In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche
In detail, Ratuken Intelligence estimates Amazon’s share of US ecommerce sales fell from 35.1% in 2017 to 33.7% in 2018. Additionally, Amazon’s share of the US ecommerce market was 28.9% in November 2018. On the other hand, Amazon’s share of America e-commerce rose to 39% during the December 2018 holiday buying frenzy.
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Consequently, Amazon could buy Target, Macy’s, Dollar General, or Kroger for cash.
In fact, Jeff Bezos could buy both Dollar General and Macy’s or Kroger and Dollar General at once. Bezos can make such a purchase because Amazon (AMZN) has $41.25 billion in cash.
In particular, Amazon had 30.8 million video-streaming subscribers in America in 2017. Impressively Statista projects that number to grow to 46.3 million U.S. subscribers by 2020.
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GrubHub threatens Kroger (NYSE: KR) because of the size of its footprint and growth. For instance, GrubHub claims to serve over 1,700 American cities and 95,000 restaurants.
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Under these circumstances, eBay achieves classic value investment criteria. In particular, eBay generates a lot of cash but maintains a low stock price.
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Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) will probably join Sears and JC Penney (NYSE: JCP) in the retail graveyard this holiday
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Sprouts’ dilemma is that Amazon is just one of its competitors. Besides Amazon sprouts has to compete with Kroger (NYSE: KR), Walmart (NYSE: WMT), Aldi, and Target (NYSE: TGT) to name just a few.
For example, Kroger has a close relationship with Instacart and it is America’s largest organic grocer. For example, Kroger sold $1 billion worth of organic produce in 2017, Progressive Grocer estimates. In addition, Kroger sold $2 billion worth of its Simple Truth organic grand in 2017, Progressive Grocer calculates.
Under those circumstances, I cannot see how Sprouts can compete and survive as an independent company. Instead, Sprouts’ future will be as part of a larger organization – such as Aldi Nord or Kroger.
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The $15 an hour minimum wage could have killed 20,000 temporary jobs at Amazon.
To clarify, Quartz estimates Amazon will hire 100,000 temps for holiday season 2018. In contrast Amazon hired 120,000 temporary workers for holiday seasons in 2016 and 2018.
Amazon no longer needs the 20,000 temps because of its deployment of Kiva robots in fulfillment centers, Citi analyst Mark May theorizes. In particular, Kiva robots eliminate workers who pull merchandise from the shelves.
Instead, the robots literally bring the shelves to the workers who pull and pack and the goods for shipment. Quartz claims, Amazon cut the time needed to pull and pack an order from an hour to 15 minutes with robots.
To be fair to Bernie, Amazon would have deployed the robots with or without the $15 wage. In fact, the robots could have made the $15 wage possible by reducing the size of the labor force. Amazon is paying workers more because it has fewer of them thanks to robots.
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It should scare brick and mortar retailers because Amazon Go could generate profits similar to Amazon itself.
For instance, Amazon Go could generate up $2,700 a square foot in annual sales per square foot, Brick meets Click, claims. In contrast, Costar estimated Walmart’s annual sales-per-square foot was $325 in 2018.
Thus Amazon Go’s sales per square foot could be seven times those of Walmart’s. However, the Apple Store’s sales per square foot were nearly twice Amazon Go’s at $5,546 in 2017.
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BestBuy (BBY) needs more partnerships because it is not making that much money.
For instance, BestBuy recorded an operating income of $335 million and a net income of $244 million for 3rd Quarter 2018. However BestBuy recorded a gross profit of $2.229 billion on revenues of $9.379 billion for the same period.
Beyond that BestBuy reported an operating cash flow of $904 million, an investing cash flow of $127 million, and a free cash flow of $710 million in 3rd Quarter 2018. Thus, BestBuy has a cash rich business.
On the other hand, BestBuy needs to keep more of that cash. The partnerships are important because they could give BestBuy more cash flow without costly expansion.