Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

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'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.

// no amount of branding awareness tv ads are fixing the name recognition they lost with that one... still redirects though.

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.

It probably makes a lot more sense to focus on a single brand.

Walmart tried to make Jet.com focused on large cities but that didn’t do much.

Disclaimer: The accuracy of this should be taken with a grain of salt, I wasn't involved with any of the decision making.

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.

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#.

That's not going anywhere.

Maybe because it's in the name ️

I'm not saying it has zero importance, just less than the 90s/00s.

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 :).

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-p...

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.

what happens when I make the delivery, but someone gets injured in the process? DoorDash has insurance for this most likely.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-retail-walmart-delivery/e...

Option A: You drive to Walmart, pick up your shopping and three other people's, you drive home via three other homes.

Option B: A driver starts at Walmart, picks up four people's shopping including yours, delivers it all, and returns to Walmart.

Seems to me the number of person-hours and distance driven is identical in both cases?

It’s so much better to either piggyback on the mail or just have customers do curbside.

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.

But also I think they’re using it as an excuse to use cheaper shipping. I know bestbuy is doing this for sure.

I think they figure no one will notice they’re using smartpost and if you complain just blaming the speed on the pandemic.

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.

Acquisitions are bad, folks.

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.

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.

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.

Or do you think it should be one rule for the richly paid programmers, and another for the low paid warehouse workers?

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.

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.