Disclaimer: The accuracy of this should be taken with a grain of salt, I wasn't involved with any of the decision making.
Walmart has been running on Jet tech stack heavily as far as supply chain side of things is concerned.
Both the distribution centers and the technology driving them have been integrated with Walmart systems early on after acquisition and many current and future developments in that area are based around formerly Jet tech written in F#.
When Jet.com launched they had some promos going on so I wanted to check out what it was all about and ordered a bunch of stuff. I think at that point they had 2 day shipping over 25 without a membership.
Their signature purple package arrives on time, in a larger than expected box. I open it, and there's a smaller Amazon box inside. I open THAT and it has all my items. I got two receipts, one from jet.com and one inside the Amazon box with the actual cost of my stuff without the promo codes.
I don't know but something about this was poetic and funny about the world of venture funded startups.
Even now when I ship something from Walmart to my address it says Jet.com. hopefully it's not an Amazon prime wrapper anymore.
Did they sell slices for more than the pizza? Because then it might have been a decent enough way to test the market, without having to put an insane amount of money in it.
No doubt this is not an original thought, just tickled me to have an urban dictionary style definition. STARTUP (n.): An invention to funnel investor money from venture capital (VC) to Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Exhaust products are hype, blog posts, and waste heat.
Unless you're a hardware startup, your money goes to payroll, Amazon et al., and rent. The rest should be noise. Depending on if that money is going to marketing or servers, a higher number could even be better because it means the startup has more scale with fewer employees.
This reminds me of when I sent a friend a case of Topo Chico from Jet. He'd never had it.
The package (of heavy bottles of water) shipped next day and each bottle was meticulously wrapped in mesh paper. You could have stuffed a mattress with all the wrapping.
All for $1.99/bottle and free overnight shipping....
It reminded me of when I ordered a 38 cents lemon juice bottle and they sent it to me in a way to big box as an expedited parcel with free shipping in 2016. (Canada) https://imgur.com/a/QpEHAea
It has happened twice now that I order something off Amazon and it arrives packaged from Walmart.com. How the turn tables!
I figure that some people have identified arbitrage opportunities in pricing differences between the two sites and are making easy money receiving orders on one site and fulfilling from the other.
WalMart actually directly lists some items on Amazon, then ships through their normal fulfillment. Confusingly, I've found that they twice listed items on Amazon that are present in their stores but not on their own website. Probably just a temporary situation but still amusing.
I can see how this would happen. When working in inventory and fulfillment we'd often see our competitors price their goods below our wholesale. Sometimes it was because of the manufacturer incentives, other times because the product was a loss leader and was used as a promo. Either way, it seems that Jet.com was able to leverage this and use the Amazon pricing to keep their client happy. Fair play to all involved.
A lot of services weight unit velocity highly in determining product search ranking and other ranking methods that involve pay per click advertising. This creates some incentives to under-price for extended periods of time.
I know it is a simple way to look at it, but Walmart on whole has been a game changer when it came to handling the lockdown. Where Amazon was taking weeks to get "non-critical" items shipped, Walmart had on average a 3 day wait for drive up pick up.
They've introduced a yearly fee for delivery and we signed up. It's been top notch. In my area, they outsource the delivery to doordash. Order, pick a time for delivery and it is delivered. Works well.
Back to the simple ... maybe they have found a way to compete where amazon cannot?
I don't understand why Walmart doesn't have a customer supplied delivery program. Using the app, you would sign in when you enter the store. It would inform you of any deliveries within X miles of your home. It tells you how much you would be paid in store credit to do those deliveries. So you start shopping with say $33.50 already in your pocket. Then you just drop off a couple of bags at a few houses on your way home. Seems more efficient and cheaper than outsourcing to DoorDash or others.
Some customers might not like other customers knowing where they live?
Obviously you can obscure some details but if you remove names would it require the customer to scan the package to confirm its theirs?
I guess you could make it opt in for community delivery, otherwise you wait for a doordash delivery?
i mean "other customers" == 1099 contractor. The doordash guy is a shopper/customer also I'm sure. Doordash/uber/lyft/gig anything is just a random person with a smartphone and hopefully a background check.
If anyone is delivering something to your home, they know where you live.
Well for starters, one is an "employee" (contractor) who signed up to do that work specifically and has been verified that they can do it. The second example is just a customer walking around a store.
That is a good point. I guess walmart customers could go through an approval/training process if they want to earn some extra cash as wal-dash contractors too.
I think Walmart wants to (or they should) have a little more control to ensure that the driver doesn't steal my order. An employee gets a background check...
I think the difference would be that you were probably going to come to the store anyway for whatever reason.
So option B is really, "A driver starts at Walmart, picks up three people's shopping, delivers it all, returns to Walmart. You also drive to Walmart, pick up your shopping, and drive home."
It's already non-employees (there's little to no entry barrier for DoorDash, Postmates, etc). They just don't want to have to deal with delivery logistics, easier and cheaper to outsource it to the existing companies.
> there's little to no entry barrier for DoorDash, Postmates, etc
There's still the entry barrier of having a background check, verifying insurance, etc., so it'd likely be more effort than it's worth for neighborhood Joe to sign up for it unless he wanted this as a full-fledged side hustle. If people want to do a "community delivery"-style thing, they can just sign-up for DoorDash/Postmates/IC/etc.
How much would you bet against DoorDash's "insurance" being the small print on page 78 of the T&Cs when you sign up to be Dasher including something along the lines of "You, as and independent contractor partner, certify that you carry all appropriate insurance and accept responsibility for any claims arising from your delivery operations."???
I know Instacart has some kind of injury/disability insurance for their runners, but if you get in a wreck you're pretty much on your own since most insurance will deny claims for "Rideshare drivers".
Shipt supposedly covers it–their contractor agreement states that you need to have the state required auto insurance and they have a policy that takes effect while working that will increase your coverage to commercial-level insurance. I have also asked their insurance department about this directly and this has been confirmed.
I interned at Walmart Technology in 2014. All of the interns had to participate in an innovation challenge, and one of the teams had this very idea. I can only assume that Walmart explored the idea and passed on it.
That does sound like a decent idea if it could be incentivized strongly enough. It also sounds like a fun problem to work on, on the coding side of things.
Amazon I think is sandbagging the estimates. We got a gift card during the holidays and decided to spend it, and we're non-prime and put in 2 orders. Both shipping estimates were 1 month out and then suddenly delivered 2 days after the order.
There are some legitimate reasons for this. Perhaps you were ordering high-volume items that had low inventory, and it was unclear when they populated the shipping estimate for you whether you'd be getting items currently in stock, or waiting on Amazon to first receive a shipment.
Additionally, there is little reason to commit to a delivery timeline that they cannot commit to. Prime 2-day delivery is not actually a guarantee, as far as I understand it (and in some places it is not 2-day, e.g. Hawaii, from what I've heard), but it is a much firmer commitment, because Prime members are paying a fee for improved service. Regardless of whether Prime delivery is guaranteed, Amazon has optimized much of its logistics chain around <=2-day delivery. So you may be reaping some benefits from that.
Finally, Amazon is almost definitely using the cheapest possible shipping option (unless you are opting to pay more for improved options). Just because the rate paid is low does not mean that carriers will purposefully slow down. Once those items are picked, the cheapest thing to do is to move them quickly. Regardless of shipping option, that package still incurs a cost everywhere it sits, and every time it moves. So it will be routed as efficiently as it can to you. Holding it is just accruing liability (more options for loss or damage). If you happen to be near the DC, or near to the shipping carrier's hub, it's likely you will get stuff very quickly, even if it is estimated at longer.
You may be seeing the worst-case estimate for cross-country shipment, but benefit from one or several of the things above.
I'm in the middle of a large project at home. I've made probably 10-15 orders from Amazon in the past six weeks as I find my way through it. All but two of them arrived within 3 days, despite most showing weeks out. No difference in shipper, shipping tier or anything else that I could see. Of the two outliers, one arrived within the estimated time and the other was lost in shipping.
I've noticed the same pattern. Presumably they would rather lose business in the short term (by scaring away time-sensitive shoppers) than risk damage to the brand by delivering late.
I was thinking about this as well, I think it has to do with Wal-Marts supply chain, distribution centers, and relationships with it's suppliers. I don't know the answer, but does Wal-Mart have more pull then Amazon?
Also, regarding the article, Jet from my memory gave Wal-Mart the infrastructure for online sales, so it's not like they didn't get anything for it. If anything, they are likely playing accounting games and writing off the acquisition, thereby improving their return on investment metrics into the future. When you acquire a company, there is sometimes a penalty to ROI if you pay too much, shows up in the form of intangible assets. When you write off an asset, you are basically removing it from your balance sheet.
I’m removed from it, but I’m told Walmart has massive loyalty with suppliers and product aggregators (not sure on the proper term). There are small-shop businesses with a contract responsible for supplying all of one product to Walmart, and that person is the sole supplier to Walmart, and the contract gets re-bid every few years. For example, there’s a “small business” who has a contract to supply all beef jerky to all Walmart’s in the USA. It’s one of Walmart’s keys to pushing prices down, using these middlemen to negotiate pricing on the hundreds of thousands of SKUs, in a game where shaving a few cents off a jar of pickles is the difference in winning or losing a $100mm pickle supply contract. As compared to Amazon, Walmart still has a quality threshold (it demands pickles that the market expects), Amazon doesn’t. The contractor will lose his contract if his suppliers slip on quality or fail to meet delivery requirements.
Seems like the opposite of a distributor (hence the term aggregator), taking products from a few suppliers and dumping into the Walmart machine. I don't think they are involved with getting the product delivered or logistics, purely about contracts, relationships and market knowledge. I think they do carry some risk on demand forecasting.
Different market and in the UK but there are no big supermarkets that currently deliver to non- vulnerable households. I ordered vegetables directly from the restaurant suppliers that had no more customers.
In the Uk Amazon had this policy too but in reality most non essential/but useful items were sent to me in less than a week.
Of course most of the very useful items were not in stock at all the first few weeks, and some still aren’t.
Edit: good lessons in not depending on one supply route and as a result I will buy my fresh food from smaller companies from now on.
Ocadao and Morrisons have delivered to us throughout the lockdown though in the case of Ocado they did at one point have a rule about delivering only to existing customers from before the lockdown but that has been relaxed as well.
Given the sheer scale of the lockdown and following disruption the existing supermarkets have handled it really well except for the toilet paper situation which was beyond silly on the consumers part and there really wasn't much that the supermarkets could have done at that point.
I'm in the UK and have had weekly Tesco deliveries consistently through this period. They do leave them at the gate now instead of carrying them in but other than that, and an 80 item per order limit, business as usual.
(1) Walmart's Global eCommerce big re-write was an expensive mess. About a billion over budget and two three years behind timeline promises. There was leadership churn and they needed a new CEO of that business unit - Marc Lore made sense. Prior to Lore the CEOs (and CTO for that matter) were not technical at all.
(2) They wanted to make some changes that would make the eCommerce business unprofitable for a long time - something shareholders would not be happy about. Buying a business and allowing Marc Lore to make those decisions was, in a way, some nice sleight of hand.
The acquisition blindsided the eCommerce CTO. DD was done out of Bentonville and was rumored to be partially done by a SVP at Google.
The tensions between the profitable brick-and-mortar business and eCommerce _grew_ after the Jet.com acquisition. It ultimately led to Greg Foran resigning in protest to how much money was being tipped down the drain trying to compete with Amazon (that is massively subsidized by AWS).
Walmart make their fair share of mistakes. They have had periods of incompetence at scale in some areas. But they aren't afraid of making tough and interesting decisions. That I can respect. If you think running or working for a startup is hard, try thinking through re-orgs and strategic re-alignments at the scale of Walmart.
I agree with all of these statements. JK IMHO set their e-commerce business back 3 years at least. He was the champion of a horrific monolith that was delivered years late.
Not quite sure what you are referring to in terms of making changes that would make e-commerce unprofitable for a long time.
Your last point I agree with as well- I often felt they were far too conservative- mid-upper management was often overpaid for their ability and thus it was in their best interest to not rock the boat too much and protect their fiefdoms and thus their jobs.
At a crude level: To compete with Amazon means running eCommerce at a loss just like Amazon do. AWS subsidizes Amazon eCommerce, brick-and-mortar subsidizes Walmart eCommerce.
It is more nuanced than that of course but at a high level that is a big challenge to profit.
RE: JK.
He surrounded himself with a handful of smart technical VPs and lots of dumb ones that he held close. The good ones eventually left and the dumb ones stayed. The replacements were a mixed bag. The tension between JK and the more successful business and technical unit (mobile) siloed under a rival executive was healthy for a while then when the axe fell on mobile, it was a disaster - lost a lot of good people.
Heh I had almost forgotten about "mobile" and that tension. My focus was always on fighting against Pangaea, which was related, but when they folded mobile I found it to be a reasonable decision- the time had past where having a separate org just for mobile apps didn't make sense in a responsive world. I just checked and there is still a "mobile alumni" group on FB, though it hasn't been active in 2 years.
what happened to Techcrunch to make it so shit? Like i'm sure even the people who work at Techcrunch hate how bad it has become. Did the company change hands or something?
Browsing Wikipedia briefly, Techcrunch has been owned by AOL since 2010; AOL was acquired by Verizon in 2015; Yahoo! was purchased by Verizon in 2016; AOL was merged with Yahoo! to become Oath in 2016, and I believe all of the above mentioned subdivisions are now circling Verizon's toilet. They're just trying to find ways to monetize before the flush happens. If you're going to die anyway, why not make a few bucks selling out your users?
I think there are three factors for this redirection: the Oath/Verizon (probably illegal) interpretation of GDPR that you opt-in once you arrive on their websites; the IAB (deeply arguable) interpretation of GDPR that once you opt-in to one partner, you opt-in to everyone of their partners; and the fact that ad-blockers simply blocked the modal to accept cookies/data tracking/data sharing/etc.
Now they simply redirect to advertising.com so that the user is forced to accept every form of tracking before being able to read an article, their emails, a blog, etc.
In many browsers you can click-hold the back button to get a pop up menu of previous pages. That can usually get you back easier than mashing.
Some sites break the back button in such a way that they only appear once in the pop up, so with them it is just click-hold and select one entry and you are done.
Others end up with many entries in the pop up so the one you want is farther down, but the one you want is still there too.
And some fill the whole list, but if you select the bottom list entry, and then click-hold again (maybe more than once if the site is really obnoxious), you can usually get out.
Exactly this. Additionally, he HATES Amazon after what happened with his previous start-up diapers.com. Jet was another at bat against Amazon. Wal-Mart wanted his expertise and his drive to make them a true competitor to Amazon in the online space. It seems like it is working. The biggest problem is probably that the rest of Wal-Mart is not super agile and changes aren't going as fast as desired.
Walmart could have a huge competitive advantage if they advertised that they don’t commingle stock and made it easy to only order shipped and sold by Walmart.com.
Although, Walmart also is known for accepting lower quality goods from brands in order to sell them at lower price, which isn’t much different from counterfeits, so I still wouldn’t buy from them.
This is the primary reason I don't shop at Walmart. Almost everything you find in their stores, save for grocery and branded household supplies, is of inferior quality.
"Snapper is the sort of high-quality nameplate, like Levi Strauss, that Wal-Mart hopes can ultimately make it more Target-like. He suggested that Snapper find a lower-cost contract manufacturer. He suggested producing a separate, lesser-quality line with the Snapper nameplate just for Wal-Mart. Just like Levi did."
The book "The United States of Walmart" goes into how Walmart pressures manufacturers to lower price points, margins, outsource, etc to meet the price Walmart wants to sell their products at. They have done significant damage to once reputable brands like Levis and Huffy in the interest of having that premium brand in their stores.
For much of the 90s and early 2000s offshoring of manufacturing in the US was primarily driven my Walmart demanding lower per unit prices. Manufacturers had little choice but to comply since not being in Walmart meant losing out on a majority of the market.
Maybe this is a result of what you describe but I never remember Levis or Huffy being premium brands. Before Walmart "came to our town" those brands were featured in other big-box stores.
Maybe premium is the wrong word. Levis and Huffy were never designer brands, they were the standard in quality. Like Tide Detergent, Heinz Ketchup or Coca Cola, they were brand to beat.
The pattern seems to happen many brands over time that sell out or fail. You see it across markets with brands like Packard Bell, Kodak, Polaroid, Martha Stewart, Kate Spade, RCA, etc.
50 years ago if you had a Zenith or RCA TV it was a sign of quality, 10 years ago you'd be mocked. Before the turn of the century Philips was known for consumer electronics and even made videogame consoles, now they make lightbulbs.
True, but this isn't Wal Mart's fault, it's China's fault.
For instance, half a dozen Japanese electronics manufacturers tried to sell televisions, a business that the Japanese have dominated for 40 years.
Half of them threw in the towel. People buy on price; nobody was going to pay a 25% premium for a Pioneer or a JVC TV.
At the same time, Chinese companies like TCL began gobbling market share.
I'm typing this on a "Silo" TV that I bought at Fry's about five years ago. When I bought it, I figured it would be junk, but it was so cheap I couldn't resist.
Five years later, it's still going strong.
Silo is still selling TVs (cheaply) and Pioneer is gone from the market.
I had my projection TV fixed by a local repairman about 10 years ago. He told me the new Chinese TV's were not repairable as most don't have any parts, or mechanisms available to facilitate a repair.
A few years later we bought a "premium" LCD TV rated highly on Consumer Repots which broke less than 2 years later. We replaced with a cheapy, for 1/2 the price and it's already lasted longer. Even if it didn't (which was expected), I could buy 3x the cheap TVs for the same price.
> True, but this isn't Wal Mart's fault, it's China's fault.
It was Walmart that drove manufacturing to China. Walmart wanted name brands and dictated the price point at which they were willing to buy those brands. When the manufacturers did the numbers they realized that they could only service Walmart if they outsourced.
The companies setup factories in China and basically showed the Chinese how to make the products. Eventually the Chinese started to produce competing products that were at first inferior but have gradually gotten better.
This is relatively common for big box stores, not just Walmart. Manufacturers might produce retailer specific SKUs to sell at different price points, cutting features or perhaps using lower quality parts.
For example, you might get a TV that shares the same model name, but has multiple SKUs, one of which has fewer HDMI ports or uses panels with a higher dead pixel tolerance.
A lot of retailers and manufacturers do this. It's not so much that the products are inferior, just different. A lot of times it's tricking you into thinking you're getting something you're not, occasionally it's to offer a better exclusive version.
Sometimes it's a TV with a lower spec panel or limited I/O, other times it'll be something like a Laptop with a smaller harddrive and less ram to drive the price point down.
It can go the other direction too, where the spec is bumped. Roku makes versions of their Streaming Box that are only available at Walmart. They're not inferior, they're just configurations you can't get elsewhere. The Express+ is a Walmart only version of their crappiest STB with their premium remote, because the basic remote sucks.
This happens a lot at places that do price matching because it's then impossible to say you found a product elsewhere because it literally is only sold in their store.
I can give you a specific example. Hanes T-shirts, for use as under shirts. They version you get at Walmart is thinner fabric, the seams are single stitched, not double. My understanding is that Walmart usually sets the price for these kinds of things and it is up to the vendor to make a version they can sell at that price and make money.
I actually like the thinner fabric undershirts. My issue with the one's I've bought from walmart is there's basically no consistency. I bought the v-neck versions to wear under a button up shirt, and had to turn half of them into rags because necks were so wide/deep.
There are a couple examples here of products that appear to be the same, but aren't quite the same.
I also remember reading about a lawnmower manufacturer that was forced to use plastic parts (the deck, IIRC) instead of metal to reduce cost to sell at Walmart. I couldn't find that article now, though. I read it years ago.
Not saying you're wrong, but Walmart acquired Jet 4 years ago. If their current web offering is the end result, I'd say they overpaid by about... 3 billion dollars.
Haha... I don’t totally disagree, but you might be missing the bigger picture. For example, under Marc Lore’s watch, Walmart Grocery rolled out in a very big way, which was a huge win.
I’ve always looked at the Jet deal as $3b to get their CEO Marc Lore to get in there and fix their e-commerce operations. If you look at the online sales performance since Lore joined, as well as the stock price (it has more than doubled), I think $3b was a good deal.
At the time of the takeover, Jet was doing pretty innovative tech while walmart had a very terrible ecommerce offering. Jet used to have this thing where they would offer you live-calculated discounts on items that were in the same FC as items already in your cart since those items would cost them less to ship. It was kinda gimmicky, but it sure was a cool tech demo. I strongly believe that Jet was a longer-term acquihire, and this kinda confirms that.
Aside: Jet's HQ is in my hometown. I considered interviewing there after a coworker went there, but being bought by walmart really soured me on it. Stodgy company that strongly discourages things like alcohol in the office. Fine, I don't need to drink at work, but weird. I hope they're able to transfer Jet's good tech branding and hiring pipeline to "walmart labs" or whatever they're rebranding jet's org as.
Silly thing to pick on. I like a drink with co-workers, but totally understandable not to at work, especially as a lot of their workers definitely couldn't because it'd be dangerous.
Or do you think it should be one rule for the richly paid programmers, and another for the low paid warehouse workers?
It’s like companies requiring a tie. Fine. A tie is easy to put on. But if you’re requiring that all of a sudden what other rules do I have to worry about being added? I guarantee you random tech company X would see attrition if they enacted a business-casual dress-code. Same with booze.
Booze is different. Booze is a drug that makes people do silly things.
You can almost guarantee that before they brought in this rule, some guy groped a girl while drunk after drinking at the office. That's the size they're at.
There's a world of legal difference when that happens under your roof, or after work.
This is skewing off-topic, but prohibiting alcohol is not going to stop people from drinking it, nor is it going to stop people from doing silly/gropy things at the office. A ban only conveys contempt and mistrust of employees. Focus on toxic culture that makes people feel like they need to drink or are entitled to grope.
That timing coincided with two pretty big unrelated things. Walmart had been rebuilding their backend systems on this monolithic system called Pangaea that was several years late and drained most of the resources of the engineering org during that period. They finally started emerging from the hole around the end of 2016 and could actually focus on the customer and building the business.
Walmart Grocery had just started taking off. By 2017 it had become a 10 figure business- and by some analysis it was concluded that online grocery sales only eat away at in-store grocery sales by a tiny amount, so this was wholly attributed to e-commerce.
And then there was the direct bolt-on of Jet's revenue streams into the e-commerce results of Walmart as a whole, as well as a lot of other acquisitions. I am not saying Lore didn't have a hand in their growth, but the stage was set well for him.
Marc Lore was doing a great job with Diapers.com but ran out of money and had to sell to Amazon
that must have been a painful 2 years working for the guys who beat you
now WalMart has him and if they give him the right resources he is going to make a big dent in the whole 'Amazon is going to take over all of retail' narrative
I remember when Jet launched, it had a somewhat mysterious marketing campaign and a referral system that made it seem like it was going to be life changing. Once I got access I never ended up actually ordering anything.
They had some interesting experiments around pricing. Things like, you'd pay less if you didn't want to be able to return it for free, and gimmicks like that - but while those may be unique out of the gate, longer-term I feel very few have time to strategize around those aspects of most of their purchases, and speed-of-delivery has become paramount for most buyers.
The only thing I found mysterious was how much money they were spending on purple ink. Other than that, it seemed like a burn VC funds to gain market share. There were people getting deliveries in Amazon and Walmart boxes after having ordered on Jet.
The problem for me (as a C# developer for a very long time) is that it has zero traction. If I want use a more functional programming language I'm better off learning Elixir, Clojure, Reason, Scala etc.
If I'm going to invest in spending the time to really learn a programming language I want to know that there's a community that's doing reasonably well to promote it. Microsoft has done a terrible job - treating F# as a 2nd class citizen for a very long time. Microsoft has all its eggs in the C# basket with respect to .NET. Without Microsoft support F# will continue to be a tiny niche - sadly.
For the folks downvoting, it's not that I don't want to use F#, but at most corps you're not going to have an easy time getting approval to use F#. Just because I want to use F#, doesn't mean the rest of the team wants to maintain it when I'm gone/unavailable/etc.
It's a terrific product with little corporate backing. C# gets more F# like everyday. I have limited time to invest in learning technology (especially the way front-end tech changes so quickly) that it's hard to justify committing to becoming proficient in F#.
I wonder if there will be some competing airline startups in the next year or two wanting to bid for the domain, or if it will sit on Walmart’s balance sheet for a few years redirecting traffic and waiting for the airline market to pick up again?
They had a large outdoor-advertising campaign around their launch time in the New York area. Purple Jet.com signs were all over Penn Station, billboards in Manhattan, and those ads on top of cabs. Not sure how wide spread the campaign was.
It was an acquihire more than anything. Marc Lore built up the beginnings of a successful e-commerce logistical chain, and Walmart got that momentum and expertise.
Shuttering the Jet.com branding makes sense now that Walmarts ecommerce play has gained momentum, as their branding has way more mindshare.
Maybe it changed more recently, but in the first couple years after acquisition they (WM and Jet) had very different approaches to things like search and there was a lot of internal conflict over whose was better. I think they pretty much just kept things separate as a result, so probably not a lot of long-term tech value attained by WM.
Then see what WalMart's ecommerce growth was before Marc Lore
and what it is now after Marc Lore
Perhaps the single biggest factor that it is growing fast is that they got the CEO/Founder of Diapers.com and Jet.com to come help them understand ecommerce
I read part of it was that Walmart was unable to open stores within x distance of Manhattan and that Jet branding had penetrated manhatttan based customers whereas Walmart has had very little success.
Jet.com was a farce and Marc Lore is a charlatan. First thing he did when he was acquired is start buying up all his friend's worthless businesses with Walmart's money.
Walmart's ecommerce platform is fundamentally the same thing it was when they bought jet.com. People around here don't know what they're talking about.
Marc wanted to close down all the in-house data centers and move everything into Azure. Walmart inked a big deal with Azure with sweetheart pricing. I'm sure they're paying through the nose now because Marc Lorey only knows how to spend other people's money, not make it.
Walmart execs bought hard core into the SV culture as the means to success online. As soon as his 5 year lock up is done, he's out of the company.
I remember the good old days of those sweet discount codes from Jet.com. I was building a computer at the time and saved enough cash to buy an extra monitor.
Haha, this company was great. They just took money and burnt it on customer acquisition through fantastic coupons and then sold to Walmart. I love these businesses. I bought so much stuff I needed on Jet coupons. 25% off max $50? Don't mind if I do. Hope there's a new one.
I think I must have gone through like 4 different emails using slightly modified addresses and all my CCs.
This is unsurprising. The Jet team was basically picked apart and focused on Walmart.com and other Walmart initiatives as soon as it was bought.
I’m surprised Walmart kept the brand going in the first place, since the focus was clearly on Walmart properties (including the logistics tech stack, etc).
Why not just spin it back out, bring back the 20% off coupons (especially for things drop shipped from Zoro and Ingram), and sell it to someone else for $3B?
I especially liked the buy one get one-half free specials on heavy items, for them having no clue how to pack things. Thankfully Chewy seems to have taken up that mantle. (/s)
Rest in peace Jet. Thank you for getting me used to buying toilet paper 4 packs at a time, preparing me for the COVID shortages.
> “Due to continued strength of the Walmart.com brand, the company will discontinue Jet.com,” the company said in a short statement. “The acquisition of Jet.com nearly four years ago was critical to accelerating our omni strategy.”
What a load of corporate bullshit. How does anyone actually write that and live with themselves?
True, but having a 3 letter domain name that sounds fast and a separate checkbook may have actually been important to growing their e-commerce business. The crazy discounts they offered when they first started and the purple boxes all had the effect of signaling to consumers (and investors) “we’re trying something new”, and now they rolled everything they learned (things lots of e-commerce sites are learning all at the same time) into their core e-commerce strategy.
I was referring more to the first sentence attributing the strength of walmart.com as the reasoning to shutting down jet.com. Walmart isn't shutting down jet.com because of "the continued strength of the Walmart brand", Walmart is shutting down jet.com because jet.com lost $2b last year and failed to gain the success they'd hoped for. The business failed.
I always wanted to like Jet, they just never had what I wanted. Placed 3 orders, each was cancelled when they could not fill it. Mostly didn't find what I needed. The world needs a real Amazon competitor.
Jet was purchased for one thing. Marc Lore. The executive team missed their chance to Amazon with Quisdi and were not about to make the same mistake again.
"Discontinue" has gotta be one of the best (worst?) corporate-speak BS terms of late. I'm genuinely surprised to see an outlet like TechCrunch using the term when not directly quoting someone — I mean, who are they trying to protect here? "Walmart says it will /(shutter|shut down|sunset|retire|axe|kill)/ Jet" would be truer to their spirit, IMO.
And for my rant/last straw with Amazon: My most recent Amazon frustration: I ordered a Ryzen processor "shipped and sold by Amazon" and got an opened and obviously installed processor. Pins were bent. I have had a few other bad items like that in the last year. I just don't trust them any more.
I want actual single source suppliers that vet their suppliers and supplies. Microcenter is great for a small range of computing products, but you have to go to the store to pick many things up [at least you can see what you are getting and don't have to wait for weeks of turn around]. Amazon's current solution is just automated returns with no acknowledgement they did something really shady. Guess it is time to vote with my wallet.