this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Given how many millions of people must have used Amazon to order stuff to work from home over the past 3+ years, this is a really weird position to hold. You'd think this guy would be all about everyone kitting out their home office spaces.
Amazon makes almost no money on retail sales. They make their money from AWS and from advertisers.
Even better then. With people WFH companies move their on-prem servers and applications to the Cloud like AWS!
No matter how you dice this Amazon is fucking itself
Amazon had $220 billion in first party online retail revenue in 2022 $117 billion from 3rd party online retail $80 billion from AWS $37 billion from advertising.
Retail is amazons primary source of revenue.
Historically Amazon has used revenue from other segments to fund new ventures. AWS is profitable now, but it only came to be from the huge numbers that retail posts.
If it was truly the case that retail has no value, it would have been ditched ages ago, but in reality, the retail segment of the company enables other segments to be profitable. High revenue gives you liquidity, and Amazon's vast infrastructure network provides lots of other opportunities for the business.
At almost zero profit
Just ignore the other two paragraphs then.
Nobody’s denying that retail enabled Amazon to get where they are today and continues to be an important aspect of the business. But the notion that increased retail demand due to remote work would be a major boon for the company’s bottom line is fundamentally flawed. If anything, sudden surges in demand tend to be costly, since their distribution network is tuned to be able to just barely meet expected demand.
It's not weird when you consider the average real estate lease for companies of this size is probably 10 years or more, so they are sitting on an inventory of empty or more empty than full offices, paying rent on them, but not having anyone in there. Also, many cities/states incentivize "butts in chairs" based tax breaks for companies that hire staff in their cities, and you don't have butts in the chairs, you don't have the tax breaks.
Can you point to one of the butts in chairs breaks? I have never heard of that specific requirement
It'd be buried in a contract somewhere. I only know about it because my company had that deal with a major city in the east coast.
Not to mention the fact that said real estate is all in extremely expensive locales (Bellevue, WA for starters), so that's a lot of money they're blowing on unoccupied buildings.