You see them building a delivery fleet as a moat: I see it as they've burned through literally every logistics broker in the US and now have no other choice. Their modus operandi to date was to put bids out to logistics brokers who would treat Amazon like any other customer and have some routes that were profitable, and some they'd lose money on in order to win the overall business. Amazon would then use that broker for nothing but the loss leader route and hammer it until the broker fired them as a customer. You can only do that to so many brokers before there is literally nobody left willing to do business with you.
Source: my buddy runs a broker business and will not do business with Amazon under any circumstances nor will any of his peers in this market.
This is pretty amazing (not for the brokers, I’m sure). Amazon just seems to be a hyper optimizing machine, logically stepping through all possible options to every decision.
You could drive all over town buying groceries piecemeal at whatever store has the biggest loss leader deal on those particular items, but for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs the savings will be offset by the expense of going to multiple stores. Yet if you are buying 10,000 gallons of milk and 10,000 loaves of bread, it becomes feasible.
It's cultural and it started way before they reached any scale. Bezos famously refused to buy desks and used recycled doors because it was cheaper. This isn't specific to Amazon, pretty much any business involved in distribution will work on ultra thin margins. If they don't penny pinch then they don't survive.
Incidentally this is most of what makes these places so miserable for their employees. They will think about their employees the same way they might consider an order for a million rolls of toilet paper.
Taking advantage of your friends doesn't make you a "hyper-optimising machine", it makes you an ass in the short term and a loner with no friends in the long term. Being a sociopath is not an innovation.
Why isn’t it an innovation? It’s a pretty brutalist view of how the world works, and is arguably optimizing for the short term over the long one. But it seems to work (and quite well at that).
I'm not sure why you feel the need to go to absurd examples to just prove a point. Whatever floats your boat, but this has ceased to be a useful conversation so I'm going to step out of it.
Source: my buddy runs a broker business and will not do business with Amazon under any circumstances nor will any of his peers in this market.