Hi Glenn,
Happy Holidays, and I'm glad to hear your stores (including online sales) are doing well. And congratulations on your pending retirement (though something tells me, with how hard you apparently work, that you'll be having fun with some "work" as a hobby, just to stay involved and make it all happen). Will your son be taking over the wheel?
I liked what you wrote, but I think you're still seeing Amazon in a biased way (I may be also, I realize). You said:
Customers buy when they are treated in a manner that makes their purchasing enjoyable, convenient and reasonably economical.
There are a huge number of customers of Amazon who buy from them for these very reasons. They've been far from perfect, doing some things well, others poorly, and losing a great deal of money along the way. They've been, perhaps, unfair to their shareholders at times (and that may or may not have been intentional, the other possibility being that they were themselves naive). Let me point out however, that they have a pretty good size customer base now. They still have the opportunity to make their business work, profitably. You seem sure they cannot. That to me seems hard to say, either way. AOL stunk things up in a big way for many years, and their customers hated them (many did) for poor service, poor access, busy signals etc. In spite of the road Amazon has taken, they can still conceivably survive and thrive. If they do, by your own measure, it will be in part due to providing an efficient, enjoyable, convenient, and reasonably economical route for customers to buy. |
