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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering.

Is it? That’s by households, not individuals. Is it really crazy to imagine a household spending $200-300/month at Costco, Walmart, Whole Foods—or Amazon?

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I spend $200-300 per week at whole foods, much to my own chagrin and moral discomfort.

If it brings you moral discomfort, why do you shop at whole foods? Shopping at Walmart (or whole foods!) would also bring me moral discomfort, so I just ...don't do it.

Today I shopped at the local food co-op, Sprouts (regional/semi-national chain), Whole Foods and Trader Joes. Word on the street is that the co-op has a worse labor relations history than Whole Foods. Trader Joes is good but doesn't sell more than a 1/3rd of the food we eat. Sprouts I don't know much about, it would be a fallback if Whole Foods disappeared.

Whole Foods has the food products (produce, dairy, eggs, grains, nuts) that we eat, is cheaper than the competition for this stuff, and unbelievably beats the co-op on labor relations. However, it also ships profit out of the area. For now, it's sort of the best of a bunch of not particularly good choices.

Maybe there's no comparable or better alternative? (Possibly because of Whole Food's capitalist power)

AFAICT, the numbers Matt’s referencing include Whole Foods so that’s a Whole Foods + Amazon.com $3,000.

Frankly, I think a lot of people have lost perspective on just how rich the average American household is: Around $145k annual income.

Not shocking that Amazon is capturing 2% of that gross.

You’re way off the median household income is $80K

https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/

Median isn’t the average and Matt was computing the average household Amazon spend.

The mean is almost always a meaningless statistics. It only takes a few people to buy stuff like this to skew it.

http://www.sellersprite.com/en/blog/most-expensive-thing-on-...

Be that as it may, the point at issue was the Amazon spending of the average US household. I’m not sure what point relevant to the discussion you’re trying to make, other than reflexively arguing with any use of means in economic analysis. OK, sure, tell Matt Stoller.

I guess it's just always important/helpful to keep in mind that the average is almost certainly going to be misleading when the distribution is extremely skewed, as is the case for household income. It's usually a mistake to talk about averages in these cases, when the median is almost always going to be more meaningful.

Agree, but can't we just include both average _and_ mean? And maybe min/max while we're at it? Seems like that could give a much clearer picture (without even needing a graph!?)

Min & max are also meaningless for most distributions, so probably you should instead look at P1 and P99 or something, and all of a sudden you're now talking about 5 numbers when all you wanted was a quick point.

The average Amazon spending of a US household, not the Amazon spending of the average US household. That second one gets weird.

I’d be comfortable assuming household income and household Amazon spend are highly correlated.

It actually is for the normal distribution.

Household income is not normally distributed. In fact nothing with a hard zero can be normally distributed.

Sure, but I’m certain US household income is not normally distributed, and I’d bet all the money in my pockets that US household Amazon spend isn’t normally distributed, either.

You're conflating two different things, but what you point out is still useful because it suggests that there are a few people on the higher end who make a LOT more and are dragging the mean up when compared to the median. The mean is probably not as indicative of the fortunes of most Americans as GP suggests. $3000 is a lot of money for most families, but there are a few for which it's increasingly not only inconsequential, but more like a rounding error.

That's on food and consumable household stuff. I imagine some people do all of that shopping through Amazon. But on average?

I spent $3000 at borders bookstore in one year, back in the day. But Amazon gets about $100 a year from me.

You should spend less at Amazon. $100 less per year.

I do agree with you.

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