Sunday, November 27, 2016

More Black Friday Hype

In self-delusion, it is called bias-confirmation.  You read something and you make it fit what you want it to say.  Here is a article linked from a breathless headline on Drudge:
We have said earlier this week Thanksgiving can beat Black Friday or even Cyber Monday in terms of online consumer spending. Amazon just announced that Thanksgiving is quickly becoming one of the busiest mobile shopping days on Amazon in the US. In fact, mobile orders from Amazon customers on Thanksgiving Day exceeded both Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday 2015.
If he could say Thanksgiving beat Black Friday in terms of online consumer spending as he predicted, then he would have.  So his prediction is not borne out.  Never mind, he twists an unremarkable point to serve the self-delusional: orders on mobile devices, that is smart phone shopping, is up.

Well, with a year's worth of new smartphones in the hands of shoppers, and a year's worth of technology improvements, and a year's worth of new vendors optimizing smart phone ads, one would expect this result, right?

When O when will they report sales net of returns?  And net profits on loss leaders as the product mix?

Never.  Gotta keep those boys in mom's basement, thinking all experience is pixel-mediated, the future is on the web.  That will never happen.  VR will go the way of the movie industry, it is content, not medium that matters.

 Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Since Amazon is a public company, aren't they required by securities and exchange commission to report their earnings quoterly in 10q form ?

John Wiley Spiers said...

Sure, and Amazon always reports carefully engineered razor-thin margins... but my main concern is the "online retailers" who people think are replacing brick and mortar... they aren't.

John