SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
When Buffet speaks, people listen:
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has sold off $900 million of Walmart stock, choosing to invest billions in airlines instead.
The sale, which leaves Buffett with nearly no shares in Walmart, comes as the US's largest traditional retailer has been rushing to catch up to Amazon and other online competitors.
Amazon's market value is now $356 billion, compared with Walmart's $298 billion. Last year, Buffett acknowledged that traditional brick-and-mortar retailers were struggling in the face of competition from the e-commerce giant.
Yes, but is he still long on Big Cola?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Warren Buffett Drops Walmart -- Signals Death of Retail as we know it
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 53 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
sillema sillema nika su
(Score: 4, Touché) by donkeyhotay on Thursday February 16 2017, @04:51PM
I'm not sure it's fair to compare Amazon to Walmart with respect to how they do business. Virtually anyone can sell on Amazon. Amazon is less like Walmart, and more like the person who owns a big strip mall and leases space to a bunch of various stores. They make money no matter who moves in and sells.
Walmart's business model depends on discounting name brands in order to get people to come in and buy things they don't really need. So, while Amazon is happy to try to up-sell you, their model does not rely on it. There is less risk.
From the consumer's point of view, however, they can be compared. Here's how I see it:
Amazon:
Sitting in your comfortable recliner, in your pajamas, you go to a website, where you quickly search for the exact item(s) you want. You know immediately if they are in stock. You click a couple of times and purchase your item(s). Two days later, a nice person delivers them to your front door.
Walmart:
You have to get up from your comfortable recliner and get dressed. You fight traffic for twenty minutes to get to the store. You park in the nearest available space, which is 400 yards from the entrance. You begin the quarter-mile hike to the entrance, avoiding drug deals, stolen goods fencing, domestic disturbances, and various mentally ill loiterers.
At the entrance you are accosted by children who are selling (something you don't want) to raise money for (some "service" organization). You don't want to look like a jerk, so you buy a box/bag/tin. You wait several minutes while the adults, who are supervising the children, try to figure out how to make change for your purchase.
As you walk into the store you are greeted by a senior citizen, for no apparent reason, but social convention requires you to respond even though you don't really want to talk to anyone. You walk another half mile through the store trying to find what you want, discovering that they are either out of stock of your desired item(s) or do not carry your desired item(s), or carry some other damn item(s) that you're going to settle for because you've already lost what little self esteem you had before arriving.
Even though you only find half the things you're looking for, you nevertheless blow your budget and buy 15 things you never wanted, nor needed, but for some reason seem like a good idea at the time, because you're here and you don't want to feel like the ordeal is a waste of time. At the same time, Walmart reminds you, at every turn, that you're saving money.
You proceed to the checkout. Even though there are 28 lanes, only three are in operation.
You stand in line behind eight people at the checkout, all of whom have their carts full, and many of whom have two or more boorish, loud and/or whiny children -- one of whom needed their diaper changed about three hours ago.
Checkout time is approximately twice as long as the time spent shopping.
You finally make it out of the store and head for your car, avoiding the previously mentioned obstacles, and praying you aren't mugged.
You make it home, exhausted, plop down in your recliner, and go to Amazon anyway to order the stuff you couldn't find at Walmart.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @09:57PM
You work at Walmart, don't you?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Saturday February 18 2017, @01:33AM
SMH/LMFAO. That's true of Newegg and many other online shops, but certainly not Amazon.
<RANT>
With Amazon, it's more like order from my couch, wait two weeks, wonder why the tracking number says it was delivered successfully to Italy (I'm in the US), complain, get a different tracking number that now says the item I just ordered was shipped six months ago, finally get my items a month and a half after I ordered it, in six different boxes half of which are damaged, that I have to retrieve from a block down the street since they can never seem to get it to the correct address. And this is after specifically limiting my search to items with both "Fulfillment by Amazon" and "Free shipping by Amazon" -- apparently adding both of those options is still no guarantee that the item is sold by Amazon or is actually shipping from their warehouse. (Last time I mentioned this here, someone questioned if I was REALLY sure I selected those options. I wasn't, so I started paying more attention. And I found after choosing those options I still got stuff direct from China. Of course, you can tell when you get to the order confirmation and it suddenly tells you that you have to pay six different shipping charges, but there's no real way to filter it out up front...so you either accept it or delete your whole cart and try again...usually with the same result.) And even when the stuff DOES actually ship from their warehouse...I can get an entire PC worth of components delivered from Newegg, and it all comes in one box, two days after I placed the order. With Amazon, I order ten tiny bolts, the one order ships in two separate boxes from the same damn warehouse in Texas, and takes two weeks to arrive. When I specifically requested as few shipments as possible. Even Amazon customer service got confused trying to figure out how the hell that one happened...
These days I mostly use Amazon when I don't care so much when or even if the item ever arrives. Cheap garbage that I simply can't find elsewhere (other than Ebay or Alibaba, which are even worse than Amazon...) Or when I don't know exactly what I need -- since Amazon has such a large selection, you can usually type any random crap into the search bar and eventually find what you want. But the only thing I'm confident about when it comes to Amazon is that I can get my money back when (not if) there's a problem. It's safe -- possibly safer than brick and mortar since they rarely question a refund or return -- but it's far from reliable.
They were fantastic before they started adding all this marketplace crap, but now these garbage shops with garbage products have infested the entire site and that place is not just going downhill, it's fallen right off a cliff.
</RANT>
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Monday February 20 2017, @04:34PM
I've never had an experience with Amazon as bad as what you describe, but I agree that it would be very frustrating to have that sort of thing happen.
The one thing I can totally agree with you on is the quality of some goods ordered via Amazon. I've received a couple of items that were pretty crappy and obviously Chinese knock-offs. Amazon definitely needs to do something about that.
Since those two bad experiences I have started getting careful about who I purchase from, rather than just clicking on the least expensive seller. I haven't had any bad experiences for a while now.
Additionally, to be fair, Walmart sells some pretty crappy stuff too. I've noticed, among people making small talk, there are three "safe" topics for discussion: 1) The Weather 2) Your latest DIY project 3) The most recent thing you've had to return to Walmart because it didn't work.
:-)
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday February 20 2017, @05:33PM
I'm sure they do...although I stopped shopping there about ten years ago. Not that I was shopping there much at the time to begin with, but it was the only place I could find in my hometown to buy a decent pair of sunglasses (it was a small town...) Then I discovered the pairs I was paying $20 for at Walmart could be found online for $7...for a three pack. So that was the last time I went to Walmart...