I usually pay with Amex and sometimes a business will say "Oh sorry, we don't take Amex". Never once have they ushered me out the door and issued a trespass notice. Instead I just pay another way and we are both happy. That seems pretty optimal.
It is intentional, I'm just saying it's ridiculous. the Google way is to treat everything like a programming problem. That works decently well for bits, but really breaks down when working with humans.
Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine. I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day.
In this scenario it seems pretty obvious that their automated fraud AI messed up, but the customer service person is probably also automated. They have so many people working on insane moonshots, but don't spend money for customer service for their core products (in this case people literally trying to give you money!). Just bizarre.
In addition to Amazon 3rd party sellers, this seems like bad news for Shopify. They host a lot of Chinese drop ship stores that work because of these artificially low rates.
A lot of tech IPOs recently after a decently long drought. There is conjecture that people are rushing to get them filed before a recession hits and it's more difficult to go public.
> Over 59,000 data breach notifications have been reported across the European Economic Area by public and private organizations since the GDPR came into force on 25th May 2018, according to DLA Piper's GDPR Data Breach survey.
> Price guarantee is available between August 13th and September 2nd, 2019. You'll see the price guarantee badge on select flights where travel is completed by November 24th, 2019.
Still sounds like a great deal, but this explains why it's not a huge liability.
I'm suggesting that ride sharing doesn't have to be a tech company. I just want to get across town, there's no requirement that the company that does this has to fund flying car research or have fancy offices around the globe.
The only way they survive as such a richly valued company perhaps, my point is they could provide the current level of service with vastly lower spending and be a sustainable company. The financial problems aren't they charge too little for rides, it's that they have thousands of people working on bullshit that brings in little to nothing.
But in this case they clearly don't: Operations and support ($864m), Sales and marketing ($1.2b), General and administrative ($1.6b). They have bloated costs all over. Easy to do when you're the hottest VC backed company around, but the clock is ticking and they'll probably trim a lot of fat.
I think it's more the massive amount of spending they do with little to nothing to show for it. They spent $457m last year on autonomous and flying cars with $0 in revenue from those projects. Maybe that will work out, but I bet every penny was ultimately wasted.
Not spending billions a year on R&D certainly makes the financials look nicer. It might not attract as nice of a multiple, but it's not the ride prices that are out of whack at Uber IMO.
But it's not a conspiracy, Movie Pass really did pay theaters full price for tickets while charging customers $10 a month. It lost a huge amount of money. No one disputes any of this, it's just someone who doesn't know anything who said "money laundering". They are wrong, it was an obviously bad business, not a money laundering or tax scheme.
Yes, and not giving away the money in the first place is even more profitable. When you hear about these schemes they are generally paper losses (depreciation being a big one). It's not in your interest to hand AMC millions of dollars for a tax deduction.
Would you be enthusiastic to partner up with Jeff Bezos on something like home delivery? He's going to squeeze you until you beg for mercy and that's the point he'll roll out a competing service and start to take your best customers.
Apple has run out of people to sell iPhones to, Amazon is just getting started ("day one" as Bezos likes to say). P/E is about growth potential and the market is saying Amazon has lots more of it than Apple.