Chamath Palihapitiya is a famous startup investor who runs his own venture-capital firm, Social Capital. He was an early Facebook employee and is now estimated to be worth over $1 billion.
Because Palihapitiya is a VC, he gets to invest in a lot of different companies. But if he had to put his entire capital in a single company and hold it for the next 10 years, Palihapitiya knows where his money’s going: Amazon.
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In November, Amazon opened its first bookstore, and reports from the CEO of one of America’s largest shopping mall operators Tuesday afternoon suggest that the company is prepared to open several hundred new ones across the country. This prompted many to ask why the company that destroyed the physical bookstore industry would possibly want to operate a physical bookstore.
Part of the answer is that, as the announcement of the original store location said, “At Amazon Books, you can also test drive Amazon’s devices,” meaning Kindles, Echos, Fire TVs, and Fire Tablets “are available for you to explore, and Amazon device experts will be on hand to answer questions and to show the products in action.” Apple has physical retail stores for its digital devices, as do (albeit less successfully) Microsoft, Sony, and Samsung. Since Amazon makes Amazon-branded devices, why shouldn’t it have a store too?
Source- Chicago Tribune
Amazon says its “Prime Day” sale led to a sales surge and “hundreds of thousands” of new signups for its $99 annual Prime loyalty program. The company said it plans to make the sale an annual event.
Tied to its 20th anniversary, Amazon promoted Wednesday’s sale for weeks by saying there would be more deals than during the busy winter holiday shopping season. Some shoppers took to social media and elsewhere to complain about the types of sales they were seeing and their limited nature.
Nonetheless, Amazon said Thursday that in the U.S. and nine countries around the world that offer the Prime program, shoppers ordered 398 items per second, surpassing the rate of ordering on Black Friday, the busy shopping day after Thanksgiving. It said worldwide order growth more than quadrupled over the same day last year, which is typically a sluggish sales day, and rose 18 percent more than Black Friday 2014.
As seen in the New York Times:
Rollback. Doorbuster. Blowout prices. Do those words mean anything anymore?
Even Black Friday is fast getting lost in the blur of perpetual discounts as some of the nation’s biggest retailers go head-to-head Wednesday in a new midsummer event — yet another addition to an annual sales calendar packed with sales, sales and more sales.
Amazon, the online juggernaut that has been upending brick-and-mortar retailing for years, set off the latest sales frenzy by announcing a sale for the site’s 20th anniversary on Wednesday. Its AmazonPrime Day, meant to attract more shoppers to its $99 free-shipping membership plan, promises “more deals than Black Friday.”