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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

>> Marc Lore, Diapers’ founder, has not forgiven Amazon. He later went on to lead the e-commerce division of Walmart,

Compare Walmart retail to Amazon retail. Who has more revenue? Im going to tell you that it isnt amazon.

AWS and its 30 percent margins are the only thing propping amazon up vs Walmart.

Walmart drove every small retailer out of business. They gutted America an then when there was no money they left communities with NO retail. Walmart moving out of areas creates massive food deserts in relatively urban areas.

How ruthless is amazon, not as ruthless as Walmart.

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Yea, I was gonna say! (And I'm glad you did)

Walmart was honing and perfecting this devour-everything strategy long before Amazon was a glimmer in Bezos's eye. They moved into every rural area in the country like a vampire, sucked out every drop of value, undercut to the point where they were the only game in town, converted the previous small business staff into mid- and low-level WalMart drones, and in some cases, skedaddled when the store couldn't make obscene enough profits, leaving the area stripped barren.

So in every case they strip-mined Main Street.

>Compare Walmart retail to Amazon retail.

>AWS and its 30 percent margins are the only thing propping amazon up vs Walmart.

In 2023, AWS had 27% margins while North American retail had 4% margins for Amazon, but that still meant $15 billion in income from North American retail versus $25 billion in income from AWS. By comparison, Walmart US is operating at a 5% margin with about $22 billion in income. Both companies have worse margins internationally.

I agree those numbers make AWS look a bit more attractive, but it doesn't mean they're "the only thing propping amazon up vs Walmart". Walmart is running a bit larger and at slightly better margins, but the difference isn't as stark as you're making it out to be.

All numbers were hastily pulled from recent earnings reports, so apologies if I made any sloppy mistakes.

I always joke that we already have ‘AI-like’ entities: corporations are algorithms that ravage everything in their way to profit.

We have a lot of cross-disciplinary work to do to keep these paper clip optimizers in check.

It's helpful to think of Corporate America as one gigantic factory that produces "billionaires and millionaires" as product. The raw materials that come in are investor capital and workers, and the waste that gets discarded are communities and the shells of people that are used up to the point where they can no longer produce viable economic surplus.

> They gutted America an then when there was no money they left communities with NO retail.

Evidence of this? Because I mean, the obvious retort would seem to be, "well then the retail could come back then?"

Like, destroying mom and pop shops so that you can just leave seems pointless? Is the idea that people in the community will just shop at a Wal-mart further away then?

> Evidence of this?

These are an overview of the impact when Walmart leaves a small town [0][1]

Walmart has been downsizing it's presence in small towns for almost a decade now [2] and pivoting to global markets [3][4][5] or e-commerce [6]

[0] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/when-wal-mart-leaves-small...

[1] - https://www.nprillinois.org/illinois-economy/2018-12-13/when...

[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/business/walmart-to-close...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/china-embra...

[4] - https://inc42.com/resources/how-walmart-is-pivoting-its-stra...

[5] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-walmart-ecommerce-brazil/...

[6] - https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2024/walmart-counters-ama...

>> Evidence of this? Because I mean, the obvious retort would seem to be, "well then the retail could come back then?"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/09/what-happene...

About retail coming back: I wouldnt be surprised if dollar stores (dollar tree etc) took advantage of Wal-Mart's departures

Bing bing bing!!!

Your just a hair off the mark its dollar general. And its next level fuckery there too:

https://www.businessinsider.com/dollar-general-overcharging-...

In theory, a small general type store serving a small community could make a lot of sense. In practice however, they tend to be fairly depressing to shop in because they're just barely maintained by the one employee who's harried to stock shelves and clean between ringing up customers.

There are other issues with Dollar General too. For one thing, profits don't stay in the local community as they would if you were shopping at a mom and pop. And, just like Walmart, they can easily undermine competition by lowering their prices temporarily.

Except why would Walmart leave if there were still sufficient consumer demand to capitalize off of?

A Walmart is larger and requires far more resourcing than a Dollar General.

What's the point? Are you saying that not restraining Amazon's market manipulation is some sort of revenge for the fact that we also don't restrain Walmart's market manipulation? I remember some people celebrating that all of the big box book warehouses like Borders and Barnes & Noble were dying because of Amazon, because they had been allowed to kill local bookstores.

Bitterness can drive people into severe error when they lose sight of what they actually wanted in the first place. People end up cheering on the second step in the consolidation of markets as schadenfreude against the players in the initial step in the consolidation of markets. What we need is a government that is interested in maintaining competition.

This was on the home page a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40031365

It's this great PR piece about a woman running a Walmart location.

PR.

Walmart is the bigger retail business (amazon - AWS is 30 percent smaller). This article, from the very start makes Walmart look like NOT the villain. It's a pure PR piece.

Are you saying that we should be talking about amazons market manipulation and NOT Walmarts? Why are we talking about the number 2 when the number one is still running around scott free?

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