
Amazon announces 4th quarter sales - rising-sky
https://ir.aboutamazon.com/static-files/bf635f1d-f1d0-4cf3-b172-bb6ebdc6241b
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kilo_bravo_3
They earned it.

Polar vortex is here. I'm going to be outside at a customer site working on
some equipment.

Need a hat. Something thick and furry.

We have an actual "indie millinery shop" in my city. Yay! Support your local
merchant!

No winter hats. If I wanted a $399 Super Duper Hats Albino Fedora 100% rabbit
fur felt fedora I could get it in an hour but no winter hats.

So then I went to Bass Pro, JCPenney, Sears, Nordstrom, Dick's, Macy's, Eddie
Bauer, Burlington, Target, and finally REI.

Only a handful of them had any winter hats and none of them had any men's
adult-sized hats in stock. Not even a beanie.

On Tuesday, January 29th at 6:57pm I left REI after having wasted over three
hours going to 11 retailers and I got into my car. While in the REI parking
lot I ordered a winter hat and gloves from Amazon for $45 with Prime next day
delivery.

They were delivered at 3:03pm the next day. Before the sub-zero temperatures.

This keeps happening over and over again, I stopped being a "grazing" shopper
over a decade ago and only buy specific items after research.

No retailers seem to be adapting, just racing to the bottom.

Burlington looked like a nightmarish blindingly brightly-lit hellscape with
garbage that had already failed to sell at Target being strewn about as old
ladies picked through it.

As far as I'm concerned, brick and mortar is dead.

edit: to be fair, if I wanted a SWAT-team/bank robber balaclava that covered
my entire face, the sporting goods stores had me covered. I prefer that people
I'm interacting with at work see my face.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
> brick and mortar is dead.

Honestly, partnering with Amazon and basically giving you a product instantly
would make brick and mortar thrive.

You want to buy this thing? If it's available at Best Buy, you can pick up
within minutes at the counter and Amazon can ship a replacement to Best Buy in
the next few days.

~~~
sl1ck731
I wonder of retailers getting slightly different model numbers has anything to
do with preventing this from ever being possible. I know they do it on black
Friday to avoid price matching but I seem to run across wierd almost-exactly-
the-same electronics at the local electronic stores more often than just black
Friday.

~~~
jon-wood
John Lewis in the UK do this all the time, mostly because they loudly promise
to match the price on any product in their store. It just so happens that the
product in their store is a shade of green which is exclusive to them.

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rising-sky
> "Alexa was very busy during her holiday season. Echo Dot was the best-
> selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased
> millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year,” said Jeff
> Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “The number of research scientists working on
> Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, and the results of the team’s
> hard work are clear. In 2018, we improved Alexa’s ability to understand
> requests and answer questions by more than 20% through advances in machine
> learning, we added billions of facts making Alexa more knowledgeable than
> ever, developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000, and
> customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared to
> 2017"

~~~
wufufufu
I have a HomePod and Echo Dot. I trust the HomePod more in terms of privacy,
build quality, customer service, warranty, etc. The Echo Dot is way better at
finding my voice and doing what I want it to do. The HomePod goes off randomly
when the TV is on, and it costs 10x more.

~~~
borkt
Do either of them actually provide any value (apart from homepod audio
quality)? For the life of me I can't find a reason to have one of these in my
house and I really am not concerned about the privacy issues.

~~~
chrisjc
Really depends on the individual. For my family, Alexa is almost
indispensable, especially with a baby.

Controlling lights, fans, HVAC, TV (shield, amp, etc), Todo and shopping
lists, cooking/laundry timers, reminders, tracking baby (diapers, bottles,
nursing), weather.

Being able to turn on a light and track baby events while you're up to your
elbows in poop is really invaluable.

Definitely won't add smart locks anywhere in the mix.

Limited music since we use Google music.

Also, Celery Man.

~~~
jedberg
> Celery Man

Had to Google that. Clearly I've been missing out by not having cable.

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DVassallo
$10B in net income in 2018. I guess it’s not an investor-run charity for
consumers anymore [1].

[1] [https://slate.com/business/2013/01/amazon-q4-profits-
fall-45...](https://slate.com/business/2013/01/amazon-q4-profits-
fall-45-percent.html)

~~~
DVassallo
Also intesting: AMZN’s net income was 4.3% of sales. For AMZN to reach AAPL’s
valuation of 13.5 P/E, AMZN would need to do $1.5 trillion in sales.

But if it continues to grow sales at 31%, it should get there by 2025.

~~~
why_only_15
That's a crazy pair of facts. Interesting to compare Walmart on this front -
its revenue is $500B with growth at 2%, whereas Amazon has sales on the same
order of magnitude but growth an order of magnitude higher. I wonder how long
this rate of growth is sustainable, both for Amazon and the rest of FAANG.
Have there ever been companies this big growing this fast?

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kgwgk
I noticed that margins are down compared to the previous quarter in the three
segments (US, International, AWS). Maybe there is some seasonal explanation
for that, but in 2017 margins improved in the three segments.

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partingshots
dang, if you read this, I think you should seriously consider banning earnings
report articles. They always come and clutter up the feed, hiding the
substantive information and technical news I come to Hacker News specifically
for.

Because I feel like if I really wanted a feed of quarterly earnings, I’d be on
Google Finance or something, not HN. The name is _Hacker_ News, or has that
been forgotten at this point?

~~~
nathanaldensr
HN has, since the 2016 Presidential election, become a dumping ground for low-
quality pieces from various popular media outlets (you know the ones I'm
talking about), as well as all kinds of generally-interesting-but-not-related-
to-tech-in-any-way stories. My guess is that since the very idea of a
"startup" has waned in recent years, the readership has shifted from a
technical one to a political one. There isn't much any one of us can do to
correct this. The people who want this kind of content apparently now
outnumber folks like us who wish that content would stay on Reddit.

~~~
dang
People have been saying that for a long time now:

2008:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561)

2010:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380)

2013:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485)

There has always been a mix of general-interest and technical articles on HN,
and a certain portion of politics. I wrote more about this if anyone wants
more:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511923)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869)

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heurist
No mention of Audible?

~~~
hbosch
I don’t think Audible is a significant portion of Amazon revenue.

