I wrote about Workampers, old retirees that move around the country in search of work, in my earlier blog post that discussed the excellent book, Nomadland by Jessica Bruder. In that post I mentioned that: So, it is very likely that it was not a young person that picked, packed or shipped the gift that you bought online this Holiday season. Instead, it is very likely that it was an old retiree… Increasingly e-commerce channels rely on retirees to pick products in the warehouse, which are then shipped to customers. (Picking is the lowest entry-level job in warehouses). Much of such retirees were people who lost their savings during the 2008 recession. Recently, one of the best reporters writing on operational issues in…
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An Amazon worker at Chattanooga, Tenn., fulfillment center in August. Photo Credit: Doug Strickland/Associated Press A fascinating article by Laura Stevens on WSJ (Subscription required) talks about how Amazon sets its third-party “deal of the day”. The first compelling fact that stood out from the article was the scale of revenues generated by third-party sellers on Amazon. A graph of the total gross merchandise volume (GMV) sold by Amazon, shows that in the recent years, the third-party share of Amazon revenues have increased from 50% to about 70% (even as Amazon’s revenues have exploded). How are these deals evaluated and picked by Amazon? Amazon’s deal of the day selections hinge on two important factors—whether it thinks an item will be…
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The above chart from Quartz shows how much e-commerce sales in the US have grown because of the low price. In fact, the price level is now comparable to 2000 prices. In short, many goods on e-commerce are being sold on very marginal and progressively diminishing profits.
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Online Sales in China exceeded USD 366B in 2016, almost comparable to e-commerce sales in the United States (360B in 2016). Note that online retail is “only” about 8.5% of the overall retail market in the United States. According to Fortune Magazine, Amazon was 34% of the US e-commerce market. However, China is an entirely different story. Amazon barely makes an appearance among the big e-commerce contenders. Taobao – an e-Bay like electronic market place owned by Alibaba commands a lion’s share of the China e-commerce market. Perhaps, even more, impressive is the scale of vertical integration of mobile payment systems with their corresponding e-commerce websites. For instance, the largest third-party payment system, Alipay, the mobile payment arm of Alibaba, has…
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Where do temporary e-commerce workers come from? I noticed that Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland, a book I enjoyed reading earlier in November, was listed in the NYTimes 100 Notable Non-Fiction books of 2017. Well-deserved recognition for the book. I recommend the book review by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who has written several deeply informative books on the nature of work and life in America. Here is an excerpt from Dr. Hochschild’s review. Moving “like blood cells through the veins of the country,” Jessica Bruder writes, a growing number of older people, post-recession refugees from the middle and working class, are, like Linda, crossing the land in their Jeeps, campers and repurposed buses in search of work. … Other nomads “pick raspberries in Vermont, apples in…
Leave a CommentI always thought that the term Black Friday, originated when retail firms turned “red” to “black”. Due to the heavy seasonality in sales, the existence of this term always made sense, especially for Retail firms. Through Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, I learned that history is more complicated. But, most interesting for the readers of this blog: The term originated in Philadelphia, probably sometime in the 50s, and wasn’t in common use in the rest of the country until decades later. From Wanamaker’s Department Stores to trying to Amazon HQ2 to Philly, Retail has changed a lot here.
Leave a CommentBloomberg has an excellent article on Retail Apocalypse, filled with some neat data visualizations, which I highly recommend. (Read the whole thing!) While media and political discussions have generally focused on the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs (e.g. Carrier, Rexnord, etc.) and the death of certain industries (coal, mining – which actually hire relatively fewer people than retail), I have always thought that there has been relatively little attention on Retail Jobs that have been lost in the past few years. For sure, Retail has been undergoing an accelerated sea-change due to the growth of e-commerce, historic suburban over-storing decisions, and the influence of changing customer tastes. However, at the heart of this crisis, is the loss of retail jobs and…
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