> Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them

What do you meany nobody can compete with Amazon? It happens all the time across the various markets they're in: e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.

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Grombobulous 7 hours ago | parent [-]

How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?

How much investment money and customer volume do I need to make that business viable?

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Anon1096 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fulfillment business is very hard. Amazon has invested well into the hundreds of billions building it out, and that's supported by their economy of scale of Amazon.com. A fulfillment business for toilet paper would never pencil out profitably no matter how hard you try.

This is actually a great example of the consumer winning out due to Amazon's business. Pre-Amazon, 24 hour shipping was literally not a thing, even 2 day shipping, especially for free, was a major innovation of the site.

So for fulfillment for general goods, I do think this is something that you will never be able to compete with Amazon on as a small player profitably. However, there is plenty of competition in specific verticals, such as Instacart or Doordash for groceries specifically. And if you want to be a toilet paper producer/seller, that is possible too (just not the fulfillment part but again I'm not sure why we expect "toilet paper fulfillment" to be a valid category that needs to be a thing), for example I bought my phone case from Dbrand due to the strength of their product and marketing. As a small player you need to compete on specific verticals but that has always been the case. Amazon was originally a book seller.

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andsoitis 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?

As with all successful businesses, you start small.

You figure out what's your edge. You are resourceful.

You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.

Pro-tip: selling (rather than producing) toilet paper is probably never a big business anyhow.

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Grombobulous 7 hours ago | parent [-]

If all we are going to do is engage in vague inspirational idealism rather than using realistic boundaries to the discussion I fear the relevance to the subject at hand fades away.

> You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.

This idea bleeds into the definition of a monopoly. I can’t just make a mobile operating system like Apple and Google because I won’t have a competitive advantage. I can’t make my own Amazon competitor because their edge is that they deliver more packages than UPS or FedEx. I can’t compete with Google search because the web browser that comes with Android defaults Google on the home page.

Sure, nobody is trying to do 100% of what their competitors do, but I wouldn’t be able to do 5% of what Amazon does even if you handed me billions in seed capital.

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andsoitis 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It sounds like you’ve decided it isn’t possible to compete, there’s nothing worth trying. I suppose that’s a fair stance to take and I’m not here to convince you to be more resourceful and strategic.

Meanwhile, lots of people are starting and building successful businesses.

	▲	Grombobulous 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We can certainly agree that lots of people are starting and building successful businesses. But I would hope we can also agree that there are many business categories where entry into the market is extremely difficult. And hopefully you can agree that, conceptually, monopoly businesses do exist and have existed in the past.