Amazon Branches Offline in an Innovative Way

Amazon has opened an offline store in Seattle to beta test a counterless physical shopping experience, but this is limited to its employees for now. Konga and Jumia could pick one or two things from there (not literally though :grinning:) http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/05/amazon-launches-amazon-go-a-brick-and-mortar-grocery-store-that-does-away-with-checkouts/

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WOW! This is amazing!

Time will come when your Google or Uber employee card would get you a visafree pass into countries and special living privileges around the world.

Borders will then emerge from which company you work for as against one’s nationality. Civil advantages, primary social benefits and coverage defined more by the company you work for than the color of your passport, even within a sovereign border.

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I am bookmarking this statement of yours, principally because IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN, and principally because most people will not see this statement and realise that its chillingly telling of what Globalization will do in the Future.

Ok it’s better seen than narrated in text. So I’m posting the video here.

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I remember thinking this when a Facebook employee was telling me of their security detail while they were here.

I think this is super-interesting.

  1. Amazon aggregated consumer attention by selling the promise that its users could buy anything from any merchant in the world without leaving the comfort of their homes. At the same time, they sold merchants on the promise that their addressable market would become the whole world and they can infinitely scale inventory without having to spend money expanding a brick-and-mortar store.

  2. It means that they are going to buy ā€œJuiceā€ from ā€œAmazonā€ (the merchant they buy it from is not important). Consumers started to see Amazon as THE destination, instead of each merchant’s store. To do better, merchants had to list more and more of their inventory on Amazon at lower prices, which put Amazon in a stronger position relative to the merchants every cycle.

  3. Now that Amazon has aggregated all the attention, they are delivering the service to each customer’s physical location. So, if you don’t want to wait for a truck to deliver the item to you in a day, or a drone to deliver your item to you in 30 minutes, you can get up and pick it up ā€œfor freeā€ at the Amazon Go store closest to you. Merchants have been reduced to an easily replaceable commodity. Amazon can force them to sell at lower prices to increase its own profit margin without passing the cost to the consumer. Because all the consumers come to buy on Amazon, they cannot delist their produce.

Leverage of life.

Now, apply this mental model to Netflix and content creators, and finally, Facebook and the news media. :slight_smile:

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It’s already happening even in Nigeria. As the CEO of a recognized multinational company, you don’t need to pre-apply for a visa.

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