Actually Amazon has lost money or broken even many times in its history. Its margins are razor thin because it plows its profits into growth at all costs. It has also made mistakes...BIG mistakes....in its attempts to get into fresh food. It has delivered spoiled food and its retail experiments with robots and cashier-less stores have largely been a disaster. Yes, if you want a case of Bob's Red Mill ground flax seed you can get it fast on Amazon at a reasonable price. But what Amazon has overpaid for is just a poorly-run, horribly managed far-flung chain of upscale grocery stores and a damaged brand name. Nothing more, nothing less. Barriers to entry are low and we've seen the food giants and smaller competitors step right up to do what we do better, faster and more profitably. The same kind of breathless hyperbole about Amazon and Whole Foods was heard in the wake of the Time Warner - AOL tie-up. Two years on, the analysts and experts were eating their words asking "What went wrong?" The same thing will happen here. A $13 billion white elephant is still a white elephant. Best bet is to get out NOW. I'm putting my money on TJ's, Wegman's, Costco, Aldi and even Lidl. This isn't going to work and in fact will be a business disaster. Bezos was apparently under the hypnotic spell of the track lighting and neatly stacked pyramids of oranges. What a waste.
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You can't fail when you've already failed. Failed to adapt, failed to set employee and customer expectations, failed to do something so basic as have a website where you sell your own products (I know, radical idea there), failed to fire incompetent idiots at the regional and global level. The only thing that succeeded was selling out at $25 per share below the all-time high because the egos were bigger than your mindfulness about your own hype. That, and handing out golden parachutes. Amazon just made a $13.7 billion mistake. The company has entered the lowest margin business (grocery stores) by buying an inefficient operator that's losing ground fast and uses aggressive below-the-line accounting for its capital leases to make its finances look better to the unwary. Wow, I can't wait for all of this hype to result in every successful operator just giving up. I'm sure that will happen any day now.
We will not fail. :)
And with the earnings call mysteriously called off yesterday, could Amazon be looking for a way to back out?
I wish more people would realize this...