Inefficiencies in Retailing

[uptheorg]

Hmmm . . . Arbitrage has been with us as long as there have been markets. The value added is the information that shows up the pricing disparity. Maybe the arbitrager doesn't work as hard as you and me, but that doesn't mean he hasn't added value.

"Gaming" the system is a part of human existence -- didn't cave men use clubs to kill their prey? A lot easier than using their bare hands, no?

[ibmiked]

All of this ‘free shipping’ from China is heavily subsidized by the US taxpayer. The irony is that it is pushing small American businesses out of business. You can’t get something from the Far East to your door more cheaply than you can ship something cross-continent without someone getting it up the tail pipe, and that’s ultimately us as Americans.

[LiveFromNY]

All of this ‘free shipping’ from China is heavily subsidized by the US taxpayer. The irony is that it is pushing small American businesses out of business. You can’t get something from the Far East to your door more cheaply than you can ship something cross-continent without someone getting it up the tail pipe, and that’s ultimately us as Americans.

You're exactly right. As an e-tailer, the whole thing infuriates me.

[beh911]

...When I first got involved in the internet (in 1995) we called this disintermediation. It’s been interesting over the years to watch various layers in business models being removed (think of travel agents). Another thing that occurred to me is that as younger generations grow up with the internet as an integral part of their lives and online sophistication grows, this removal of layers will most likely accelerate. In an extreme example, who needs Amazon when you can buy bare bones wholesale one item at a time from Asia, the same place Amazon gets most of their goods?

John, this is an interesting topic, technology exploiting inefficiencies. It's my industry so I am a part of it daily.

While you can go back in 2001 Kubrick-esque fashion to the discovery of the bone tool by pre-historic humans as an early exploitation, the internet or more directly its backbone of shared compute and network has accelerated change so dramatically that most people haven't thought through the ramifications beyond the near term economic dislocation.

What happens when entire industries that took decades to solidify their processes and pay scales transform in a matter of a couple years?

Next up for massive disruption or "inefficiency exploitation" are key white collar industries such as medicine and banking. And I don't mean the banking app on your phone. I'm talking about entire swaths of white collar bankers in front of screens losing out to algorithms and automation. What does that do to metro NY real estate for instance? The AI (Artificial Intelligence) push will drastically alter how society works.

We're LinkedIn buddies so check out my world a bit; it's the tooling and operating models driving these transformations.

Bryce