It seems costco can deliver HEAVY things that amazon can't (economically, afaict)

Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I was reading the book "How the internet happened": During the dot com bubble, there was a company called furniture.com which basically lost a lot of its investor money by learning the hard truth that IKEA also had to learn that shipping Heavy things like furniture isn't actually economical.

I am not sure if costco's model could allow it but especially for amazon, if they tried to do it or make it their USP like furniture.com, then I can imagine a very different outcome for it overall.

There was also a company I think who spent hundreds of millions of dollars (IIRC) in creating a large grocery website with buying large warehouses then and basically losing a ton of money. That business also failed quite drastically.

Another fun fact: when Amazon was first established, one of the largest loopholes that they had used which one can argue was why they were able to exist in the first place was that although they had selected book for Amazon because books are somewhat centralized (barnes and nobles essentially) but I think that the b&n warehouses required 10 books to be ordered each time.

So within the start, what they did was found out there was 1 book which was consistently out of stock. so they would order 1 book which the customer had ordered and then 9 of those other books. I imagine that if it might not have been for this as well, it might've been hard in the start.

There was also the fact that Barnes and nobles created their website and everyone thought that Amazon would basically die. Logic sort of suggests that it should've.

My conclusion is that Retail works in strange ways and timing matters a lot.

Also there are so many little facts within the book and it might be one of the fastest reads that I had of a book but the dot com bubble does feel quite similar to AI bubble IMO.

Here is a graph that I was making of a very limited connection graph of companies during the dot com bubble. https://files.catbox.moe/xdcxuy.png

I think that i have gone a bit too afar from my original comment but I sometimes like to chat and share bits of knowledge that I know and then I can't resist myself! :-D

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shawn_w 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>There was also a company I think who spent hundreds of millions of dollars (IIRC) in creating a large grocery website with buying large warehouses then and basically losing a ton of money. That business also failed quite drastically.

Probably thinking of HomeGrocer or WebVan (which bought out the former and then went bankrupt too)

	▲	Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think it was WebVan and you are right (but I am not entirely sure) but thanks for writing the comment, appreciate it :-D > (which bought out the former and then went bankrupt too) ironic, does make you think if the clock has reached full circle in terms of bubbles but there are just so many similarities within the dot com bubble and AI bubble(TM) which are just so hard to ignore.