Podcast appearances and mentions of mercedes sprinter

new jersey bucky mercedes sprinter

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 14, 2020 48:36

Shane showed up in our hood while we were gone. He's recently come out from New Jersey, and he's living full time with his pitfalls Millie and Bucky in a giant Mercedes Sprinter that he converted himself. He's been great to hang our with for the last little while, and we had a nice little sit down and chat. Hope you enjoy it.

Mercedes GLS nicht gekauft!

Vom Selbstständigen zum Unternehmer von Jenz Koralus

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 27, 2019 6:27

Warum ich einen Mercedes GLS 400 nicht gekauft habe! Ich werde leider in diesem Haus so bald kein Auto mehr kaufen. Warum? Ich habe einen neuen Mercedes Sprinter da gekauft, einen Atego LKW und jetzt muß ich leider feststellen, es hat sich nichts verändert. Schade, mein nächster Schritt wird es sein, mal eine Verkaufsschulung durchzuführen. Warum? Ich sehe da noch so viele Möglichkeiten. Ich werde dem Inhaber mal einen Vorschlag unterbreiten. Es wäre so schön Ihn zu unterstützen, Gruß sagt Jenz.tv!

leben auto mehr geld haus unternehmen schritt gru verkaufen inhaber vorschlag ihn warum ich schade gekauft selbststndig grnden mercedes sprinter jenz mercedes gls selbstndig verkaufsschulung

from the van #40 - Megan Cable

cable socal mercedes sprinter

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 25, 2019 75:03

Megan is a nomad accountant living in a converted Mercedes Sprinter. We met when she was between vans in early 2019, and we've been trying to get her on the podcast ever since. We kept missing each other, but winter in SoCal is where all the vanners flock in the winter. Turns out we didn't even need to chase her. But it's been really great to spend some time with her.

from the van #37 - Alexa Glazer

livin glazer encinitas mercedes sprinter

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 3, 2019 61:10

Alexa Glazer came to Encinitas for a speaking engagement promoting her book "Livin' the Dream." She's livin' full-time in a Mercedes Sprinter and rolling from place to place for speaking engagements and adventures. We were stoked to get a chance to sit down with her and talk about public speaking, ambitions, and #vanlife. @movinalexa alexaglazer.com/

AUTOMAG Mercedes Sprinter Bodybuilder Solutions, 13/11/2019 16:15

RTL - Automag

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 13, 2019

En neien Auto konfiguréieren ass je no Autosmark net esou einfach. Säiten a Säite vun Optiounsleschten a Packages musse fir den optimale Wonschauto duerchgeholl ginn. Am Utilitaire ass dat nach emol anescht - wéi genee, dat huet fir eis de Paul Origer bei de Mercedes Sprinter Bodybuilder Solutions gewise kritt.

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AUTOMAG Mercedes Sprinter Bodybuilder Solutions , 13/11/2019 16:15

RTL - Automag

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 13, 2019

news comedy radio auto luxembourg rtl packages bodybuilders mercedes sprinter

EP189 - Code Commerce and Grocery Shop

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 27, 2019 51:54

EP189 - Code Commerce and Grocery Shop This episode was recorded right after Jason & Scot received their iPhone 11 Pro Max's. Jason mentioned a new iOS feature to take full page screenshots. Here is how to take full page screenshots in iOS 13. Event Recaps: Code Commerce - Sept 9 and 10 in New York City Groceryshop - Sept 15-18 In Las Vegas Amazon News Amazon orders 100,000 electric vans from Rivian Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products Other News BDO reports more than 7k stores already closed in 2019, which is already more than any other year Some contreversy over store closure numbers. IHL disagreed with Coresight methodology and findings. Coresight store closure tracker IHL score closure study Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 189 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Sunday, September 22nd, 2019. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Automated Transcription of the show Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this episode 189 being recorded on Sunday September 22nd, 2019 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners. Jason it was we got a lot to cover tonight we'll see what get a couple trip reports before we jump into that I'm dying to know did you get your iPhone 11 on new iPhone day was September 20th. Jason: [0:58] I did I was traveling during the week that it was an out so I was like at code Commerce secretly listening to the announcement. In the audience and then that Friday I was still in New York so I super convenient for my Apple they made it 5:30 a.m. 8:30 a.m. East Coast time so I got to pre-order. That that Friday and I my phone arrived this is Sunday my phone arrived on Friday. Scot: [1:30] Look at it all moved over and everything's rocking. Jason: [1:33] I did I think. Scot: [1:35] Pictures senior pictures. Jason: [1:36] So I suspect we got similar if not exactly the same models I got the 11 Pro Max screen. Scot: [1:46] I got the same thing yes you have impeccable taste sir. Jason: [1:50] Yes twinsies and I would say the upgrade experience continues to get smoother and less glitch free so, in general it was super easy one wrinkle I was using a unpopular feature of the 10 which is dual Sims. And so the way in the the US they don't have two SIM ports so one of your Sims is virtual and one of them is a physical Sim so I had to a work phone account in a personal phone account and in the upgrade Apple convert your former esim to a physical Sim so now I have two physical Sims and I can't fit them both in my phone so I'll have to go back to an AT&T store and get a new esim. For all those people that want to have have a new definition for first world problem. Scot: [2:47] Watches get two phones. Jason: [2:50] Yeah not a fan I've carried a lot around a lot of phones and it's much easier to have to I mean I have one in the to send feature actually works quite well. Articulated there different carrier. Scot: [3:01] How to upgrade. Jason: [3:03] Except for this week I mean I'm still fine I'll I'll still be able to travel with the with the once a mint I can swing by and AT&T store last time I did this no one in the AT&T store never heard of any ECM but I have a feeling they've got it all I'll Donald in by this time. And so I don't think we need to cover a lot like it's you know mostly well-known, new features like you know why she related to camera but there is one secret e-commerce TV feature that I'm I'm kind of happy about 4 maybe only be relevant to his nerves of the show. Scot: [3:40] I'm trying to block what is it. Jason: [3:43] So in the the Safari screen capture so when you you do the combination of buttons to take a picture of your screen. You can now and now gives you the option to grab not just the visible part of the screen but the entire webpage all the way to the bottom. Scot: [4:05] Nice so you can get your lung checkouts. Jason: [4:09] Yeah yeah and so when you're taking pictures of mobile experience is to illustrate two teams or clients or things like that which is something we do a lot in the old days what you had to do is take a bunch of pictures and Stitch them together. And so now this is super seamless in it actually works in Safari and male and a couple other programs that weren't as relevant but they're for web pages that's a handy little feature. Scot: [4:33] If I'd call that an e-commerce feature as much as it Chief digital strategy retail officer feature. Jason: [4:39] Fair enough fair enough a ux, u.s. benefit I guess and on the flip side I feel like the last three years I've been waiting for the stupid true vision camera to go in the back so that we can finally get our shoe size right but I'll have to wait at least another year for that was. Scot: [4:55] Did to get the little pixels and also that we can. Jason: [4:59] So that front camera that does your your face recognition has it's an advanced measurement device that measures in 3D in it in the few retailers that are they use that for clever e-commerce experiences like Warby Parker will measure your face and recommend frame specifically for your face and it it it's like millimeter accurate so we're there to be a camera like that on the back of the phone you could imagine measuring a space to make sure that the refrigerator would fit the opening in your kitchen or the sofa would fit in your living room or exactly what size shoes you should order from a particular vendor Nike watch that feature without the fancy camera but it would be much better with this this hyper accurate camera. Scot: [5:47] Yeah he agreed and while you were traveling will you get a pretty cool recognition. Jason: [5:52] We did we did that must have been you because I was busy not focusing on the podcast. Scot: [5:57] It was snot me I think it was it was so it was just people someone out there likes our content. Jason: [6:05] Are the Luminous body of work. Scot: [6:07] What is a if you know how many hours that people have to listen to us. Jason: [6:11] We we yeah we're about 200 hours. Scot: [6:16] That's a it's a lot of us out there in the universe. Jason: [6:21] Yes yes so if you ever have The Misfortune of hearing me speak in person I usually open up by saying in the highly unlikely event you don't get enough of me in the next 30 minutes there's 200 more hours of me on the interweb. Scot: [6:31] Google I got a lot to cover let's jump into it first when I get a trip report from recode decode that was held in beautiful New York City September 10th how's the show. Jason: [6:46] Yeah it was awesome so we waited to that in the last segment but this is code recode the the publication which is now owned by box them a very fancy show that I went too early in the year that they call code conference and Jason Del Rey there has been enough that show a couple times is the Commerce correspondent for them and he is started the series of events called code Commerce so used to be, like an evening event on top of other shows where he would have like three speakers and now for the, third year in a row he's had his own Standalone two day event in New York city so this is the third annual code Commerce, and I like it it's a conference more than a trade show so there there's a few exhibitors but. [7:38] It mostly is a single agenda of speakers everybody sits in the room with since to the same speakers, there are no presentations that are all interviews with journalist mostly Vox journalist interviewing the the gas so it's a pretty dynamic. Dialogue and you know sometimes people you know that stuff out that maybe they didn't plan to, the audience is allowed to ask questions and so I got a little fired up at some point and ask some some questions and some of the speakers, and so I just really like it they get a really good collection of speakers. And I feel like the format lends itself to getting really useful stuff it's small and intimate so the networking was great I got to meet and talk to a lot of. Listeners on the show I got to meet a couple of guests that we've had on the show that week we did not have in person so. That was fun so all-in-all a good thing that one other thing I should say is in addition to that, that's her speaker format they also have a half-day of off sites where you pick one and let you choose your own adventure of these I ate different offsides and they take you behind the scenes of a of a retail or e-commerce business. And know that those can be cool to I had a complex so I didn't get to do that this year but in. [8:57] Let's see what's hot in 90 seconds or less there's probably 18 speakers at the event so there, there's a guy Kim Downing used to be the chief creative officer at Neiman Marcus he moved to a mall of group in the New Jersey called triple five and they're they're famous for having taken over this mall development in New Jersey called The American Dream It's At Nigam all owned by the same folks that own Mall of America I've been trying to open it for 20 plus years it's supposed to open next month don't hold your breath based on their past track record openings and not doing it and I have to be honest like like these guys seemed totally disconnected from reality like there just talking about what a great experience it is and how everyone in Manhattan is going to want to go to New Jersey to escape Manhattan and you know go shop for other necessities at this this giant mega mall and it's you know it's the anchor tenant in the mall is Barney's who's already bankrupt you know all the other tenants are tenants that have eight other stores in Manhattan and it just it just seems like, yeah he came up there pitching a small development like half an hour after Scott Galloway did 45 minutes on why malls were dead. [10:14] So not super exciting. They we had Jason Drogi who's the vice president of uber everything so that's all the services at Uber besides the car-sharing so he does all the restaurant delivery that you know food is a particularly interesting area for me it was an interesting interview at the end I got up and asked him if his service was good for the the restaurants because I like, there's a lot of evidence that. That all these delivery services are disaster for the restaurants cuz the margins are super low the customers are super opportunistic and the restaurants can't sell liquor in most cases which is where they make most of their profit so I had a premise that. That these services are a disaster for the restaurant and the services are not 20% of all restaurant consumption so that's a pretty big. Inflection points and Jason did not have a kid a very good satisfying answer for why he was he was good for the restaurant business. Scot: [11:15] Do you lease disagree with you. Jason: [11:17] Like she did not make a strong argument we were talking about that after the fact he kind of like pivot away from the question. And talked about you know what like you know how they could be good for restaurants but not like the underlying economics of it being tough. Scott Galloway did a couple things he recorded a podcast the final episode of Land of the Giants with Jason Del Rey and he did a 45 minute presentation I most enjoyed it I've sometimes been critical I think Scott is super funny and has a lot of insightful things to say, but he has a tendency to be highly repetitive so if you seen him once and then you see him a bunch of other times. [12:01] It's a lot of the same content which is maybe something all I'll public speakers struggle with but I would actually say most of the content in this show. Mabon thoughts I'd heard of his before from Twitter or what. That was the first time you put them together in a presentation so I thought that was good and interesting and he was. You know he's been super negative on the wework IPO and you know so we spent a lot of time talking about those guys. He's eating a kind of a bullish on breaking up Amazon so he shared his POV on. And that whole thing and you know just. Had some sort of interesting controversial povs which is what he's he's usually known for he also pointed out. That light from his perspective the mall business is just totally dead and the specialty apparel business is next to go after that. That voted poorly than for the American dream project which is a mall full specialty apparel. [13:04] So next up Jennifer Hyman from Rent the Runway so that's, awesome story she's one of the three really well-known female entrepreneurs in our space and that was an interesting conversation talking a lot less about the the original model and more of their. Their monthly rental model and and you know some of that the new competition that's emerged in the rental space so that was an interesting conversation. David Kahn the CEO of Birkenstocks Scott you'd be familiar with him because he's he's had he's been one of those outspoken controversial positions on Amazon they were selling a ton of shoes on Amazon. Century pulled off the platform completely because they felt like they couldn't protect their intellectual property. Now they're they're back on Amazon in a very conservative mild way they've authorized a few resellers to sell an Amazon but they don't sell Direct. And David was prominently featured in the episode of Land of the Giants that focused on. Why Amazon could be bad for companies and potential should be broken up so is interesting to hear from David and I was joking with you before the show. You know what brand like Birkenstocks you you kind of expect that hippie would like long hair and Birkenstocks to walk on stage and he can't you know he's like a witch I could bank or in a in a like custom suit so it's kind of funny. [14:25] So then we had your favorite brand on a BofA Steph Korey and Jen Rubio from away until they talked a lot about their. There a growth strategy and and you know some of the success they've had in their retail strategy moving forward and that was all. [14:45] Someone interesting Max Webb Gin who's the founder of a firm which is an interesting payment model that a lot of e-commerce sites use their. Sort of an interesting financial model they're there like a no fees lending system so you get charged no late fees. There's some really interesting novel things about it and he he was sharing that we had Marie. Myrna Levine who's the VP of global Partnerships at Facebook and so she was mostly talking about Instagram and in Instagram checkout which is. Something near and dear to do e-commerce smokes and a little bit about the Facebook Marketplace. And again you know she painted a pretty Rosy picture I got a chance to get up and ask her a couple questions I asked her you know if. I said hey there's a bunch of from my perspective yqx problems with Instagram check out that make a not very appealing to Brands like most notably you can only sell one product at a time. And ask if they plan with all of that and she she said that yeah they still consider Instagram check out a real early beta and that they would expect it to evolve a lot before General release, and I said you know bigger picture you talked about how important it is for consumers to have stored payment information to make things like this work. [16:08] You know is it realistic that customers are going to ever trust Facebook with their payment information by giving your your track record and she totally dodged that question and talked about like all the great security features they were using for payment. Which was not the point right like obviously I'm sure Facebook is using the best. Encryption technology in tokenization but it's at the point is there there a damaged brand when it comes to trust in. It's going to be really interesting with it I can get a bunch of consumers to give him payment information and give her a chance to answer that and she she was not a very compelling enter answer. [16:45] And then wrap it up probably the big Marquee interview was Mark Lori who's the president of digital at Walmart Jason did written, that's somewhat negative article that was like super popular a few months before so. How to take props to mark 4 for coming into the lions den and facing him. And I not shockingly well polished Walmart exec did not break a bunch of news in the interview. But it was interesting to see him there and you know there are few questions where would say like. He did not seem as enthusiastic as you would expect someone to be that was, I'm super fired up about the role like I think Jason you know like tried to grill them on whether he was going to leave Walmart at the end of five years and you know Marge answer is it like absolutely I live like committed to be there and she seems like wait are you staying because you love it or because you made a commitment. [17:44] So that that was really interesting generators one of the co-founders of Harry's that's a great idea to see story Julie rain Wainwright is the CEO of Rio Rio was. One of the most colorful interviews of the show so that was cool and then Tara walpert who's the VP of agencies that use Google who's mainly focus on YouTube and so she talked a lot about like how how there, they're expanding influencer marketing and expanding Commerce features on YouTube so pretty rich robust lineup that had a in a bunch of different stuff for different people and I thought it was well worth the time. Scot: [18:27] Code to seems like Lori had bet a lot on grocery kind of going to show with the pickup and then also all those Acquisitions they did on digitally native brands for loose stool kind of your gear just harder or had the blue kind of come off that Rose. Jason: [18:44] I think the answer is yes or no so I think they're Walmart is Super Bowl champs grocery part of Jason's article was Mark tends to get a lot of credit for digital Grocery and apparently that's creating some conflict because most of the digital grocery work actually happens in the stores and you know Mark was like hey it like that's totally fair like this the stores are killing it on digital Grocery and yeah we probably do get disproportionate amount of the credit totally understandable that digital groceries going awesome so he like I would say he had a good answer and double down on digital grocery digital native Brands if it was a little bit like yeah I originally we bought some Brands and that's no longer the strategy that were much more bullish on incubating brands from scratch in house then we are buying Brands and he confirmed the rumor that Jason Delray had heard that. One of the Acquisitions ModCloth that they're there might even be discussions going on to sell it back to someone else. [19:42] So I think Mark like with Express that he was still bullish on the space, but that's why you know they had to learn at Walmart that like buying a brand and integrating it was was probably a challenge so he pointed out he pointed till I come all is well home which is a de jure need a brand that they incubated in house and then there was kind of a third category that they were talking a lot of a little bit about and you may have seen some news sort of you know turning up the the focus on the marketplace which is probably near and dear to your heart and I think they've announced the pilot of fulfillment by Walmart which for the first time there duet they're not that helpful products for some of the third parties and that they have an interest in dramatically improving their tool set and you're improving the experience for third-party sellers so. Scot: [20:33] Seems like a one theme with Rent the Runway and maybe a way would be diepio Market to that come up because diepio Market's been somewhat open with Chewie getting out and, real real and a couple of other folks and those guys are kind of both could be on in the pipeline the Jason drone to a month. Jason: [20:54] He did yeah yeah so there was in the pre-ipo companies were mostly pretty koi which You is kind of what you would expect the date you know they're open to it in aren't you know I'm close but that they don't need to go public and that's not that you know they didn't start the pump the company to necessarily go public Julie Wainwright you know who's at the real real and they they finish their offering already right am I. Scot: [21:20] Yeah they been out for all the done really well. Jason: [21:23] Yeah and so she you know she had a lot more sort of insight about what either the the pros and cons have been on the other side and. And you know how there was some interesting conversation about. [21:40] The impact of competitors and their successful IPO you know bringing more people out of the woodwork she also has a totally fair an interesting POV about being a, female entrepreneur and some of the challenges raising money and she's like you know she talked a lot about how like. Should have been a lot of time convincing every male investor why, that the business use case was even appealing to women and she's like you don't know nobody that we work at Uber ever had to explain to an investor, that white small businesses need office space or people need a ride right but but she often would have to convince someone that that. You know that women would benefit from buying these used luxury goods and that often authentication was a super important thing in so she she told some funny stories and, I felt was a sort of appropriately cocky she talked about 1 BC that like. So I didn't get the pitch and like felt like all the money they were investing in in selling authentic products was was a waste of time and now that they've had the successful IPO that VC has funded a new competitor and is like publish blog post talking about the importance of authenticity, and I think she's like whatever dude we were here before you and will be here after your death which is kind of nice in both. Scot: [23:07] Yeah I've heard the Rent the Runway and the Stitch fix lady's house somewhere story where a bunch of mail DC's wouldn't invest because they didn't understand the concept or they would say I don't know if I don't think my wife would use this. Jason: [23:18] Yeah and I think that sounds like the common Trend right is that everybody's market research as they go ask their wife and that you know that's pretty small sample size. Scot: [23:26] Yeah cost of the new zip from there had a mini Starbucks and went to Vegas for grocery shopper. Jason: [23:33] I did I would load it up on Starbucks order my phone and Jen it out to grocery shop which is in Las Vegas so is reminder this is the second year of grocery shop grocery shop is a a show by the folks Miss founded, shoptalk that's focused primarily on grocery in cpg and so. Drew really fast it was maybe 1,500 people last year was 3,000 people this year that it was at the Venetian and felt a lot like shop Taco Shop talk and grocery Shopper moving to Mandalay Bay next year for people that care about their Las Vegas venues there Starbucks at both so it's kind of neutral to me. [24:17] The end it was also a good show I'd say it in a different way so most of the the Keynotes at this show were Marquee brands, but the content was less interesting to me because for the most part their brands aren't allowed to come up and just give a commercial for their, their business and that you know there weren't like critical questions or necessarily new content so well. You might have been interested in a lot of the companies in the Keynotes there are folks like Target and, beyond meat and honesty and ortado in Procter & Gamble that were giving key notes Coca-Cola Sam's Club. [25:04] Either wasn't a ton of like interesting new useful takeaways in that contents but the the 3,000 + people that attended the show where all industry insiders there a lot of the breakout panels that were where super interesting and they were just that I just had a ton of useful conversations, at the cocktail parties and you know at the Starbucks between sessions and just felt like that the networking was super valuable for me so. Kind of the opposite of a recode it was less about content and more about networking. [25:43] I did host a couple of panels so I was the MC for two panels I did. A panel called preparing for grocery Commerce that was kind of targeted at people grocer that are just getting into e-commerce and I had three panelist on that session I had to, a Stephen Raymond who's the VP of e-commerce at Hain Celestial which is a house of brands most notable for their Celestial teas, I had Wayne Dewayne who's been on this podcast he's the VP of e-commerce at constellation brands. Which is a bunch of alcohol and Spirits brands, so we actually drink some Coronas on stage while we were chatting so that was a big hit. And then I had to Dan Bracken who's the VP of consumer Insight at Church & Dwight which is a. A big cpg so they each kind of gave their their learnings and best advice for new people entering the e-commerce grocery space I got good feedback that that was useful. [26:38] And then on the second day I did a more advanced panel on connecting customer data points so far this one we had kind of to Keynote panelist. We have to bring in a retailer so the retailer is a Steve Henning who's the VP of digital. For Wakefern Food Group which is a big Co-op of of Grocers. And talked about where they are and in data and what their customer data strategy is and got an all the bits and bytes of, add emps and. All those sorts of things and then for the brand perspective we had Doug stranton who's the chief digital Commerce officer at the Hershey Company so got got his perspective and Doug has a bonus that was also the chief digital officer at Unilever for number of years so so it was kind of their in a lot of their formative so a lot of interesting insights from both of those guys you know when you're getting into the hardcore management of data and activating that data for customer experiences. Scot: [27:43] The so. What's kind of the meta Topic at grocery is it still curb versus home or is it Amazon jump the shark with Whole Foods or more. Almost feels like maybe Brands going direct his kind of. Jason: [28:03] So this show like so it is. Like there's a lot of groceries at the show but there's a lot of cpgs at the show so one big thing is the whole disruption of cpgs right that the there's a lot of digital native brands that have lines that are like competing with income in cpg, and you know I'd say a year ago the dialogue was like this is a huge disruption in this year like there's more evidence that those brands are, you can achieve a certain level of success but then are really sort of plateauing, the the incumbency Bee Gees have not successfully launched a new a lot of new products and so there's a lot of dialogue, about how those companies are doing things to get more customer intimacy and get better connected to the customer and watch products that are more relevant to customers and then they're there was an awful lot of talk about the sort of third approach in this whole thing which is retailers launching brands, and how those those retail brands have been successful and how they've evolved a lot from the original, start a private label and in fact one of the the Keynotes Stephanie winquest use the EVP of food at Target. You know they launched a major new grocery brand for Target but basically at the show so. [29:24] So her keynote was a lot about this new food brand in that. The that the Retailer's sort of competing with the the incumbent and Challenger cpgs is was a big conversation at the show. Scot: [29:37] Yeah and then I'm watching your Twitter feed it seems like there is some interesting Target kind of talking going on there with what did we learn from Target. Jason: [29:46] Well I talk about that you like so Target is maybe the poster child for being the most successful at that strategy so they want to strike 5 brands. Now sell over 2 billion dollars but one place where they haven't been big as in grocery and so in fact, like grocery was a newish strategy for target maybe we'll call it seven or eight years ago and well a lot of categories at Target or any kind of known for surprising and delighting customers and having these. You know premium products that that the customer wouldn't expect. Grocery was always sort of the me to category for Target like like if you needed something that they may have had it but it wasn't something. [30:24] You were excited about acquiring. Inside out you know a lot of this conversation was about Target doubling down on Grocery and you know trying to get to the point where they're surprised is. And Delight for grocery in the same way that they they are four other categories and they said they launched a new owned brand for food called good and gather they kind of retired a lot of their older brands. And you know this is a a focus on. Simpler products fewer ingredients non-GMO mostly Organics in so it's not so much a knock off of a of a national brand but you know what a set of products that they think I'm particularly targeted at the. Target guest and they're forecasting this will be the the biggest. I'm on brand that Target has which is pretty big because you know some of that apparel brand cell cell 2 billion dollars each a year so. [31:27] So if they hit that forecasts that that will be somewhat impressive so that was a lot of the the target conversation I would also say you like shipt. You know there is a lot of conversation about curbside pickup & Home Delivery Target owns the company in that spaceship. And there's a lot of talk about how successful that's been for Target but ship still is in the business of providing the services for other party so shipped had a big. Presence on the trade show flooring was a big sponsor and said there's there's a lot of talk about Last Mile in the Bears pros and cons of the different meth. Scot: [32:00] Code for their highlights from grocery. Jason: [32:06] For me those were a bunch of big takeaways I got to sit sit down with a couple bucks and record a couple podcast that will get out of here in the weeks to come so I mentioned Doug Stratton who's the chief digital officer at Hershey you and I are both chocolate Advocates so like we wouldn't miss the chance, to get a podcast with him and then I also got to sit down with a zebra car while who's the VP of Shopper marketing at the Coca-Cola Company in, can I talk about how coke is thinking about digital and what what they're doing in in digital which is interesting you know it is interesting like we are now. Grocery is a very low margin business, the average sale price for a lot of these products or the Brand's is super low and so historically these have not been very digital categories you you don't think of. A big digital investment to sell dollar candy bars or cans of soda, but you know now these guys are you know front-and-center focusing on digital because it's really starting to impact their business. Scot: [33:09] Wrinkle in the other Megatron to uncover before we jump into some news. Jason: [33:13] Nope nope I think that's a ton but if you're in that space I would definitely think about putting that on your on your wrist for next year and come visit us at Mandalay Bay. Scot: [33:22] I forgot to ask when you're in New York did you get to see the new Apple store or did you miss me. Jason: [33:28] I didn't sit at the Apple Store at you open this Friday so I've done some video walkthroughs you and I are going to be back in New York Knicks next month together so maybe if schedules permit would be super fun we should go visit the store together. Scot: [33:43] Awesome I look forward to that Coldwell wanting to lose last couple minutes to talk about some news and it wouldn't be a Jason Scott show without some Amazon news. Jason: [34:00] Amazon news new your margin is there opportunity. Scot: [34:10] To a lot of news out there on Amazon some of it I was going to put into the political bucket before we talk about that though you're one of the things that kind of hid in my world it was interesting was they made a big investment and Order of electric vehicles Tesla has competitor called rivian, and ribbons coming out with trucks with electric platforms so Amazon announced not only they invest an undisclosed amount that they were part of a $700 round and they were listed first which kind of flies are the largest but they ordered a hundred thousand electric delivery vehicles from Caribbean and they're saying they should have prototypes in 20/20 start volume out in 2021 and have them all on the road by 2024 this is kind of interesting because Amazon has not really said much about a green lot of Amazon employees have been. [35:09] Rallying internally Jason Del Rey has written about this so it was kind of a pretty big vote for our insert limit their carbon footprint as a company and then it's also interesting because they are propping up a big rival to two, Tesla in the form of rivian and you know Elon and Jeff are going at it as latest Rockets So Alive people kind of said this is kind of another way for Bezos to really kind of get under a Elon Musk in by supporting a competitor. Jason: [35:41] Interesting so we might see some Amazon high speed trains in the near future to them. Scot: [35:49] Whatever the Rival to boring could be. Jason: [35:55] Exactly the thing that toy strike me about this which seems like Amazon's exact Playbook is I want to say they made this huge announcement the day before there was a big scheduled like green demonstration and a bunch of Amazon employees were planning on walking out to Tess art of advocate for Amazon embracing adrenal footprint and so do I get Amazon has historically been very good at these like proactive PR moves and it seems like this was they were totally able to leverage that this time. Scot: [36:29] Yeah yeah. They have a picture of the Prototype van will link to it and show notes it looks really good so it's going to be interesting that the big question is really the range on these things so, you know the I don't know how much it typical Prime band drives a day but I see him on the road constantly so be interesting to see if they have to come up with some clever way of rapidly charging these things are or they're going to ship them in a different way or something. Jason: [36:54] They each do half a day's delivery so that's why they had to get so many. Scot: [36:57] Yes it could be it could be part of it so I don't I don't know the ranges. Jason: [37:00] Quick clarification question for me so like obviously Tesla makes a bunch of electric vehicles and I know they've talked about business vehicles and trucks but as far as I know they don't they don't have a, like a van form-factor I feel like Amazon's about Sprinter vans in the past which is the big, Mercedes V8 like is it obvious that this is a trivium's a direct competitor with like is this worse news for Tesla or is it worse news for Mercedes. Scot: [37:26] I think it's probably worse news for Mercedes Elon if this is a tweet or live interview I've seen him talk about how he really likes the Mercedes Sprinter and they should work together on the electric one he always has little twinkle in his eye and you can't tell if he's just basically crazy or if there's something going on there I think Mercedes a Tesla have crossed licensed a lot of technology to I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't Force something go on there between Tesla and Mercedes to get the Sprinter platform Electric. Jason: [37:59] Got you and I assumed that like the Des customer will then be FedEx. Scot: [38:05] What FedEx use it so UPS actually has a big electric thing going already and I don't know who they are platform is on that it's, maybe I don't know I don't know what UPS uses but I've seen them them talk a lot about getting to carbon-neutral pretty quickly and they have some electric fans out there. Jason: [38:30] That's going to be an interesting space to watch if only to a podcast about that kind of stuff. Scot: [38:34] We will will keep track of it here and then also on the vehicle to podcast where it's been even more time talking about that Scot vehicle Trends going on how about on the political side there's been a lot of negative stuff out there on Amazon and so I'll turn to you for this the highlights on that. Jason: [38:51] Yes I know. Scott loves talking about the political stuff it's his favorite thing to do so it's a big big, generosity on his part time to pass it over to me. [39:05] So you know there continues to be a bunch of Niger negative sentiment you got all these Democratic candidates talking about breaking up Amazon without. [39:16] Necessarily obvious reason why the last couple weeks there were some actual that government announcements about like looking into antitrust issues in the one that affect an Amazon was that the FTC was talking about probing some of the 3p practices and in the one that comes with the most is, Amazon, disadvantaging third-party sellers in favor of their own practices so essentially like the The Narrative goes you can't both play in the game and be the referee it's not fair, that you're selling products in competition with your Marketplace Sellers and you, control things like whose product shows up in Search and how visible every product is and so, that's a big narrative like the counter narrative is like this is in a remotely new idea retards have been selling their own products for over a hundred years they always put their own products and favorable positions and they charge brands in order to have have good positioning in the store said that like there's, there's nothing particularly new that Amazon's doing that Walmart and Woolworths before then, didn't do but it is getting a lot of visibility and one of the the big articles that came up there was kind of interesting is Wall Street Journal. [40:46] Actually like ran an article where they they talk to some Amazon Engineers that like, confidential confidential admitted that Amazon had changed their search engine to intentionally by us their own products and so again debatable whether that's, illegal or immoral in any way and I'll leave that to others to decide but one way it's interesting is Jeff has always talked about being the most customer-centric company in the world and wanting to have the best experience for customers and it's super controversial if you search for Energizer batteries like pretty obvious what your intent is and you would imagine the best experience would be too quickly get you to Energizer batteries but when amazonbasics batteries have higher visibility on that search term then Energizer batteries, like arguably like you're trying to boost your own profits at the expense of being customer-centric and so it's kind of a. [41:49] A pretty tangible example of of where Amazon might be drifting from their their idealistic morals, and so that that's been a little interesting to follow that, that exact issue is one of the episodes of Land of the Giants and a former guest on the show Charlie Cole who's the the chief digital officer at to me and Samsung by cheat he very explicitly said it is like look, I don't mind competing with Amazon that's totally fair they can make products to compete with me that's totally fair but when people search for my product on Amazon and they intentionally put their products in front of them that's not a good customer experience and just don't lie and say you're trying to be customer-centric when you're doing stuff like that was gonna as blunt as Charlie put it so an interesting space. Scot: [42:39] Yeah I guess cleaners and go to watch them navigate through this stuff and you have the counter argument would be well retailers for doing it for years and. Old Roy, dog food in a Walmart is in front of the Purina dog food that kind of thinks sometimes you know these the physical arguments don't really translate to to the digital where you know it customer is clearly expressed a brand new you should get them their quickie soap to be a lineman. Jason: [43:08] Yeah yeah like a little less controversial but like you know there's some labels like Amazon choice and and some new labels that they're testing and people are like is Amazon gaming nose and I I may have made a smart a tweet at some point where I showed like staff picks from Trader Joe's and I'm like oh my god do you think some of these might not actually be stabbed pics. Scot: [43:29] Go in any other needs any other Amazon usually cover. Jason: [43:36] I think those those were the big things I know we're running short on time so let's let's get to our last genre. Scot: [43:46] We haven't talked to her about Mulligan lately but I was reading some reports that a we've already had over 7,000 store closures heading 7300 as of September 1st I think that's more than we've ever had in any previous year and we still got three to four months ago, another world retail you kind of if you can make it through October you you're probably not going to close for December that thing's going to be pretty pretty bad if you're going to close for those two months so I think it will slow down but I think we have a chance of hitting 8 or 9 K hear some of the this is based on data from video so some of the top store closures are Payless with 2,300 stores Gymboree with 750 Charlotte Russe. And then on the watchlist they have several companies that are our kind of they look at this kind of load of ducks to assets and then also are they losing money making money in kind of protective time when there may be a chapter 11 events Forever 21 is on there a JCPenney at send a Pier One in Francesca's chokes, I'm surprised this didn't include more mattress worse cuz around me you know we still have like eight thousand mattress stores just in Raleigh-Durham and they're pretty much all closed all the sudden I wonder if this is under-reporting a little bit and I was kind of surprised that mattress stores weren't one of the big contributors. Jason: [45:15] We'll see that's a great point because it's something funny came out about all this so I think the macro points are totally true like that we are seeing more store closures in a single year than we ever seen before there are actually like we'll see if they come to play or not but like that on that watch was the one that they're like strong rumors are really preparing for a a bankruptcy which would be somewhat surprising at this point is Forever 21 because prove your point like. You know you really wouldn't want to go in a bankruptcy right right before the holiday season and there are there rumors that, if they did that the malls might be a potentially bail them out as they have, I've done for at least one of their apparel retailer in the past Aeropostale so that's kind of interesting but I I see the inside baseball I found an interesting study also, so this instead of you just said it is from video and they did a bunch of their own research so most of their store closure information came from, public disclosures so it's public companies that said in a 10K or an investor call that they're planning to close X number of stores. [46:28] And so that's that was their data source for the store closings and like I'm sure all the stores are closing video also cited the source that we see most commonly for tracking these store closing closings and openings which is core site which is a research firm that does this really useful can a weekly tracker on how many stores are closing and how many stars are opening a bunch of stores have open this year not enough to offset the closings and that that would also be a first so while there been a lot of closing in the last couple years that I've actually been more openings than clothes XO, this could be the first year we had a net negative and course I may have had a net negative last year even that now that I think about it but. Here's what's interesting about that so all of these companies are arbitrarily picking a list of well-known retailers in tracking. [47:20] The opening and closing and said there's another market research firm out there IHL that does a bunch of retail research. And they conducted a lot more comprehensive study and they said hey we are going to look at every retailer that operates 50 or more stores in North America and track how many they've opened and closed. And we're going to estimate where they don't have public disclosures or we're going to call them and ask and we're going to use real estate records and so instead of just kind of. Tracking press releases we're going to really do the math on all this and, they not surprisingly they found more store closures then then video or. [48:02] Coresite but they found way more store openings than either of these companies so pretty this IHL research that came out, there are still more stores opening then closing it just interesting to think about like I, I think our macro points are totally true that retails not going away that were way over stored in the US that we we do need to be closing stores in our closing stores in there that's a a necessary adjustment but it is interesting I feel like in the Echo chamber of our space like this coresight research gets its reported and recited and blended into other people's research on the time and was kind of funny to see this I shall study come out and explicitly point out that. Coresight research is not particularly rigorous and somewhat random so it was like a little inside baseball research fight. Scot: [48:56] Yeah and I wish square footage is what really matters right because you know Closing one JCPenney is is like I don't know. Jason: [49:04] Yeah you have to open off a lot of the way stores to make up for a JCPenney. Scot: [49:07] Yeah yes that's what really matters and I've never seen anyone really be able to track that very well unfortunately. Jason: [49:12] No no and I unfortunately like we've all seen the summaries of the IHL I'll confess it's inexpensive study to buy so I haven't actually. Bought the research but I don't think they have the the net square footage in there but just anecdotally if you look at the list of stores that are open and closing you're absolutely right like in general there's there's more bigger stores closing in smaller stores open. Scot: [49:37] One one last thing to make sure you put on your your calendar the Disney plus subscriptions it opened up so you can go ahead and pre buy that so on November 12th, and they have exciting new Star Wars TV live action show called The Mandalorian that off and up is pretty excited about to make sure you sign up for that Jason. Star Wars fan listeners. Jason: [50:02] And before any listeners Panic Scott and I promise to pre-record a podcast so that we don't have to skip a week while Scott is binging the Mandalorian. Scot: [50:12] Yes sadly I don't think they're going to do a bench so I think they're going to do it's hard for traditional TV people to get their heads around it but they're going to have kind of really someone a week or something so I have time to podcast. Jason: [50:25] Good news good news in like slightly related there is this interesting thing Target in Disney have announced that they're opening these permanent shopping shops and so you're going to see a bunch of unique Disney merchandise at Target I think that is potentially going to be beneficial to you Scott but I seen speculation that the Disney plus service could be one of the things that's heavily merchandised in that. In that assortment. Scot: [50:55] Cool hopefully I'll have more Star Wars Target exclusives those are those are the good ones. Jason: [51:00] Exactly what was in that is a great place to wrap up this new show cuz we've come out perfectly use the a lot of time as always if if I wasn't Earth have a question or comment feel free to hit us up on our Facebook page or on Twitter as always if you have time we sure would appreciate if you go to iTunes and finally give us that five star review that we've desperately been begging for but we have a we sure appreciate your time today and we have a bunch of great shows in the pipeline so appreciate you keep listening. Until next time happy commercing.

tv ceo american new york amazon google earth disney apple las vegas pr super bowl land star wars club co founders brand elon musk market dc search new jersey north america forever iphone chief presence 3d uber partnership code target tesla advocates force giants walmart wall street journal manhattan starbucks narrative bears caribbean commerce ios spirits brands prime tracking trend jeff bezos democratic rent express bc electric mandalorian east coast sort echo samsung sim vc new york knicks dialogue ipo bought playbook groceries ups att sims keynote mall whole foods fedex vox safari pov goldberg evp 10k acquisitions barney ftc rival challenger gmo unilever trader joe celestial runway hershey stitch niger scot apple stores bee gees stand alone prototype xo mulligan encryption retailer simpler pro max misfortune organics venetian sprinter woolworths warby parker marquee luminous keynotes procter gamble megatron neiman marcus coca cola company chewie shopper last mile scott galloway jc penney wainwright coronas ecm grocers payless inflection star wars tv publicis birkenstocks mandalay bay purina energizer mabon raleigh durham jason scott hershey company groceryshop ihl coldwell articulated taco shop david kahn gymboree aeropostale jason del rey mercedes sprinter channeladvisor charlie cole jen rubio pier one jennifer hyman charlotte russe julie wainwright hain celestial scot wingo new york city september

from the van #24 - Ellie & Sandon

michigan detroit mercedes sprinter

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2019 66:48

Ellie & Sandon hit us up on instagram as we were passing through Michigan in response to our story requesting somebody introduce us to some van life folks in Detroit. They're finishing up their first van build in her father's barn in Michigan. Soon, they'll move full-time into their 170" Mercedes Sprinter. We talked about their van, their excitement, reservations, and media careers after a beer at Easter Market Brewing in Detroit. We're super excited to have them back on the podcast after they've been living in the van.

MP 086: Why should I move into a van with my spouse? (with Chris & Sara Pochiba)

Married People Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2019 50:56

For this episode, we’re exploring a slightly unusual question—why should you move into a van with your spouse? And that’s our topic because Ted recently had a conversation with a couple who recently uprooted their lives and now live in a decked-out Sprinter van traveling all over the country. They’ve learned some important things about their marriage and we can all learn from their experience. Links Let’s Be Us website: https://letsbe.us Let’s Be Us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/letsbe_us/ Chris on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrispochiba/ Sara on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sara_aho/ Chris’ website: https://chrispochiba.com/ Sara’s website: https://www.saraaho.com/ YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/letsbe_us Holy Hustle: https://holyhustle.co/ Interview Can you tell us how you met? Chris: We met five years ago when we were both bicycling across America. We were biking from Seattle to New York City to raise money for refugees in Thailand. We fell in love—you know, because of all the spandex. We were team leaders and with all the other people there we didn’t want them to know there were feelings growing so we kept it a secret. Sara: I was still living in Athens, GA and Chris was in Raleigh, NC. After I graduated, I moved up to Raleigh and we dated another year and then got married. Why did you guys decide to elope instead of having a big wedding? We wanted to move out west to Seattle, where we officially met. Both Sara and I like big parties and don’t like big parties at the same time. So eloping felt right to us. It felt intimate. We climbed a mountain in our wedding clothes with a photographer. There’s a lake at the top of the mountain and we baptized each other there to start off the marriage. We missed having our families there but it was very us. Can you tell us about your current living arrangements? We live in a van, but not down by the river. We transitioned from living in a stationary apartment to an 80 square feet Mercedes Sprinter van. It looks like a FedEx truck on the outside. We do need to make it clear—it’s by choice, not by lack of work or something like that. What made you guys decide to live in a van? We’d been saving money for a while; some of it had been for wedding money. We’d been in Seattle for a while but had landlord issues and we weren’t buying there anytime soon. We’d been talking about doing this and we just bit the bullet and did it. What about your personalities played into your decision? Chris: We’re both adventurous and like trying new things. We weren’t ready to settle down and buy a house. From an Enneagram standpoint, Sara is a 7, the adventurous type. I’m a 9, which is the peacemaker. I think that compliments each other—she’s always pushing and it gets me out of my comfort zone. Sara: And he keeps me level headed and makes sure we’re grounded. How did you get rid of enough stuff to move into a van? Chris: We moved before that Netflix show, Marie Kondo, came out. Everything we had brought us joy, for me at least. We went through and made a designated area of essential items. The rest we decided to sell and make some money. Sara: We didn’t know how long the van thing was going to last, so some of our bigger items we put in storage. We also kept all of our books. If there was any tension, it’s because I’m a big collectible guy and we compromised on those things. How are you continuing to work from the road? Chris: A lot of savings ahead of time. But we also work full time from the road. I do a lot of branding and graphic design and have been able to work from anywhere. My work allows me to travel and the van just put that to the test. Sara: Before we lived in a van, I was growing a photography business. It’s been hard in the van, but in some ways it’s allowed us to grow our business jointly. I’ve been using those skills to grow our YouTube channel. Why did you decide to document your journey on YouTube? We had been on the road a few months and we were at a campground at Disney World. An older couple was there who had a YouTube channel about following their dog around on their travels. If they had one, we needed one, too. We recorded our first episode that day, and now we’ve surpassed 2.5 million views. What have been some of your favorite experiences? We actually have a YouTube video going up today about our favorite experiences so far. This summer we drove up to Alaska and at the end we drove up to the Arctic Ocean. It was like 500 miles each way on a gravel road and we saw grizzlies. It was a really fun adventure. In the town of Bellingham in Washington, the director of the downtown association reached out to us to offer a tour. We went out and had coffee with him and for the next three days he gave us a behind the scenes tour. Our impression of a town after we leave always comes down to how the people were. One place that stands out is that we really like the people in Maine—it was an awesome experience for us. What has been peoples’ reaction when you tell them you live in a van? Sara: I think we were more nervous about Chris’s family. My family took us van shopping when they found out. But everyone has been really supportive and not that surprised. How has this living situation impacted your marriage? The thing about living in a van is you have really high highs and really low lows. Alaska for us was just awful. It was fun but for us relationally it was not great. When we were driving back and decided to go to the Arctic Ocean, it was the complete opposite. We’d never been more supportive of each other. In Alaska, we had really high expectations because there’s a lot of hype around Alaska. The weather was rough and the mosquitos were out of control. It was all these little things adding up. We did enjoy the state but the produce from the grocery store would be rotten by the time we tried to eat it. It was all these elements adding up and it was tense—a combination of circumstances and expectations. What principles have you learned no matter where you live? There are other ways you can do cool things without having to live in a van. You can take it one step at a time. You both have to be on the same page no matter what the adventure is. It’s natural to have one person be more balanced, but if one of you is all in and the other is not, it’s not going to be healthy for your marriage. You guys are a team and that’s what it comes down to—playing as a team. Your one simple thing this week Chris: Put down the phone (or whatever you’re working on) and make eye contact with your spouse while you’re talking. Sara: Be intentional to seek new experiences together that only you can share. Show Closing This episode was brought to you by the Married People Membership—an affordable, monthly subscription that provides married couples like you a ton of great resources every month to help you do marriage better. That means new date nights, videos, eBooks, messages, and more available to you when you need it—all in one place at one low price. Go to our website to find out more about the Married People Membership.

from the van #22 - Skye Walker

sea corvallis encinitas mercedes sprinter

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2019 74:17

Skye Walker is an Encinitas based muralist who is wrapping up his year-long Sea to Sea Mural Tour. For the last year, he's been living in a 144" wheelbase Mercedes Sprinter, traveling from town to town painting murals for a variety of different clients. We caught up with him in his hometown of Corvallis, OR to have a conversation about art, van life, and street art.

WazzyCircus Radio #34 Eric Revord

WazzyCircus Radio Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2019 48:35

Eric Revord walked away from a career in electrical engineering for companies like Tesla and Mercedes to follow his passion for flight. After converting a Mercedes Sprinter van into a mobile studio apartment, Eric and his dog Teddy began their coast to coast drop zone adventure My name is Waz Choudhry. I have been blessed with over 4,000 skydives and more than 13 years of experience in the sport of skydiving. WazzyCircus Radio is a show where I sit down with some of the most amazing people that I have met over a decade of professional skydiving

tesla mercedes sprinter

W906 – Mercedes Sprinter

Anerzählt Archiv 900-1000

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2019 3:42

W906 - Mercedes Sprinter

mercedes sprinter

EP172 - Amazon Shareholder Letter and Q1 Results

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2019 48:34

EP172 - Amazon Shareholder Letter and Q1 Results Amazon Annual Shareholder Letter Jeff Bezos released the Amazon 2018 Annual Shareholder Letter, which this year was focused the the phenomenal success and growth of the Amazon Marketplace. In the process, Amazon disclosed the breakdown of it's 1P and 3P revenue from 1999 - 2018, as well as giving us the "physical gross merchandise volume (physical GMV)" for the first time. In 2018 1p = $117B, and 3P = $160B. For a total GMV of $277B (which means US GMV is approx $161B). Prior to this disclosure we've all had to guess as the the actual size of Amazon's retail business. This makes Amazon the second largest retailer in the US, behind Walmarts $318B (excluding Sam's Club), and ahead of Krogers $116B. The letter also talks about the importance of companies being allowed to experiment (wondering as Jeff calls it), even if many of those experiments ultimately fail. No customer ever asked for AWS, but a few success like AWS can fun many failures. Even failures can be valuable, such as the Fire phone, which ultimately led to the Amazon Alexa. Jeff argues, that as the scale of a company grows, so much the scope of these failures. The letter takes a victory lap for some of the improvements in employee pay and benefits that Amazon has put in place and a challenge to other retailers. A challenge that other retailers like Walmart did not particular appreciate. As always, the letter closes with a reminder that the 1997 shareholder letter still accurately reflects the guiding principals of the company. It's very likely that this years letter, is in response to an increasing call from thought leaders and politicians to regulate and even break up large tech companies like Amazon. Q1 Results Revenue came in at $59.7B, 19% y/y growth ex-F) which was in-line with Wall Street consensus. Overall operating margin was 7.4% compared to a 5.2% consensus, so that was a clear beat. There is some concern about unit sales decelerating (a risk as Amazon saturates the market, and Prime membership plateau). Surprisingly, ad sales growth also plateaued but that was explained as mostly an accounting change. The big news from the Q1 earnings was that Amazon would be investing over $800M to move from free 2-day shipping for Prime members, to free 1-day shipping for Prime members. With most retailers already struggling to match Amazon's 2-day delivery promise, this is a meaningful moving of the goalposts by Amazon. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 172 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, April 29th, 2019. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 172 being recorded on Monday April 29th 2019 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:38] Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners so Jason did you survive the Epic geek week that we just went through with the featuring. Avengers and Game of Thrones really big episode / movies come out. Jason: [0:56] I did it was soup this is the first time in a I did not get to see Avengers yet so I have tickets for next week so so spoiler-free please and we won't do any Game of Thrones spoilers either but I will say is the first time in a long time I was like desperately waiting for the weekend to be over. [1:15] So that we can watch Game of Thrones so I got her the whole weekend I was just waiting for Sunday night and in that seems like counterintuitive. Scot: [1:21] Yeah yeah me too it's pretty epic the amount of geekdom was was was off the charts I ended up seeing an in-game twice with a complicated kid Arrangement so it was so I had like seven hours of of intense content. Jason: [1:38] You're the only dude I know that gets to see the movie twice and win father of the year for doing it. Scot: [1:44] Yeah we'll see if my wife agrees but yes I am not coming husband. Jason: [1:50] I decided when everything come out. Scot: [1:53] Mutually exclusive. Jason: [1:54] Apparently so I will say on the a joke about desperately waiting for the weekend to be over with a young kid at home my brother who's in the same situation and I am taking the saying that like. Sunday night is the new Friday night because I like entertaining your kid for to haul at the holidays is so much more exhausting than going to work. Scot: [2:16] Yes it absolutely is. Jason: [2:19] You could have warned me about that earlier. Scot: [2:21] Sorry you didn't ask him. Jason: [2:23] So in between all that supersetting get dumb and parental responsibilities I feel like it's pretty dense Amazon week as well. Amazon news new your margin is there opportunity. Scot: [2:47] It is so Amazon had there since we we we we were at Austin and lay down some shows that we've been putting out there so the lot of Amazon music come out so first mr. Bezos Jeff who's one of our top listeners he releases annual shareholder letter which is one of my favorite days of the year and then they also had their first quarter results that came out last Thursday so with all the Amazon news that is going to be our Focus For Today Show so let's jump into the shareholder letter this being an Amazon geek I read these like. Many many times I keep them all and I refer back to the 97 letter L this is a really interesting shareholder letter first of all because a lot of time so like last year he talked about it always being day one. I'm and you'll come cultural stuff I would say about Amazon and this one was really so very internal thinking, sharing a little bit of how they think about things of Amazon with which I find intriguing the 2018 letter the one that was. [4:00] Just came out recently it was really different because it was really external so the first thing was there is a really big surprise you and I have talked a ton about mini people underestimate the size of Amazon because their revenue is a derivative of the GMB that goes the platform so first-party sales 100% Revenue equals gmv third party sales they only recognize their take rate of that GMP to Amazon's a lot bigger than you would think they are on the retail side and this is been a puzzle that everyone's been trying to figure out literally for 20 years and just right there in his letter Jeff Bezos revealed the the DMV for 2018 from third parties so let me pull that up here just kind of go through here so we'll talk about why he did this but here's what he said third-party sales are grown from 3%. The total of 58% to put it bluntly third-party sellers are kicking our first party but badly and then he said just got a little long so I was up to it and it's High party because her first party. From 1.6 billion 1999 2A 117 billion this past year the compound annual growth rate for a first-party business in the same time. Is 25% but at the same time they're pretty cells are grown from .1 billion to 160 billion. [5:25] Compound annual growth rate of 52% so twice the rate so he's essentially saying 3ps going twice the rate at 1 P we talked about that on the show that's definitely a thing. Write an external Benchmark eBay's GM be in St. Drew a compound rate of 20% from 2.8 billion to 95 billion so I want some pack there but he was he's essentially saying in 2018 first party was 117 third-party 160 you had those up you get 277 billion new surrounding you got about three hundred billion in GMP so and then you'll see yes I didn't do the revenues during that period were 232 billion so much have to take out AWS and advertising and then you're left with retail gross it back up to 277 Amazon's a lot bigger than people think so that was really interesting and you're the real question is why why would Amazon do this do you have any speculation on them. Jason: [6:29] And why they would they shared the the the gym being focused on the third-party sellers for the first time. [6:36] Yes I do right now I think there's been a lot of news recently talking about folks that are interested in regulating Amazon and that you know you have all these. Candidates for political office I frankly on both sides of the political Spectrum in Amazon has been a easy Target and you have people like a professor Galloway that talks a lot about splitting up all the big Fan Company in Amazon gets included in that and it's a complicated issue. And I feel like there there's a number of vectors where they like the the sort of simple. Criticism of Amazon probably isn't accurate or fair but one of the the best offenses Amazon has that I think they're really trying to lean into is. [7:29] We we are not some big company that has these huge revenues where a facilitator of all these small businesses that have these these revenues and you know if you were. To try to split Amazon up based on antitrust allows you to have to establish that there are monopolies in one of their big defenses against being a monopoly is hey we don't have 277 billion dollars in sales our partners have. This hundred and sixty billion dollars in sales those are even our sales so I think emphasizing the their Marketplace roll. [8:08] Is is one of their better defenses and I think you know there's a full-throated version of that in this the shareholder letter but I think there's some earlier efforts as well where they, like they really started doing some advertising campaigns promoting the small businesses that sell on Amazon and in hitting those numbers and so to me. That there was a huge nugget in that letter that it was the first time that he really shared enough data let us back into an accurate gmv and. Amazon famous for not sharing information like that I think Jeff has a good quote we're in the information Gathering business not the information sharing business so she had to have a good reason to share it and and in my mind the obvious good reason is it's it's one of the the pillars of of his defense against the The Break-Up break us up argument. Scot: [9:00] Yeah I'm playing up here he even specifically says you know where we're a very small percentage of overall retail even when you can add one Pea in 3p so so definitely you know kind of. Trying to get in front of the spani trust talk that that's out there. Jason: [9:17] Yeah they're making the anti-monopoly argument and I'm frankly based on the way the laws are written right now like I did think it actually is a good argument the the the argument that comes up a lot. Protecting Amazon the there's this related argument and and I think some of the the presidential candidates have gotten really vocal and this one is the whole like hay they're using the marketplace data as an unfair advantage to design their own products so they they look at what what those 3-piece sellers are selling and then they knock it off and sell it themselves and it's not fair for you to be one of the teams in the baseball game and the Umpire to use a bad metaphor that Elizabeth Warren tried death I tried to use at one point and so that's an argument that I also frankly think is wrong but that argument ironically like probably get strengthened by buy this argument that the marketplace is the biggest part of our business. Scot: [10:23] Yeah he doesn't really defend against that other one he kind of takes a little bit of a swing out is just reminding how many employees they have and which is portents and then they have raised The Gauntlet and I think this is actually just came out around the time. I think it was Bernie Sanders was talking about how they don't pay a living wage that they upped it to $15 an hour for all their full-time books. Jason: [10:47] Yeah. So that way there's a few funny references right any any so that you mention that he he compare their there third party DMV that eBay which eBay did not appreciate and and had some pretty prompt responses to online and then Walmart decided the comments about hourly wage were targeted directly at Walmart despite the fact that Walmart was not named. In the in the shareholder letter and I think maybe you guys should pay your taxes. Which also is kind of a. Amazon doesn't pay a lot of taxes and I think there's a legitimate criticism to make their from a from a social justice perspective but. They do pay all the taxes they required to pay under the US tax code so it's it's maybe a little unfair to criticize them for. Following the rules but it does are interested or interesting sort of public fuse I'm not sure. That in past decades you saw this kind of like real-time tit-for-tat between in a bitter Rivals I got I don't think the car manufacturers took those kinds of over shots at each other that we're now seeing eBay Walmart and. And I Amazon shoot in that I think we're going to have more examples before the show's over. Scot: [12:14] Yeah yeah the the Twitter battles between these guys is pretty fascinating and then some other interesting thing was kind of everyone was able to now say okay here's a real datapoint let's go sharpen our pencils now one of the things in the letter is it. Because it's a letter and not really Financial document this is not what's called Gap measure meaning that it's subject to General accounting principles you know everyone Defiance GM be a little different so for example. [12:47] EBay. [12:49] They've gone back and forth I can't remember where they are right now of you have this concept of unpaid items so they're there are some items on eBay that go unpaid and then know should they count in GMT or not they went through a phase where it was in wasn't sometimes shipping is in what are the sayings did Amazon did say was this was paid physical items so this would not be things like apps any of the Kindle e content in the ebooks any of that kind of stuff music digital music digital movies any of those kinds of things were not included in here so that being said one of the analysts that we put a lot on the show John Blackledge she's over at Kalen he had 2018 at 314 billion so off by about 20% Which I feel like could be I'm pretty sure this number I called includes media and digital stuff so and I know he hasn't text me yet it have a chance to put for the show so pretty close my model was a good bit higher so the percentage wise you know was really capturing the 25 in the 50% growth rates as well so I'm going to go find my model never actually have a real datapoint and then the real variable you say two points is. What the average selling prices for 1 p.m. three piece suits this really gives us a pretty good way of backing into that now it should be helpful going for. Jason: [14:18] Yeah I know I was like a day and a half of my life when that letter came out cuz I quickly started opening spreadsheets and building forecasting models and and trying to like. Back into the physical DMV in North America and compare that with like Walmart's physical DMV in North America for example and there's all kinds of interesting ways to slice it and dice it now that we have. Slightly less speculative data. Scot: [14:47] Yo what you think about the rest of the letter. Jason: [14:51] So I liked it you know he hit some important points that he is he's talked about in the past as well the the main theme for the the back half of the letter after the gym V stuff. Was. The the notion of the importance of curiosity and what he called the power of wandering and this is a section of the letter where he talked about the. [15:21] The company needing permission to. Sort of stumble into new products and solutions and not necessarily take a straight line from each each product Innovation to the next and so. You know he kind of talked a lot about how when you know you have a successful product in your iterating it that you know you want. Can you achieve a certain scale and you can you can really focus on efficiencies and and try to take the shortest path from each version to the next version as you can. But when you want to invent something new most often you can't do that by. Knowing in advance what you're going to invent and that you can't necessarily ask your customers what they want and and you don't assume that you're going to get some. Some you know game-changing new innovation out of a sort of feedback from your customers and so that the huge example for him of that was AWS and that like. [16:23] You don't know customer ever came to Amazon and said hey we really need to rent server capacity from you you guys seem pretty good at doing it for your retail store you should sell it to the rest of us. That that was a a a sort of risky bet that Amazon had to take that like if we offered this to people that they would accept it and. And I could be a big business and it's become a huge business obviously and then you know in the letter and Jeff gives examples of. Of dozens of soda products on top of AWS that got invented in much that same way that like. No one was necessarily asking for machine learning models from Amazon but they built them and put them on top of AWS. No one was asking for all these like specific database solutions that Amazon invented but you know many of them have been super successful. And you know you kind of made the point that. [17:19] You have to give people permission to sort of explore and fail and then he's easier to transition into talking about how important it is. To have failures and he talked about the Fire Phone for example and that that was a you know a billion dollar fail for Amazon. But you know his argument was that that failure enable the success. With the the Amazon is I quickly hit mute with the Amazon Alexa and that those products only existed because. A bunch of Engineers had permission to fail on the on the phone that was sort of the precursor to this product and he pointed out. As a company gets bigger that their failures have to be bigger as well and so you know he's going to. He talks about you know you should expect companies of Amazon size to have some pretty pretty big honkin of failures and that that's a sign of of Health then so. I think that that's an interesting message you know like I'll be blunt like I walk into a lot of distressed. Clients and they they talk about like only being able to make a limited number of a bats and I can't afford for any of those vents not to work. [18:38] And I Michael those aren't Betts if you know if you have to know in advance that eat each one's going to pay off like there's they're like by definition you can't take any risk and they're not bets and and you know Jeff is talked before about. Like if you have to know the outcome in advance is not an experiment in until I like this weather seems like a kind of articulation of that Philosophy from Jeff which which. I do think makes a lot of sense. Scot: [19:04] Yeah I was good to you it's just easy to make billion dollar bets when you know why she doesn't care about you make me up your GPS and you have a cute voice. Jason: [19:16] Yeah I mean I do think that there's an argument the date they have more leeway and until I do think a lot of companies to wear that are a little sort of jealous of that but. You know the kind of argument would be the day earn some of that we way with their investors. Scot: [19:34] Yeah they're they're pretty upfront about it with Wall Street will talk about it and q1 but you know if the know they basically say to Wall Street we're really focusing on growth and we think this is a big opportunity for that ride. Jason: [19:48] And if you it's for those that aren't super friendly are at the end of every single annual shareholder meeting Jeff references the original shareholder meeting letter he wrote in 1997 and includes a copy of it which is what you were talking about at the beginning of this segment and it's in that shed all their letter that he sort of like. Makes the the argument and announces to shareholder that hey what were long-term thinkers and where we're not going to necessarily focus on on short-term profits and if you invest in that you should be up for that. Scot: [20:25] Yep yep and he's been amazingly consistent. Jason: [20:29] Yeah yeah and so again like the when you write that in 1997 you might not have a lot of credibility but but today and in 2018 that the fact that he still gets to point to that letter and say hey we've been through that for now more than 20 years like there's there's some good credibility there. And as you mentioned he kind of closed out with this conversation talking about wages and I do think you know Amazon has made significant progress in. In raising their wages I'm as have a lot of other retailer so I would say like sort of. [21:02] Target Walmart Amazon have all announced major initiatives about raising wages and into Arch Dent have. Follow through on those initiatives they all want to get as much Public Credit as they can for it and they all want to use as a foil for the attacks they get from the the Bernie Sanders of the world, like there's also a very good practical capitalist reason that they're doing that that like their. They're all desperately trying to grow and they need quality employees to grow and is a competing more customer experience then they're relying on these employees to deliver the customer experience. And I think they're all just finding they have to pay more to. When the recruiting battles and get the kind of employees that they need to keep feeding their businesses and so I. I'm not so sure that these guys are all doing it out of the goodness of their heart I think this is a place where. Where capitalism is kind of working and driving driving wages up a little bit which is certainly a good thing. [22:01] So that was my take on the shareholder letter I did reference earlier like that you know. The other attack is this whole notion of the the market put is unfair to be an Umpire and a player, and that that was the baseball metaphor that Elizabeth Warren me like she's she's pretty smart woman I'm not sure she's an expert in baseball cuz I didn't love that metaphor because the umpires actually work for the owners. And I think I can change the rules whenever they want like I'm not sure that wasn't exactly the the metaphor she was going for. [22:37] I have heard this a lot like there lots of people that hark on the fact that like oh my gosh Amazon's totally leaning in a private label and they're launching all these products and their they're using the data from the marketplace. To build these these products and we can't allow that if you're going to be the marketplace you can't also be a seller. And we're hearing that argument more and more and. [23:01] Yeah you can make that argument like that I mean there's an intellectual argument there that that a smart person could could certainly by into but what what miss me a little bit is people talk like Amazon's the first one to do it and it's a new idea. And I would argue like that's a play that retailers have been running for 200 years and at the moment all of Walmart's competitors are much better that play than they are so I don't frankly with only a few exceptions. Virtue of the Amazon. Private label products are very successful and is as business does hit I think I think I may have hit this in the in the shareholder letter also or maybe it was in the. Another document this week but like less than 1% of their sales are private label and you go look at a. Walmart or Target or a Best Buy in your in the like 20 and 30% of sales are our products that. That are owned by that retailer and so I like I do think we want to be careful about just saying hey retailer shouldn't be allowed to sell their own products in addition to other people's products because. That that would like fundamentally break most retailers. Scot: [24:11] Yeah yes communication to see how these things play out and you know what we'll see. Jason: [24:18] So I know there's a super big transition that I was supposed to remember and I think it's to the the q1 sales results which came out last Thursday so Scott what what were your sort of take away highlights from from the q1 result. Scot: [24:36] Yes it does the really big news that kind of swamped some of the Nuggets that we will cover here is it Amazon announce they're moving Prime to one day shipping and they're going to become gradually doing this so they're going to start with certain areas in the US and and then continue to ramp it up that's really kind of what they announced it didn't announce it in. They also did announce that they're going to do to they're going to be interesting over $809 in this initiative so certainly not chump change by by any, means on Wall Street is girding so Amazon is gone through this. Through to one of 19. And harvesting a bunch of Investments and now they're really signaling both with this race Pacific number and then there for guidance I'm a really good margins in q1 talk about their sibling you know don't get used to that investment cycle as we really invest in one day Prime, so does speculation when you kind of read you know you and I get along this Wall Street reports Wall Street, read the tea leaves there is no Prime now is in 50 to 75 US market so maybe in those metros by Prime day at which will be dry just as shortly Benadryl I don't know what it'll be this year but I'm at but then by holiday 19 will see a much bigger kind of coverage pays for the delivery. [26:03] Reaction was really interesting on social media you and I had a lot of folks chatting to us about it while streets are really excited so I said said they were very spaghetti with excitement and most of Wall Street I'm on the back so this announcement plus the results will go over a socially raised Amazon, 2002 2250 price Target the wall Street's kind of analysis has this is going to weigh more than pay for itself because know what we seen is as Amazon turns the crank on getting stuff to you faster and faster your demand goes up so you just got someplace just it's not clear how much that's incremental but more of your everyday shopping kind of then the time is over into the prime bucket as I can just get it next day then that's in fact the shares of Wal-Mart and Target were worked something after they announced that but then at the same time so that was the bush reaction to Bears reaction is there's a sea of people on on Twitter that were saying that's kind of ridiculous because they're not living up to the two-day promise for me so it was interesting to see that there was more negativity that I've seen in a long time from anecdotal Ian I'm sure Amazon has all the student is exactly what's going on but. [27:22] Army isn't rushing there was a pretty big outpouring a folk saying what day what what happens if I don't get my stuff in two days so that was that was fun to watch most perplexing reaction was Walmart's Twitter where they said one day shipping without a subscription interesting so that was funny what time is the Wall Street guys that the headlines in the reports are kind of fun this was the winner from you is Scott Devitt of I said Amazon is releasing the next day Prime that starts we work the Star Wars reference in there which is always awesome Jason what did you think about Saint ounce what is this kind of the nail in the coffin for the Ollie's omni-channel guys that are kind of catching up the amazon or or do you think they're going to kind of be able to hang in there. Jason: [28:11] Yeah you're always going to win the quitting contest with Scott if you include a Star Wars reference I don't think this is the nail in the coffin I do think it's a big smart move from Amazon though and I do think it's a gut-punch to most other retailers so the. You know no retailer has close to the investment in fulfillment that Amazon has and you know Amazon has all this. These other aspects of their fulfillment network but if you just look at these big fulfillment centers they have like more than seventy-five of them in the US now and and dozens of other things that support them like sortation centers in and transportation hubs and all these other but they have 75 of these big warehouses Walmart has been next most which is they have like 20 many of which are much smaller and then you know after that most retailers are lucky they have like two or three and so no retailers made close to the the. [29:17] Investment in fulfillment infrastructure that Amazon has made into most retailers are you know. [29:25] Taking some sort of strategic approach to how they answer what Amazon was already doing like. Oh man we don't have custody ability to deliver in 2 days at Amazon has what should we do should we invest billions of dollars to try to get closer to them by opening more fulfillment centers should we use our stores more in leveraged or fulfillment like you know because Amazon doesn't have stores and we do and you know they're all these sort of. Typical omni-channel plays that you would make and those are all things to sort of close the gap than Amazon has between everyone else and so when Amazon it if you just came up with some strategy to. Partly closed the Gap and you're making a a big painful Investments to partly close that Gap and then Amazon goes oh by the way we've got another gear and we're going to open up this Gap more that's that's really demoralizing to to a lot of these other retailers and so I do think this is a big smart move I think it's it was a clever way to leverage that advantage in in fulfillment centers that they have over everyone else and you know I think there's going to have to be a lot of soul-searching amongst all these other retailers about the how how to respond a little more detail in the Walmart response which I agree was totally wacky. Like basically Walmart public relations made a tweet that said. [30:51] Not sure that's revolutionary what would be revolutionary is one day shipping without a membership fee. Stay tuned in the the implication was that Walmart's going to announce something in the future that they're not prepared to announce today along the lines of free free one-day shipping in the the reality is they just don't have enough of filament centers to do one day shipping to to the whole Us in so you don't frankly like either they're going to make an announcement to dig another hundred holes and build you know you know 10 billion more square feet of a filament space or it's going to be something like we're going to do one day shipping from our stores, which is interesting and that could be a good customer experience in a bunch of retards are using that approach Walmart's one of the last ones. [31:39] That really isn't shipping from their stores but I would remind people that those stores have like a hundred thousand skews in them and Amazon selling 800 million products so you know really not Apples to Apples if that's the approach that any retailer takes two matching Amazon so you know roll all that up and I think the Fulfillment centers are a huge competitive Advantage for Amazon and they keep investing more in it which is a total gut punch for retailers and in frankly they talked about you know this being an 800 billion dollar investment for Amazon that's actually not that big of an investment right it's all right you like you know I think going back to the the wandering and the size of your failures has to scale part of the letter like I actually don't think a hundred million dollars in fulfillment for Amazon at this point is even a huge bat and so you know that's that's going to be problematic for retailers to match I think they're they're doubling down on their damages which is smarter. Scot: [32:37] Yeah my um so I have two thoughts on this just got out of pylons what you're saying and you give a really good talk you have this kind of rare but occasionally to give a good talk in the winter. Jason: [32:51] You know that I'm recording this right. Scot: [32:54] What are the topics you talk about is that their work done out of Potomac capability among the big tree so UPS FedEx USPS right I maxed out to as a reminder to listeners in October of last year Amazon started this program that they've tried to go out this couple is first day they started this flexnetwork I like uber for products that it works okay but it's not really at the NC that. Volume that they're looking for and it's it's hard to control the quality of uv2 of that program of doing more salt delivery is they they split up this program called delivery service partner program DSP this is very much like FedEx Ground where they actually went to logistics companies and said look if you'll deliver packages for us we will give you some pants and in front of the state with her 20,000 Mercedes Sprinter is really nice delivery Vans let you know. Orders more capacity than likely yes. If you think about it I think we could take a six months of data under the hood and my bed is they now know exactly. [34:13] What the cost is and how to take over enough of The Last Mile in certain markets to do the one day and don't think they could do it when they had they had FedEx. I'm really ups and USPS a little bit of FedEx as The Last Mile I just want to date the cost was cost-prohibitive but now I think they have the economics for they say you know if we just spent $800 more we got you know maybe that equates to you another 20,000 Spinners and then whatever it is to deliver their I think they now see that there had this last little push and they can get to that. Buy one reading of the tea leaves is you're right the filament centers are key to it but I don't think it was until they did The Last Mile that they realized this was Insight they could do it and then I think once you do next day then same day everywhere Art's to become a pretty good reality so then you're kind of there's not that much more capacity I think you have add for same-day so so I would say to retailers you're going to probably have a competitor that's able to do its own last mile delivery at about half price you pay a third party and they're going to be moving to same day delivery so it could be interesting to watch this and see what happened. Jason: [35:32] Yeah for sure in like I don't even think you have to guess that like. I live in Chicago which I sometimes described as living in Amazon's future because there's a lot of this this one film incapability they're talking about rolling out Nationwide is already here so the majority of packages I ordered get delivered in one day and they're very often is a same-day offer in this is totally distinct from Amazon Prime now so Amazon Prime now is this thing with smaller warehouses that have 60,000 accused and and can deliver in a couple hours what I'm talking about is delivering from the the full Amazon assortment and when it says like order right now when when you get this product if it's before noon very often it says I'll get the product by 9 p.m. today and almost always the like the the promise is that I can get it tomorrow and so you know frankly I think what they're with their talking about here is is building out the Chicago style fulfillment Network. For the rest of the country in it like you know I think it does fundamentally change your shopping behavior when you win the the lag between desire and fulfillment is is that much closer. Scot: [36:47] Yes and one day Prime was the big kind of Earth shattering news out of the first quarter results what other financial highlights did you see Jason. Jason: [36:55] Well they made some money so so revenue for the quarter was just a hair under 60 billion like 59.7 billion which is 19% growth from from this quarter last year which is basically in line with the the Wall Street estimates but what got people excited was the Mead more profit on that Revenue than then folks expected so I think. The consensus goal for operating margin was like 5.2%. And they actually announced that they made 7.4% so that's a very meaningful beat. And you know it's super encouraging that that Amazon is continuing the ratchet up these sort of. Record profits on their their sales and you know side note that makes it easier to make these billion dollar investments in new fulfillment capabilities. [37:51] And yeah a little more detail on that North America is is about 60% of Amazon's revenue and that's the profitable market for Amazon so that. Operating margins in North America were 6.4% and international was a loss International so far in their in their history is always been a loss. But the the loss is getting smaller and smaller so the International Ice was like 6%. Which which sort of demonstrates that they're getting close to break-even and eventually getting profitability on that that International Revenue in addition to this North American Revenue. So that seem like a big deal in an encouraging sign and I think Amazon attributed a lot of that that incremental profit to. Fulfillment efficiencies so essentially. Getting a return on all this fulfillment investment that you were just talking about and all those fulfillment programs in the airplanes that are Leasing and things that they're essentially. As they scaled they're able to to squeeze some some incremental profit out of the model which is unisuper encouraging to. To Wall Street at the very least and then of course you know. [39:07] Amazon web services is another big big chunk in revenue for that for the quarter was like 7.7 billion. Which is still 42% year-over-year growth which is exciting cuz you you worry that eventually you're going to email when you that gets a big that it's harder to keep growing at that pace I'm so I do think the pace of growth is slightly decelerating for Amazon web services but it's still very fast growth and, just a quick reminder like an unlike the retail side of the business that 7.7 billion is considerably more profitable so that's a nice revenue or profit driver for long for Amazon as well. Those are kind of some of the the financial highlights what what else would you take away from the the quarterly earnings. Scot: [39:53] Yeah there was a third-party side 53% of the units for third party that was a new high Wall Street was expecting the kind of you that has a missed their revenue that Amazon does report from third-party services that was a little light another positive was subscription Services which grew 49% and the CFO in his is kind of color commentary and answering some questions I know at the 4th quarter report listeners remember we talked about Amazon said they had more Prime users added in the 4th quarter than ever before so one street Wall Street analyst kind of said hey how are those new ads kind of converting is there is. There and they it said that you know they saw a really good activations across all the different rhyme capabilities suits what they mean there is no way they do it is in a Bezos says that you'd be I want to make prime so good you'd be responsible not not sign up for it so so you've got. Obviously the fast free now going to one day normally two days you've got. [41:05] You got all the Kindle stuff you got music you've got the video star. I called the Alexa and puts in their busy even more in their exclusive products and all these things so one of the things that they kind of said body language was on the call was there fishing really good kind of. Is increasing I kind of read it is increasing and this line item called subscription Services where that would show up that grew 49% what kind of cars do you everything in the first quarter that was kind of the fastest-growing peace which I think it's well if if Prime is prime sign up for when your fastest growing things that that. [41:43] What's the acceleration on the road as those people start ordering and taking advantage of their subscription advertising one this was this is interesting so we talked a lot about this on the show it really slow down prematurely it's been growing kind of north of 50% I believe in this load to 34% year-over-year the there was some talk the system of all she has reported that there was an accounting change their that some of the third-party types of ads have now moved over into more this merchant services kind of line item and aren't showing up in advertising so I think they're kind of you know. Are some apples and oranges there and then the CFO did say you know if you adds grew faster than other so the other line with 34% so he was kind of trying to signal I think if accounting changes out there is still growing pretty rapidly John Blackledge I referenced earlier you got to put sad visit 13 billion this year and she's at about 35 by. What kind of the new multibillion-dollar line that Amazon is growing up a lot on the call about how. [42:55] And I'll take this over to you cuz this is your bailiwick they're adding a lot more capabilities here for agency types of folks to have apis and ability to. Run multiple accounts and I think they they realize that something that has large agencies need to include Amazon and a lot of ads and it sat out there. The biggest concern from Wall Street is they have this metric called paid units. That has slowed those 14% growth in Q4 at slowed to 10%. Speed unit growth only go 10% yet will Revenue gross means the. [43:39] The average order value is kind of doubled the only way to make that work in the retail world so there are some bears out there saying this feels like maybe Amazon starting to bump up against. Challenges of scale in saturation there's a lot of reports that show that there at like 85% less of the. High-end cameras out there are on Prime and those kinds of things so that's give me a metric I want to watch this really close when they did their forward-looking projections it does feel like a little bit of acceleration but it's not clear is that coming from a TBI sads or the retail business are our what soaks I was kind of like the only little kind of cloud on the horizon I would say is the speed unit growth really decelerate it pretty hard it's the lowest it's ever been Child Say the bottom line on the first quarter is a really solid showing by Amazon the big surprise was the one day Prime that definitely kind of got everyone's attention and like I said before most of the Wall Street folks were pretty pleased and we saw a lot of yeah raising of price targets to your kind of that north of a trillion-dollar territory up into the the $2,250 kind of ranch. Jason: [44:58] That it's going to be interesting to watch that the advertising thing a lot of the new device are right after the announcement like people people miss that certified accounting change and there was a little bit of a panic in the advertising world because there's been all this talk about oh my gosh Amazon's the fastest growing advertising platform and and you know number of the newest episode of forecasted at 2 do certain eventually be able to compete with a Google's and Facebook's of the world and so. [45:30] At this point to already have decelerate in growth would have been a concern but obviously if that's. I'm sure they explained Away by just went buckets Amazon puts the the revenue in then that's that's not as big a concern so it'll be interesting to see. Like is that does that explain 100% of it or have they had a deceleration. Well I am sort of bullish on on Amazon's prospects as an advertising platform, I think you you hit one of the pain points that that's going to keep them from scaling is there there. They're advertising tools and capabilities are are much more nascent than say Google or Facebook in and you mentioned agencies don't like that and that's certainly true but like increasingly the the Google and Facebook tools are good enough that clients like to run their own campaigns on and that's that's way less true on Amazon today so Amazon has a lot of. Catch up to do on tools and you know you could see that like I'm sure they're they're investing a lot in the tools right now like we see a lot of new apis and capabilities coming out all the time but but that could be a constraining factor on their advertising and another thing that I still speculate. Is Eliza constraining factor in the short run is the budget that these advertising dollars are coming out of so. [46:54] You know I still think the majority of advertising it happens on Amazon is advertising for a particular product that a brand is trying to sell on Amazon and Those ads usually come out of what's called a trade budget and a lot of the dollars that gets spent on Google and Facebook come out of a marketing awareness budget and I'm not sure Amazon his establish themselves as as a viable platform for those those kind of top of the funnel advertising dollars in the same way that that Facebook has yet I think they're ever going to really scale they're going to have to demonstrate that they're good at that too and so I think. Time is going to tell there but that's probably a good place to leave it's got unless you have any any closing remarks cuz we we've used up the are budgeted time for for the show. Scot: [47:49] I think that's all the exciting news on the Amazon side will it's just kind of keep it there and we'll be back with more guests and more news and future episodes next for joints. Jason: [47:59] Yep and if you didn't try this episode we sure would appreciate that five star review on iTunes as always if you have any comments or questions or we got anything wrong feel free to the reach out to us on Twitter or leave us a note on her Facebook page we loved to have a dialogue with our listeners and until next time happy commercing.

ceo amazon time founders health chicago art google earth star wars challenges club fire international innovation north america write network financial clients record game of thrones philosophy epic target run wall street walmart services speed private bears gm amazon prime avengers bernie sanders engineers prime gps pacific jeff bezos breakup investments ebay revenue sort advantage cfo criticism denver nuggets fulfillment marketplace kindle candidates gap virtue spectrum operating orders apples typical fedex goldberg dmv makes aws elizabeth warren nationwide best buy slightly usps gauntlet executive chairman scot vans tbi leasing umpires galloway amazon alexa 2a betts partly potomac arrangement 7b dsp pea last mile spinners kalen 800m gmb publicis 3p gmp jason scott amazon marketplace gmv 1p fire phone shareholder letter mercedes sprinter scot wingo

from the van #05 - Molly Mandelberg

molly mandelberg mercedes sprinter

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 23, 2019 44:50

Molly is a nomad and marketing strategist living in a Mercedes Sprinter camper van that she converted herself. I ran into her at a vanlife meetup, and we had an inspiring conversation about her travels, her work, and her optimistic world-view. Visit her website at: http://wildheartsriseup.com

Lead is Dead: Why lithium batteries will rule the RV world

RV Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 3, 2019 54:58

In this episode, we talk to a leading expert on lithium batteries – Sean Nichols of Battle Born Batteries, one of the best known companies making lithium batteries for RVs. Sean tells us that lead is dead, that the old lead acid batteries found in most RVs are rapidly being eclipsed by more powerful and efficient lithium technology. He explains just what lithium will – and will not – do for the RVer and how they can be made to reliably work even in very cold weather. Sean Nichols will be coming up soon in our interview of the week. Also in this episode, your questions, RV news if the week and an off the beaten path report from the Burketts. Show Notes for Episode #236 April 3, 2019 of The RV Podcast: WHAT MIKE AND JENNIFER ARE UP TO THIS WEEK JENNIFER Before we get started, two housekeeping notes. One, in this podcast we will mention a bunch of different resources, news stories and web links that will give you more information about the things we’re talking about. Whenever possible, we build in direct links to those topics on the shownotes page for this episode. You can find that at rvlifestyle.com/236 MIKE Also, you may have a question you’d like us to answer, or a comment on the things we’re discussing. If so, we invite you to leave us that question or comment on the special voicemail number we have for the podcast – it’s 586-372-6990. If you are driving and can’t write it down right now, just go to the RV Lifestyle travel blog at rvlifestyle.com and scroll down the page. You’ll see that number prominently posted on the blog. Mike and Jennifer at the beach We share our whereabouts and plans We’re down in Florida on the Emerald Coast enjoying a spring break vacation with family The next big trip will be to Phoenix Arizona and the huge Super B Small Motorhome RV Show. Once again, Jennifer and I will be attending the Super B RV Shownear Phoenix. The dates this year for the show are April 11-14 and it will be held at what is now known as State Farm Stadium (formerly University of Phoenix Stadium) in Glendale, AZ, Jen and I will be doing meet and greets Friday and Saturday, as well as video live streams direct from the show. Over 100 Class B and short Class C RVs will be on display. There will be some new products being shown at the show for the first time, as well as new floor plans being introduced. Manufacturers represented include Winnebago, Leisure Travel Vans, Pleasure Way, Midwest Automotive Designs, Fleetwood, Tiffin, Entegra, Roadtrek, Hymer and Thor Motor Coach. Sponsored by LaMesa RV (which has RV dealerships in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Florida), this is the largest RV show in North America that features only small RVs. Attendees can see in one place all of the latest floor plans and the and most popular motorhomes from the top manufacturers. People coming to the show will be able to talk with factory reps, RV manufacturing company owners and RV experts and celebrities. Dean Corrigal from Leisure Travel Vans will be there, our own RV Lifestyle Personal Chef MJ Curry will be talking about cooking in an RV kitchen, and there will be a seminar on solar power presented on Saturday, April 13 at 11:00 am by David Copeland from Van Dyke Enterprises. We’re in our second week of ownership of our new Leisure Travel Vans Unity FX. We have it being detailed tomorrow. Look for a video on the YouTube RV Lifestyle Channel thus week in the 2019 Mercedes Sprinter chassis and the big improvements it offers compared to previous Sprinter chassis used on RVs. Jennifer has sheets and bedding coming for the Murphy Bed. I need to order a cellular booster. Probably won’t install it until we get back to Michigan in late April. Considering lithium… as you’ll hear in the interview Next 7 Stop Adventure Guide is coming out. Probably next week. It will be on Utah and joins the one we did on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. RV LIFESTYLE NEWS OF THE WEEK MIKE

EP159 - 2019 Predictions and 2018 Recap

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 9, 2019 69:29

EP159 - 2019 Predictions and 2018 Recap Our annual predictions episode for 2019 and a recap of our 2018 predictions. 2018 Recap - Predictions made on episode 112 Scot Mallageddon 2.0 - We saw 7000 stores close in 2017, I think this accelerates in 2018 as the 30-40% of weak malls fail closures. YES Amazon will NOT buy another offline retailer, triples down on private label. YES Amazon will squarely get in the last mile business in 2018 and compete with FedEx and UPS. NO Amazon’s ad group will get so large that they have to break out details about it and everyone will be shocked at how large it has gotten so quickly YES Walmart will make a big M+A - top candidates would be Instacart, postmates and eBay. YES Somebody acquires Magento, or they go public. YES 5/6 Bonus - Amazon comes out with Alexa powered wireless earbuds - because I want them. NO Jason Grocery gets disrupted by digital (led by curbside pickup). Digital grocery doubles in US, at least one delivery firm peters out.YES Drug gets disrupted by digital. NO AI Gap - biggest trend of 2018 NO Voice - Huge but not for commerce. YES Payments - Retail digital wallets die (except Starbucks/Walmart/Amazon). Bitcoin tanks. YES 3/5 Bonus - Amazon launches a wearable. NO . Scot crushes Jason! 2019 Predictions Scot At least 5k more store closures in 2019 Amazon - Prof Galloway is big on Amazon having to create a AWS spinoff and has moderated that to tracking stock. I’m going to predict Amazon doesn’t do either of those things. But this WILL be the year they break ads out. eBay/Alibaba - I think this is the year when the both need to do something big and the stars are aligning for a combination there. Shopify gets acquired by one of the big ad-based companies (facebook/google most likely) Walmart stumbles in e-commerce Jason Amazon store count exceeds 1000 stores Walmart buys a last mile firm Another big bankruptcy (going to be a tougher than expected year, JCP, category killers Office, BBBY, Neiman) Mobile commerce revenue passes Desktop - Aided by PWA’s, and payment API’s we see mobile gap narrow Fads (Voice Commerce, Customer facing AI, SocialCommerce, VR BlockChain) Bonus: Amazon breaks out Prime revenue. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 159 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Sunday, January 6th, 2019. www.jasonandscot.com Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 159 being recorded on Sunday January 6th 2019 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back and happy New Year Jason Scott show listeners Jason am I mistaken or is that some new music we have there at the beginning. Jason: [0:48] Yeah yeah due to overwhelming listener feedback that I finally updated the the intro to the show it is the same song and the the same announcer but you know you and I both both had some career accomplishments in that in the last year until now there are titles are updated and it's you know just kind of refreshed for the year. Scot: [1:13] Yeah and you how is the new gig going for anyone that missed for smashing on you if you missed any of our last couple episodes but Jason has a new gig will see if I can remember this Chief Grand Superior digital retail Commerce officer is that the right now. Jason: [1:31] The for the second time in a row you nailed it exactly right. Scot: [1:35] Awesome my dad sometimes I drop a word in there but I think I got them all. Jason: [1:38] Yep and impacted cuz you mark that title so much in the last episode I had a ton of a client with legitimately fancy titles all making fun of me for the for the entire break so thanks very much for that Scott. Scot: [1:52] Awesome it's maybe that will be everyone's New Year's resolution is to give Jason a hard time about his awesome new title. Jason: [1:58] For for sure. Scot: [2:00] Coldwell we're post holidays here I think everyone's probably on the edge of their seat did you get any cool new gadgets. Jason: [2:12] Ya always tough. Like in general there's an extremely narrow gap between my desires and fulfillment in so. Like if I got some new gadgets for Christmas it's most likely because a new Gadget came out right before Christmas so I will say I did some refresh is I finally got the. The iPad Pro the 10.5% sync you also have I haven't unbent version I've been pretty. Pretty happy with that and because because of the new job I had to trade out laptops and so now I have finally have a in all USB C. Ecosystem with the iPad and the the the laptop so I've getting those new gadgets of course cost me thousands of dollars in new adapters and cables in. And all angles but I guess the one minor little toy I got is a new. A video camera well I got a couple new vision cameras so I got the DJI osmo pocket. Scot: [3:24] Nice. Jason: [3:25] This is a tiny as in fits like in the palm of your hand you could you could hide it in your hand video camera with a a fully-functioning gimbal so it's, pretty cool to have some some. Funny pictures I'm looking forward to taking nap to the several upcoming trade shows that will probably talk about in a minute so that has been cool and I did a little earlier than Christmas get the new Nikon. Mirrorless camera system so a Nikon Zed 6 if you're from your upper or a Z6 if you're in the US. Scot: [4:01] Cool house that is the mirror listen can you tell the difference. Jason: [4:05] Yet yet so Nikon has always had a great reputation for digital still cameras and great image quality in low-light capability in the color rendering they've been extraordinary really horrible at video. And I'm assuming I actually need a camera that's. Okay it Stills and also very good at video so the fact that I've always own Nikon cameras and have Nikon lenses have been. A constant pain point for me because my car's been so far behind on video and so there's some the mirrorless cameras in general are much better at video and this this. Nikon's first mirrorless full-frame camera. Really does a pretty good weed frog for video capabilities in a lot of ways so it's it's definitely the best. Video stills camera I've ever owned. Scot: [5:01] Koba I know you're off to CES next week and we will have a lot more gadget news for us then you and I are both at the NRF Big Show so maybe we'll shoot some video do a live streaming or something fun like that. Jason: [5:12] I will bring all those gadgets why be using them to photograph any cool new gadgets that you got for the holiday stuff. Scot: [5:19] I I said William like you where I think I probably had caught up on my gadgets before the holiday suit so nothing new for me. Oh yeah yeah I do think did you get the keyboard case on your iPad I really enjoyed that. Jason: [5:35] Yeah I did I've enjoyed that it's been it's my first iPad with a pencil so that has been it's been cool yeah. Not permanently I I will concede to have misplaced it but it it does reemerged. Scot: [5:51] That an airpods have this weird like they want to get lots of gaple somehow his program them to is a margin enhancer to get lost as quickly as they possibly can. Jason: [6:02] I'm afraid to even talk about that because my my wife is so much more responsible than me and she's on like her her like 4th or 5th pair and I am still in my originals through some some like and Candy miracle. Scot: [6:15] Goodwill as is our tradition here on the Jason Scott show every year we kick off the new year with a recap of what happened in the last year and then we have our predictions so the predictions are twofold last year about 365 days ago we made a bunch of predictions couldn't remember so it's kind of fun to go back and look at those are super geeky and want to go back that was episode 112. It's a method that means we did 47 shows last year so that's 47 hours roughly of Jason Scott if you if you have a week to burn if you have mono or something like that that you want to recover from and you need something to put you to sleep for 47 hours a week we have your cure so we will be breaking the show into three pieces for going to do kind of a good bad ugly of 2018 and then we can go into recapping our predictions and squirm and then from 2018 and then we're going to put out some 2019 predictions so I think what you'll see from the 28th predictions is we're actually pretty good pretty good at this thing after how long you been at this 3 for years now I think we're getting pretty good on the prediction game. Jason: [7:34] That's easier for you to say than it is for me to say this year but sure. Scot: [7:39] Without further delay let's jump into The Good the Bad and the Ugly Jason what order a couple of your goods from 2018. Jason: [7:46] Yep so I was really excited to see some of the new physical store Concepts and the very end of the year you know Nike open at House of innovation we talked about that in the last show that's super exciting to me I think some of the Amazon Concepts like go and 4-star are are super interesting there's a lot of new physical Marketplace Concepts like we've had beta on the show I've mentioned show failed before and then a lot of these mobile-first stores like the Sam's Club now so I think, the you know we're really starting to see digital Impact Physical stores and drive new store Concepts which is awesome. [8:24] On the platform front I was excited to see Adobe make the big investment in Magento in an e-commerce platform. In many ways I feel like the the commercial platform space in the Enterprise platform space in particular that I play in is kind of. In the worst spot it's been in in 10 years in terms of. You don't really meeting the needs of retailers and clients and there's always been this this conflict between CMS systems that people like Adobe make and commerce platforms that people like. IBM sap in Oracle make in so I'm very optimistic that adobe who who is dominating the CMAs. Essbase then making a significant investment investment in e-commerce you know really could be the way forward for 4. A lot of new new retailers in in Commerce entities that need an enterprise-class system. And I say this with the one caveat Magento as it is is not the solution. [9:33] Adobe's willingness to invest in Magento 2 me is historically a Dobby is always been a. And aggressive acquire that acquired a bunch of stuff and you know it often takes them several years to really integrate the stuff so I'm not expecting Miracles this year per se but in the long run feels like. Adobe deciding that Commerce is an important part of the stack is super exciting and then my my last good for the year. Is kind of specific it was Walmart's investment in Flipkart in the reason I think that is good I think it is super smart for. From Walmart to be aggressively fighting for digital in in the super important Emerging Market in India. Some things happened late last year that make those Investments actually look a little softer is as a Indian regulation on foreign Commerce is has gotten more challenging but the reason I just think it's good overall is. I feel like that investment that huge investment in digital for Walmart you know his is the most. [10:38] Tangible physical manifestation of Walmart's absolute recognition that. Digital is the way forward in the day you know that they have to compete with the Amazon than alibaba's of the world and can't can't abdicate any of that Digital Ground And so seeing them them fight for for that that intellectual property you know I think is a encouraging sign for all of us in the future what about you what would it were you excited about last year Scott. Scot: [11:07] Well I'm always the guy that gets to say it wouldn't be the Jason Scott show without Amazon and Sonos surprised they're my good is crying it out with Amazon so I thought was really interesting than Amazon you mentioned a little bit but they really expanded their store footprint so they had acquired Whole Foods back and 17 which obviously is a big splash into offline and they never really expanded Whole Food stores I mean 2018 was a year of kind of adjusting that that acquisition they announce now they're going to start opening more here in 2019 so that's going to be interesting to see I think the surprise for me in an impossible one was done to go experiments and then just kind of really ramping that up pretty quickly you know I think they built another for 5 is that many more on the way there's rumors of wars and then you're the one thing as I travel around not nearly as much as you but going to various malls and things I would say pretty much every a mall in the US seems to have an Amazon pop-up store and I think about all those people I don't know how many that is it's how many of these are out there but I think if we looked at. [12:23] Your class A malls I think there be three or four hundred of them so I wouldn't be surprised if there was three or four hundred pretty substantial Amazon pop-ups out there so it's I think that's pretty interesting and really is a testament to the Amazon. [12:38] You're expanding into kind of omni-channel world and get their products in front of more people. [12:43] I'm done once asked on the front end of Amazon the back end of Amazon that was really interesting this year was what I would call it start a frenetic expansion of. Delivery capabilities some of this is last mile so they acquire twenty thousand of these Mercedes Sprinter vans I'd be surprised if any listener at least the United States hasn't seen one of these I see you to a date at this point in my area. [13:09] And they built a 1099 Network a very clever way kind of taking a page out of FedEx Grounds Playbook where they were actually kind of put you in the business guarantee you rub you and routes and then boom you're off and running so I think they got those 20,000 sprinters out there delivering packages and something like six months which is just pretty crazy about a lot of soccer capabilities so if you're a third-party now you can use Amazon soccer in your phone at Center and almost be like little extension of FBA Whole Foods we saw them can I ditch instacart and then layer and their their 1099 other 1099 network of Flex for that they've added a ton more jets that got to where are hubs coming and I attractive distribution centers pretty closely so in the USA in 2018 they added 46 more performance center assets and then another 23 in the rest of the world for a total of about 70 I am all in that's an additional 11 million square feet of space that came on line in 2018 and then that adds to the existing 850 or so globally and 250 million square feet so, so it's a lot of people that I always talk to you that the baby not in the industry but on the cusp there always surprise I'll say what how many how many from home as soon as you think Amazon has versus Walmart but they both have 10 and the number I think that's about right with Walmart but Amazon has. [14:34] Tremendous amount of assets they built so it matters it's Amazon a so far ahead of anyone it is going to be interesting to see there. My last surprise was becoming I think the economy did really well last year even the last reported as of December on the job side was really really strong so that we're seeing a strong economy you know as the Fed kind of Titans interest rates in the stock market with a lot of shakiness there but underlying economy. [15:09] Then let's put it in the battle I'll start those so I think the bad was I was so surprised about how kind of negative to Amazon hq2 process turned out, kind of ended in a in a thud you know it wasn't like this kind of I guess unless you're one of the two cities I think they're. Pretty excited but even then there's a lot of protesting going on in the DC New York area that Amazon's coming and then it got these really big incentives so yeah I think that's going to be interesting to watch and see what happens as Amazon is so large now that they can't just fly under the radar and I think they managed the back of that process kind of weirdly not where it seems like everyone that are decided and then and then it's kind of pain a conspiracy theory if you believe that they were just Gathering data from people what I'm concerned about a little bit you and I emailed about this just recently I kind of put it in the bad category in this is holiday 2018. I'm so Adobe came out a couple days ago what their final report they said the holiday came in at 14%. That's e-commerce so Little Debbie disappointing if that's true then you send me some data that showed MasterCard said all in 5.1 I guess you know this better than I do dinner or else was right around there and set right would that be kind of a win or a loss of your. Jason: [16:30] Yet so for all of retail that's that that's probably a win it's a little better than the recent historical averages but I think the. That does averages hide the fact that you know it just was not equal 4 for all retailers and inside I definitely think there are winners and losers. Scot: [16:54] Yeah unfortunately don't think we'll know until Amazon reports there they're kind of the Bellwether I look at and you know, Indus. Where they would have pre-announced if they had missed so they haven't said anything unfortunately Apple did pronounce look like they had a really rough calendar Q4 I believe it's there there theraphysical q1i which is always confusing what companies do it that way but that seems to be isolated to China with some of the tariffs and things in the Chinese economy that that I don't think we'll Amazon has as much exposure to just really interesting to see where holiday 18 and zup and I think we'll know what covered on the show as we always do I think we'll know by that first week in February however all the all the leaves fell and and what happened. Jason: [17:41] Yeah I'm looking forward to seeing how that all plays out so some of my bads. Didn't get a ton of Buzz last year but I've been pretty disappointed in the outcome of the Supreme Court ruling regarding a internet sales tax and so you know, basically the Supreme Court rule made a ruling in favor of a state that was suing to collect sales tax on. An internet sales in Oxy like I'm okay with. People having to pay sales tax for other online purchases I'm I actually think in general rather be Universal pricing and in. You know you buy from the same retail online or in the store you want to see the same price and and that's a lot to be taxed in a similar way the reason I say that the ruling was bad is. Because a bunch of the ramifications of the way this particular ruling plays out it just creates a lot of uncertainty in friction in the e-commerce space and so. Which states you actually need to collect sales tax in which they tax you definitely don't need to collect sales tax in and which states. You may or may not get sued by a state if you don't collect sales tax in right now is kind of. [19:02] Thrown up in the air and it creates a lot of inconsistency and just a lot of. A sort of effort and friction that isn't helping anyone and so I feel like there was opportunity for for Congress to solve this problem before dumping in the lap of the Supreme Court's and. You know maybe that was overly optimistic so didn't happen until we're going to have to let this play out for now a number of years and. Just like the unfortunate the other sort of bad one to me this year is we had some kind of ugly CEO exit so you know what we forgot about that this far end up but we had. You know the very ugly exit at Lululemon. [19:44] Early in the year I want to see February he was he was the CEO and chairman and got kind of forced out and he's now been. In an irritant for them on an ongoing basis you know Mickey Drexler was. Lasted less than a year of J.Crew and you know maybe not CEO of all but you know I see you judge executive term for some bad reasons it Nike. And so you know that certainly to me as one of the the the bad blemishes on on 2018 from a Commerce perspective. [20:19] And then my my ugly if we give it to the the really bad stuff for 2018 I just think it what I mean you're always going to have churning in retail stores are always going to have, bankruptcies Doug mcmillon famous what he carries around this west of the top 10. [20:36] Can retailers from my 1980 and there aren't a lot of those names that are that are still in business today so bankruptcies are in a shock but I feel like. 2018 hits is particularly hard with Toys R Us and Sears and then you know below them you had all these other guys David's Bridal Mattress Firm Brookstone Nine West Claire's Gymboree bonds. Etc and so you know as a lover of Commerce and Retail and sorry to see some of those stories brands. [21:07] You don't go away or get greatly diminished so that's only felt ugly and then right towards the end of the year, we had a IBM sell their big Enterprise e-commerce platform Webster Commerce to US service provider HCL, that to me is a probably super ugly for IBM clients that are relying on that platform and. You know now it's fragmented from the rest of the IBM stacked and there's going to be a bunch of challenges there there's a bunch of clients that own the or just moving to the. The cloud version of Webster Commerce which they didn't sell so that seems ugly I just feel like the the Enterprise Commerce platform space. In general is in a bad space and it's most manifested by by IBM which was you know one of the top three platforms are arguably the top platform getting kind of dumped by IBM this year. Scot: [22:08] Call yeah I'm going to plus one or as my kids would say retweet on the bankruptcies that tear you when was painfully know is that it is a kid that grew up Star Wars fan I spent many a midnight madness so you know. Jedi Friday or whatever the column hanging out in t r u so that was disappointing then you. Add insult to injury one of the shopping center if we go to a lot had a combined Tru Babies R Us like a huge one it just sitting there empty for the last last three or four months is kind of sad. Yeah I kind of say you know in this top of the mall Denton, so interesting stat here that came out towards the end of the year. I mentioned it, he did pretty well but malls were there emptiest in six years from a tenancy standpoint no foot traffic is also down at malls this company RI sorry is I had a report that said that they're at an 8.6% vacancy. [23:05] Again that's the highest it's been in 6 years and that represents 4 million square foot is the most available square footage in malls and then strip malls have been hit chick really bad because you know I think Toys R Us is really kind of one of those strip-mall type stores that it was an anchor for a lot of strip malls and and as we see in the enclosed malls when she loosened his anchors you get up into this death spiral kind of situation so I would also Echo that on the ugly side cool so so that was kind of the what was sawed in 2018 let's put it to our predictions in and see if how Clairvoyant we were on condos so I went back to Good Ol episode 112 and service predictions I'll go to mine and then you go to yours and then what kind of see how he did sue her quickly I had five predictions and a bonus so number one Mulligan 2.0 in 2017 we saw 7,000 stores closed and I said it's going to accelerate into 2018. [24:05] I ended up with 9,000 closures then my second prediction was that Amazon will not buy another retailer this doesn't seem like people may think well why would you say that it's kind of obvious but back then we were on the heels of the Whole Foods acquisition in a lot of Wall Street analyst for like issuing those reports you know Costco's Definitely Maybe the next company know it's Nordstrom's know its Target so that's that was kind of the backdrop. Predictions is really say these guys are off base I just don't think Amazon's could do anything big again in 2018, in the corollary to that was that they would instead of doing that they would triple down on private label. [24:44] Third prediction I ripped my prediction on Amazon Logistics they would be competing more squarely with FedEx ups and then number for this one turned out, pretty good I said Walmart will make big m&a instacart Postmates and eBay so, playing on Marketplace and last-mile their number 5 and said somebody would acquire magenta or they would go. And then my bonus was the Amazon would come out with Alexa powered, your butt's so I mentioned airpods the topless show I love my airpods but I am not a huge Siri fan and I everyday I wish Alexa what would hang out on my airpods instead of Siri so that was the Genesis of that production Warrior 2018 predictions. Jason: [25:30] Yep so I also had five in the bonus the first one was the grocery would get heavily disrupted by digital I think I called out specifically that would be wed by curbside pickup. Number two was the drug would get the heavily disrupted by digital, number three I said the biggest train would be talking about in 2018 was what I called that AI gap which was kind of, the difference between the big players that could take full advantage of AI in the smaller players that couldn't necessarily afford to do it as quickly, predictions for was voice I said it's going to continue to be huge and grow quickly but not for Commerce. And then my V prediction was mobile payments was digital wallets I said a bunch of them with. I said Starbucks Walmart and Amazon when continue to thrive but a bunch of the other ones women's and, snarky side note I mentioned that I expected Bitcoin to tank and then my bonus was. Close to the same as yours I I said that I thought the Amazon would come out with a wearable in 28. Scot: [26:42] What did you what you mean by Rebel. Jason: [26:45] Army night. Your paws were the most likely scenario but I just felt like they would find some way to get Alexa on on your body and especially because they lack the phone that seems like. You don't like it could be some kind of widget that you you clip to your clothing or or carry with you but but or I wear something like that but I guess my biggest expectation was that it would be your pot. And we will talk about the results of that moment early but I want to start off by breaking down how well you did so now that we reminded everyone what we thought 2018 would look like in the beginning of 2018 let's see how we actually did so your first prediction was the store Mulligan what do you think. Scot: [27:38] Yeah I'm going to because I put a specific number in there of 9,000 I I I missed that one turns out it took me a while to find the state looks like there was 6235 closures in hindsight what I should have done and there's no good data set for this is looked at the square footage of so you know when I don't know when a mattress firm closes that's different than a Sears or JCPenney are Toys R Us closing right is this really the square footage we care about so I would argue I would throw myself at the feet of the judges and say look at miss the number of stores but I think if you look at kind of what did clothes and yours juices rundown of store closures in 2018 Toys R Us 735, Walgreens 600 n Taylor Loft Dress Barn 500 Teavana 379 Best Buy 250 Mattress Firm 200 Gap 200 Children's Place 144 Footlocker 110 Kmart 109 Gymboree 102 and then let's goes It goes from there another kind of big square footage when Sam's Club 63 how big is a Sam's Club like two hundred thousand. Jason: [28:49] 100 weeks but yeah. Scot: [28:50] Honored yet so there's enough so it's all right I think if we looked as square footage I bet and I don't have a source for this unfortunately I have heard that the there was way more square footage in 2018 so. Who does if you want to hold it till I rely on the stop. Jason: [29:08] Yeah I'm actually giving you that one because I would, went out do I call the sources we do have the track store closures none of them claim or try to be comprehensive so they're they're tracking stores in a particular category or that made a particular criteria and saying they close that many but none of them for example are trying to keep track of. Potentially how many mom-and-pop closed or those sorts of things and even there are a couple of sources of square footage in your right the square footage is more dramatic because we had closure is it a lot of big stores but even the square footage tend to be like. People that are attacking mob a square footage in what the closures are so I just I don't think there is a definitive number but I think the spirit of your prediction came to pass and I think was the. The biggest shrinkage of a store for stores in in recent memory. Scot: [29:59] Colton so we'll call that one in the sky cam. Jason: [30:05] For sure so your second prediction Amazon will not buy another offline retailer and you said they'd triple down on private label so pretty with B, and I prediction but but I actually. I liked it so how do you think you did. Scot: [30:24] Predictions so obviously I didn't make another big acquisition of an offline retailer in it you know the trouble down on private label I think maybe they even quadruple down that it's hard to get data on the cell to does a good job and then we had some other data folks 10:10 to concentrate on the show and you know I think if you could attract our conversations on the show or the squeeze 7 episodes the second half of 18 we were spending a lot of time talking about Amazon 3rd party because it's probably the number one thing on retailers and Brands mines you know so so so I would call this definitely something that happened there. Jason: [31:12] That for sure, annoyingly totally giving it to you so 242 so far your third prediction which I touch you like is your annual protection, is the Amazon Logistics. Scot: [31:30] Yeah and this one's kind of squishy so I'm going to kind of say this was a zero so my mind we won't cross this one until I can ship a product on Amazon like I would FedEx from point A to point B. So I think it's become insanely cleared everyone that this is what they're building now so I think everyone is kind of, in fact if you if you go look at a FedEx stock chart and you'll see they had a number of issues with the terrorist it help them it would not, listen to their conference call their CEO and founder Fred Smith, you got a little agitated by a kind of the fifth or sixth Amazon question that he got so I think it's become pretty apparent everyone would Amazon's doing here and the the ball is no longer hidden the cards are on the table and who knows maybe 2019 will be that year when we can ship a product Coast to Coast for $3 on Amazon. Jason: [32:31] Yeah for sure so I'm sort of with you I feel like they made a lot of progress in that direction seems like you need to be something that will happen but but you don't get full credit for this year so if only because I need to keep the predictions competitive, so your fourth prediction was the Amazon the ad group we get so large that they would have to break out there the revenue separately and that people would be totally shocked how how big they got so quickly. Scot: [33:04] Yeah and so did this is a win they didn't have to break it out like they do AWS work so I could separate kind of reporting piano but they have had to break it out because it has been so large they created this they when they announced the quarter last year they said going forward they would change the way they recorded stuff. Unfortunately they stopped recording a lot of my favorite stuff which was kind of sad so they used to have this interesting breakdown between him and some things that have gone away now but when they did that they did start to break out category called other and everyone knows that that's like 99% and so and it has gotten quite large so you'll hear me talk a little bit more about that in 2019 president. Jason: [33:50] Yeah and you don't even though you're bad at reading predictions and you put that highly specific thing in there that didn't happen I'm totally giving this one to you like for people that haven't lived through the industry in last year people are not talking about Amazon's ad Revenue in January of last year in you don't even like the Scott Galloway's of the world that like make a living. Making predictions and then you know reminding everyone when they're right he wrote a book that you don't Amazon with 1/4 of the book and he barely mentioned advertising in that book in like, July and so for you back in January to have said hey there ads is going to be this big thing and it was going to be shocked when they find out how big it was and then you know last June and then again in October when they you know, showed how fast that was growing and everyone's exactly talking about that I feel like you you basically put the words right in there was a mouth so I'm totally giving you credit for that but you still ain't get one point for it so so you're three or four running into to your V prediction which was that. Annoying Walmart will make a big MMA and you mentioned some some last-mile candidates. Scot: [35:08] Yeah. Jason: [35:09] How you did Scott. Scot: [35:10] I'll give you sixteen Billy syneresis flag, Walmart acquired what card it was not one of the ones that predicted but. You know I probably should have so it was my my set up on this one going back then was, it's not like Walmart had all this pressure you know that they had to get in the game with with Amazon more and I was thinking Last Mile but it totally makes sense on their National side as well so that was, clearly a good call to kind of read the tea leaves on that one. Jason: [35:48] Yeah that was totally good and then annoyingly even though they were only supposed to be 5 predictions you did 1/6 prediction and you know to be annoyingly for me cuz I I'm I have this one-sided rivalry when I'm trying to compete with you I believe your 6 prediction was that a Dobby would acquire Magento for 1.6 billion dollars. Scot: [36:07] It wasn't that accept fake but it was that someone would acquire Majin to or they would go public so so there you know so having been on the other side of this when when you get to a certain scale as a startup in the magenta got through some complicated things but they're effectively a start up again right there an independent entity they had a private equity the clock starts ticking was what I was thinking and what that clock means is that investor wants their money back and he's private Equity guys BC's want a 10-year Horizon private equities like two or three that was kind of feeding into that prediction and then you know it's also on the other side it's. Musical chairs you know so so everyone every big cloud he's going to want to have a great platform and it just felt like there was. One chair left in and kind of two Cloud companies that wanted to sit in that chair so so that's what it said in the so happy that I read those tea leaves right as well. Jason: [37:07] What congratulations so recap five out of six right and then you did do the bonus one and that was the Amazon would have an airpod like headphones they and what it what do you want to say about that stuff. Scot: [37:23] So my strategy here is it's easy to call this when the wind because you had the same one so your Prime. So Amazon specifically didn't get released this but this is actually my son was looking for some new headphones so we went to, I would assume next to the derelict Toys'R'Us I mentioned earlier and I was surprised I'm a big I'm listening I'm on the show right now with some qc35 from Bose and I looked and it said now featuring Alexa and I was like what the heck, this is awesome now Alexa is in the Bose headphones then I went over to the job or display and it said now featuring Alexa then I went over to like two other kind of you know generic style things and literally as I backed up and looked at the row of headphones every single pair suddenly I had Alexa so what's happened is Amazon has issued an API or some kind of capability in a very strategically work with a lot of these manufacturers and unbeknownst to me until now literally like January 2nd when we were born in some. [38:29] Best Buy gift cards they are there are a lot of airpod like Technologies and and you have every configuration headphone you can imagine with Alexa now and I play with it it's actually exactly how I want it to be so on my Gadget which list is I am hoping that somehow these Bose headphones I have break and that I can. Get a new pair with Alexa or maybe I need to go check and see if I can retro them to have Alexa probably not try some kind of I'm sure there's some. Gizmo this to make me buy a new car. Jason: [39:02] Yea though I can certainly help you with the accidental breakage problem when I see you in in New York in a couple weeks but yeah yeah same boat I I'm not giving it either this credit for this cuz the Amazon didn't didn't actually, come out with an Amazon branded product but what did happen I can't remember the exact date like August or September they did finally release exactly as you suggested an API that made it totally possible for OEM to build Alexa into the headphones and you can imagine folks are doing it right then but then even a bigger deal one of the big chip manufacturers in November started shipping a new Bluetooth chipset the included that capability and access to that API in the chips at so you're already seeing a bunch of announcements that's before. Brands had the opportunity to build new products with this new Bluetooth chipset my expectation is I'm going to show up in Las Vegas tomorrow and there are going to be Bluetooth products with an Alexa embedded in them coming out of my ears with early. So I think we yeah we may have missed The Branding on that one but the floodgates are about to open up and not one of my predictions but sidenote like I think everyone's noticed that. [40:24] Airpods have been Apple's most successful product in The Last 5 Years and you know the. The Amazon Alexa family's been the most successful Consumer Electronic it in The Last 5 Years, I'll be shocked if we don't see apple Google and Amazon directly battling it out with smart smart earbuds this year. Scot: [40:44] Cool one of the one of the many Jason Scott show interns just handed me a note it looks like I can upgrade my headphones with firmware so we're going to stop a show right now. Jason: [40:58] We're not going to stop at but you may not hear Scott anymore cuz he's going to like drop by the audio. Scot: [41:03] I'm going to be upgrading my firmware while Jason finishes the wrestler show speaking of Jason let's go through your predictions so what was my score so was it 5 out of 7. Jason: [41:13] I forgot I forgot what it was I'm giving you five out of six we're not counting the bone. Scot: [41:18] Okay but I think that helps you but I'm okay with. Jason: [41:21] Well but we're also the setting it was the same bonus oh. Scot: [41:24] Okay so your first one was grocery gets disrupted by digital led by curbside pickup listeners will longtime listeners will know that is your favorite. Grocery solution digital grocery doubles in the US at least one delivery firm Peters out. Jason: [41:41] Yep so, I'm calling out a window side note I have come to realize that I hate my predictions from last year and because I just, put them badly like they're too subjective and in many cases like hard to measure so at one of my New Year's resolution is to write better predictions and we'll find out how very shortly. Scot: [42:05] It's easy to say you hate them in January of 2019. Jason: [42:08] Yeah for sure for sure but but I do think the sentiment of this when like was wildly true Walmart ruled after I pick up to 2,000 stores that over 40% e-commerce growth every quarter this year which is wildly faster than last year is faster than Amazon Kroger get a bunch of their own curbside pickup called quick list but a bigger deal they did an exclusive partnership with Arcado the biggest digital Grocer in UK Albertsons made a bunch of big Investments they both announced that they were going to watch the first digital grocery Marketplace and they also announced that they were going to build dedicated micro fulfillment centers out of the backs of a bunch of the Albertsons stores our friends at shoptalk launched a dedicated digital grocery show called grocery talk and it's sold out with 3,000 attendees in the first year you know you go internationally and the the Ali Baba concept hammer and the JD concept 7 fresh are going nuts I think it's it's a safe and fair to say digital grocery blew up even even though. You know I mean I have perfectly nailed the specifics and again there's no perfect metric but it does appear that digital grocery more than doubled in the US. Scot: [43:28] Wood shed delivery from Peter. Jason: [43:30] Yeah that's the part where I sort of depends on how you count right like you could argue that like one that got acquired like shipped for example. Scot: [43:42] Oh that's like tripled. Jason: [43:44] Not with any retailer besides Target. And I think I mean you know there's there's something there on the ropes a little bit but yeah that was a dumb part of the prediction so you can you're going to trust me anyway so don't you don't need a whole night. Scot: [44:00] Oh when writing predictions don't don't like a daisy chain hands together because. Jason: [44:06] When specifics yeah yeah. 2 + 1 is that is that I'm one-for-one right now feel free to stop listening to schoenauer. Scot: [44:17] Okay the judges give you that one okay because we're going to flip your aunt's to Anor and give you one there alright your second prediction was drugs get disrupted by digital. Jason: [44:30] Yeah and I mean a few things did happen that are interesting Amazon invested a billion dollars in pillpack they wash their first over-the-counter brand basic care they partnered to do that like at home medical devices under the choice brand of course there's this big joint health care venture between Amazon Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan but to me none of that adds up to a true disruption yet and I I mean I think there's some is there a lot of interesting tea leaves to read this year but I'm I'm not going to argue that I should get a point there. Scot: [45:12] All right and then your third prediction was the biggest trend of 2018 will be the AI Gap. Jason: [45:21] So once again a stupid prediction how do you argue something is or isn't the biggest Trend but I think it's safe to say this wasn't so I kind of miss this one like you know I do think. Aai was one of the hype things that got a lot of chatter in 2018 and there was one IPO that you could argue with sort of AI Commerce which is Stitch fix realistically like I didn't I don't think we saw a i dramatically transformed any retailers and so my my way more specific prediction that. Did the it would open a gap between the big retailers in the little retailers why I just don't think it's fair to say that happened so that was a dumb prediction and I'm I'm not one for 3. Scot: [46:06] Okay I'll see how you did a number for you said his voice is going to be huge but not for Commerce. Jason: [46:14] Yeah so again based on my fragile ego I feel like this one is climbing out of the hole a little bit I do think of voice was huge I think Amazon alone has said they sold over a hundred million devices now it's their best-selling device on all their big days that there's some by some metrics Google is actually. Selling more devices in the last couple quarters than Amazon I'm not sure I totally believe that but but I do believe they're selling a bunch of devices as well until for sure, voice over all was huge and I think even more clearly voice commerce was not there was some some data that came out in the third quarter that said that less than 2% of people that own smart speakers that ever tried to do Commerce with it feel like the only only even moderate volume, Commerce type applications were things like a Starbucks in the Uber for sure people are not ordering things with. Complicated attributes and in promo codes via there their voice devices self. Again I'm going to take the win there and which would put me at 2 for 4. Scot: [47:32] Does that hundred million devices suppression. Jason: [47:36] No because I mean some very low-cost devices we haven't talked that an issue I don't think that they now even have like and you can frequently get devices free and as part of bundles but they never liked him $19 device that you can plug into any speaker. And so they they just have all the price points in there you know there, is you highlighted there a huge advertising platform than one of that biggest biggest media platforms on the on the planet and they generally dedicate about half of all their pixels to selling this stuff so I mean. Today I am not shocked they sold that many devices if you if you ask me in a 3 years ago when they started this stuff if they would get there this past I probably would have said that shot. Scot: [48:21] So just like one way I think about this is probably 80% domestic 20% International I don't think they push the Alexa stuff is hard International so then to the pilot 89 us net, that article is totally undermined right is global High thing. Jason: [48:40] Yeah I think that was a global number. Scot: [48:42] There's three hundred and fifty people are in the US 250 households 200 million households. Jason: [48:51] Little north of 200. Scot: [48:52] Yes it was just going to round numbers 200 million households 80 million devices there's going to be some like your house that has 30 devices but that's like we on this Edge Neo so you know call it's approaching half us households have an Alexa device that's pretty amazing. Jason: [49:13] Yeah for sure but it is I feel like it is pres been on them like they're lots of devices that get to that. That 50% market share eventually and it depends on the technology took a long time but I do think one of the ramifications of the like modern digital era is. That all of this happens much faster so you know it. Adoption of new things just happens much more quickly than it did in the ear of radio or TV and so you know smart speakers, you know followed a similar trajectory to a lot of those other media technologies that they just did it in a way I can press time. Scot: [49:47] God I wish I could give you two on this one but it's been our custom to just give one point prediction so sorry. Jason: [49:53] Yeah totally totally fair. Scot: [49:56] Then your payments so you said retail die. And Bitcoin tanks so you didn't and in there. Jason: [50:11] So like you got him like me for my poor Boolean logic and again stupidly written like I call that some specific digital wallets that were the exceptions and those exceptions large we did really well Starbucks did very well on there some evidence that Walmart did well Amazon you know his continuing to thrive is a digital wallet I didn't spell out the digital wallets that wouldn't do well but in my mind there were two families of those there's Apple and Google which, like all indications are are pretty flat so there are people using them in liking them but it but it does not appear that they're growing particularly fast and it doesn't appear that they're getting as much reuse as, I'm sure they would hope so so our friends over it payments that that track this like it kind of found ample in Google to be flat and then there was this whole genre of digital wallets from financial institutions so specific Banks like Chase and Citibank and the card issuers like MasterCard and visa and. [51:13] Yeah none of those digital wallets are used by anyone that's not a family member of the company so I do feel like that that is fair and then stupidly put a hand in there 4 Bitcoin that had nothing to do with digital wallet so I have no idea why I did that but that is arguably, my best prediction of the entire thing because I think Bitcoin was at $16,000 a coin and in that is the beginning of January that you wanted me to prediction and today it's at about 3:36 hundred bucks so it's basically a quarter of its its former value so if you if you wanted to invest in any prediction in this entire, in N last year's entire show the most money you could have made was to take my advice and short bed. Scot: [51:59] Unless you were a Magento investor. Are Flipkart okay and then finally you said Amazon will come out in the wearable and I think you have already dismissed. Jason: [52:14] Yeah yeah thank you you are to cover that one so so I think you add all that up I'm I'm three out of five you're for it at 5 but with a like a much richer more impressive for. Scot: [52:26] Cool thank you I appreciate the kikuta sir I think you did a good job but hopefully you learned some some important lessons about writing your predictions and let's let's jump into that you want to go first you want me to go first. Jason: [52:39] I want to go first, before you jump in and in case we have any that overlap. Scot: [52:45] Are you good for. Jason: [52:46] So my first prediction is that Eddie Lampert is not going to launch a space exploration company. Wait wait that's all right so cheating just making fun of your negative predictions but I do like that one if anyone wants to keep it as my bonus my first one I guess I'm trying to have more measurable objective things I think continuing the the evolution of Amazon's brick-and-mortar I think Amazon is going to have more than a thousand brick-and-mortar stores by the end of this year, combination of goes Whole Foods in some other expansion of bookstore Concepts but a thousand stores is a very meaningful brick-and-mortar retailers so if you go to like the the NRF top list of retailers and you sort it by number of stores a thousand stores makes you about the the 67th, largest retailer in the US by number of stores and so in addition to all the other areas where Amazon's excelling in. And dominating I feel like eating that thousands door threshold like definitely makes you as usually credible brick-and-mortar retailer and I think they're going to get there this year. Scot: [54:04] Do you want to throw and and in there about. Jason: [54:07] And Eddie Lampert is not going to want to space exploration. Scot: [54:10] Okay alright I almost got that in here. Jason: [54:14] So then my new strategy is just to take your predictions that didn't happen from the year before and doubled down on them. So you last year said Walmart was going to make a big acquisition and you highlighted some of the last mile companies and you got credit for the making the big acquisition but it wasn't the last mile company, I think they're going to fulfill the other half of your prediction this year and actually buy a Last Mile company. And that's potentially potentially instacart Postmates taskrabbit but I also think something like that. Adda live wood would totally toy fit in there so I'm I'm sure we'll see Walmart both organically grow and acquire. Let more last-mile capability this year. [55:07] Number 3 I am sad to say based on our previous conversations but I I think we are going to see another big beloved brand go bankrupt this year so I actually think. In any way I do I told you I think that it was an unexpectedly good economy this year. I am not as confident that we're going to sustain that for all of 2019 and there are you know it again I think that the the booming economy hasn't been. Equally generous to all retailer so I do think there's some retards have had a tough going and I think as both get tightened a little bit that potential will be the last. The last straw so you know I certainly think the department stores. You know is a vulnerable category United by JCPenney certainly is vulnerable I think any of the category killers that used to win based on assortment you know aren't winning an assortment anymore do the online so you know that could be one of the. The Office Products companies are Bed Bath & Beyond or some of those guys and you know when we talk about department stores. You don't one super story brand in the US that you like I think is has a bunch of money a bunch of. Debt due in 2019 and seemed to be having some some substantial disagreements with her creditors at the moment is Neiman Marcus so I would be sad to see them go but it seems like. [56:35] Like they're going to have to do pretty well tough to forestall that so I'm afraid we'll see another another big bankruptcy this year. Scot: [56:43] How many demons are there are they only like four big cities room. Jason: [56:47] So it's not a huge footprint unless it's 40 spores and they own a couple other Concepts as well but yeah. Scot: [56:57] Predictions for 4. Jason: [56:59] I feel like I might have made a similar version of this before but the. I'm bringing it back so mobile the mobile Gap getting narrower is my is my official predictions I think aided by a progressive web apps and payment API we are going to see. Mobile really catch up to desktop in terms of conversion rate and also total sale so I guess I'll see you in my dreams specific prediction is. That we have more mobile Commerce than desktop Commerce in if you take out tablets in 29th. Scot: [57:40] And then last but not least. Jason: [57:42] Yeah I'm taking you or negative predictions to the extreme and I'm just saying there's a bunch of pads that I don't think will will. Be significant and in 2019 the first one is still going to be hyped this year and still going to be a fad. I actually don't think there's going to be a ton of like customer-facing AI experiences or are frankly even way better personalization experiences in 2019. I think we will see more more chatter around social commerce but it's still not going to catch on. I don't think going to see any meaningful Traction in in VR for Commerce. And I certainly don't think blockchain is going to be a very important element for most of Commerce so that you know there's the ones you you all of those Technologies are ones you hear people talk about a lot and. Like I frequently intended rough drafts of retail Trends decks with all these things in a minute I just don't think any of them are going to be very Signet. Scot: [58:44] Any any bonuses you want to put on there. Jason: [58:47] I do the you talk about Amazon being forced to break out their ad Revenue do I actually think they're going to get forced to break out the revenue related to Prime Membership. And I hope that happens cuz I think it would be super interesting to see what percentage of. Of their their sales come from Prime and and you don't total total Prime Revenue in those sorts of things would be fascinating to know. Scot: [59:15] Did you include, like a whole p&l there or just really Prime revenue and sales around Prime. Jason: [59:22] Yeah I don't know how specific I want to get on bonus I don't think I official purposes I won't say piano but I hope that they have to get as granny or as. Using Prime members as a segment for reporting Revenue. So that's what I got hopefully it's better than last year hopefully I am I'm not getting. I hope I am enjoying next year's version of the show more than I did this year's but the time we're finally to the part that I'm really looking forward to which is what Nostradamus thinks is going to happen for next year so Scott what do we got. Scot: [1:00:00] Yeah it's always hard to follow up on him set up pretty good predictions and if you like last year the, the chessboard was more clearly laid out for me than it is this year and and the the tilt of the board is really hard so you know we're coming off a year where the economy was smoking and wages are going up but then we have a lot of changes in the political scene there's lots of talk of impeachment there's like all kinds of craziness the garments closes record this really hard to know which way the economy is going. But you know whenever I'm on kind of the fence on these things I tend to be an optimist so it's my heart for real blood so I'm going to lean towards the positive side of things I think you know hopefully we navigate to all that I know, Tailwind of a good economy in 2019 as an industry which I think we all agree would be good so. My first prediction so following on that optimystix thing by first one's kind of negative so like you I agree we haven't seen you know. [1:01:06] The end of this kind of I think it's a Dominos that are falling and I don't think a lot of people even kind of put that together yet so like you seen Sears file Chapter 11 I don't think many stores come out of that I think we're down to a handful of Sears that's going to put pressure on malls I think that puts more pressure on JCPenney. If you look there stocks already down from for $2. The other two are heading into a delisting scenario below a dollar I don't know what's going on with their creditors but all these old-school guys Leverage. So you get into the stuff spiral it sure does feel like JCPenney's stuck into that. Spiral they have 860 stores. [1:01:45] Macy's is Macy's is doing really well today, but once you get stuck into this kind of swirling drain of mall-based retail it's really hard to get out of there and I do worry that they kind of there a domino that falls in there. [1:02:01] I've already closed some stores to trim their footprint and their 660 more so I don't think they would do bankruptcy everything but I think they may have to sell some of those stores are closing so I'm going to say at least 5,000 more stores and if we can ever find the square footage I think it'll be, about as bad as 2019 so I think 2017-18 was a huge step up 8 1617 and 17 18 wheeler big steps up I think we'll go sideways which is still going to be pretty bad though because that step up Rick kind of this 5000 larger stores whatever the equivalent Sopranos that I do believe was larger than 2017 just my first pregnancy second one is you know your your buddy Scott Galway also known as Professor go away he is really big on TV telling everyone that the government's Crackdown on Amazon and for some spin-off AWS he's backed off that a little bit and now he's talking about well maybe they'll have to have tracking stock I'm going to predict this is one of my anti production so you can Amazon doesn't do those things but this will be the year that they know that adds does get broken out and I'll be specific here as its own p&l kind of line out of the bath report because when I kind of build a spreadsheet and it got to take. Cloud stuff which is AWS and how I think adds is growing and I think. [1:03:30] Off the record I think you for ads will probably do as much as the rest of 2018 which is going to blow people's minds but it makes total sense, me and probably you cuz that's what you would do if you were brand new grass is so when I put in a spreadsheet and track them I believe it's going to be about the same size as AWS by like 20 22 or 23 1 and I've seen a couple of Reports say the same thing, that is my second prediction and just to recap it again they're going to have to break out they won't and I put an end in here in tribute to. To Jason they're not going to spin or tracking stock AWS but they will have to break out ads. What's your prediction is I think too kind of the companies out there and I've talked about Amazon and it's in the ones that are struggling on Mosside you have kind of eBay and Alibaba they had come like what I would call up computer in 2018 it is kind of you know it wasn't a great year it wasn't a bad year but they both had they have type beat up over the last year at least companies both have leaders that they want to grow and be aggressive, I feel like something's going to happen there and when I kind of think about it I've always thought this would be a perfect kind of combination so these these two companies just feel like they belong together to me so I'm going to call that there is going to be a combination there. [1:04:52] Number for and I know she didn't really make platform prediction the last platform that last chair kind of out there is Shopify now all the cloud and infection on this all all the cloud guys seem to have kind of bed on their platform rent and I will get them all but I think, so then you may be single who's left by like a Shopify and then another footnote is shopify's really expensive assets oh yeah honest AC it's like for 5 billion dollars but it has to be small revenue is going to use super high valuation so whoever buys this that really kind of limits the number of companies that buy it has to be super my prediction here is you have the ad platforms and specifically I'm thinking Google and Facebook, they're just getting pummeled right now on the ad side from data collection and and you know all the things about Russia hacking and all this in front of Congress just getting beat up I think if I had 100% of my revenue from ads and I was one of those two companies I would be willing to spend a very large sum to diversify That rumney Base because I do think that business model is going to be under external pressures for a while to mow predictions I think that last seat is taken by either fat Facebook or Google. [1:06:14] To be an ally bother someone so I'm not to be super specific there but I do think Shopify gets taken out this year and my sis production is kind of an opposite one of you so we're going to misaligned on this one I think Walmart has made a couple a lot of big bets over the last year and it's just really hard to get all this right so so spending that much on Flipkart I think Amazon shareholder base is in Amazon Walmart shoulder base isn't Amazon shareholder base and I think they look at that and they're kind of like scratching their head and thinking wow I could open a lot more stores I could then X Y and Z you could have written a dividend check so that they have a much different old school master bass been Amazon does and I think that's going to put pressure on them this year so it's a, prediction is that they're going to stumble so I think their growth rates going too slow I think they got a lot of early wins from Anna digitalizing the groceries I think a lot of those are one-time pops and, they are going to get stuck in that to keep that growth up at that and I'm north of what they said 30 40%. [1:07:18] They have to do some big m&a Flipkart has to go right zlata has to go right there and I don't think we have that flexibility to navigate to that I think they're going to have a run, I don't want that to happen so let me be clear I don't want that to happen I just think it's the natural progression of these things when you have a year where you put a bunch of bats on the table, your tab another year we're not all those bets are going to go well and truly they they're probably brace for that I think. [1:07:46] It's not going to be there nothing about a business or anything but it is going to be a tough year for them I think I'll do a cover set. Jason: [1:07:53] Interesting well I think that's a terrific sort of spectrum of predictions between the two of us and that is going to be a perfect place to leave it in the reason I say that is because we always right these show outline that we intend to be 30 45 minutes and I believe I predicted this show would be 70 minutes and right now we're at 67 minutes so I'm calling it I can be right about one thing it's how long the show is but if you are disappointed that we could have shortened you there was something you wanted to discuss that we didn't get to or you have any questions about the show or ideas for future shows feel free to keep the dialogue going on Facebook you can jump on their pop a question will be happy to chat with you as always we greatly appreciate those five star reviews on iTunes that's a wonderful belated Christmas present to Scott or I so feel free to the jump on there and we would greatly appreciate it. Scot: [1:08:52] Thanks everyone for joining so hope you enjoyed the first show 2019 happy New Year and we look forward to spending 2019 with you talking about what's going on in e-commerce retail and the rest of e-commerce insurance. Jason: [1:09:08] Absolutely and so until next time happy commercing.

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EP158 - NYC Holiday Store Visits

Vansformation: The podcast all about self-build van conversions

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 20, 2018 72:42

EP158 - NYC Holiday Store Visits We're in the peak of the holiday season, which means Jason is going to be visiting stores. This year he went to NYC and visited 33 new or updated store concepts. If you'd like to follow the tour yourself, here the Retailgeek NYC Retail Map. Some favorites this year included: Nike Dyson Allbirds Amazon 4 Star Casper Covergirl FAO Schwarz Glossier Google Hardware Macy’s (especially the B8ta shop-in-shop) Showfields Some disappointments included: Restoration Hardware Saks Apple Away Amazon News Bloomberg article had a great piece about the 1099 amazon delivery network Amazon extended delivery window Amazon new air hub in DFW WSJ article on CRAPfest Amazon Go in airports Small format Amazon Go Opening Amazon Go in UK Other News IBM sold its commerce platform (Websphere) to HCL Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 158 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, December 17th, 2018. Happy holidays everyone... talk to you in 2019! Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 158 being recorded on Monday December 17th 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host. Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:42] Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason it's been like 10 days but your life has changed a whole lot since we last talked so you you had a birthday happy belated birthday. Jason: [0:55] Thank you much it's depressing the type that even bigger number into the the elliptical machine at the gym when I am frequent occasions when I use that. Scot: [1:05] WG&R on verify so go ahead and round down. Jason: [1:10] Yeah I don't want to only be cheating myself and I feel like my my I don't know if the math actually works out this way but in my mind I mean year older so it should be more impressed. Scot: [1:22] And then you have an exciting new gig or title something like SVP of digital Commerce retail payments and chief strategy officer. Jason: [1:37] I think that's exactly my title I've had to go to jumbo size business cards for the three people that still use business card. Scot: [1:44] Or hang out 3 like a like a tweet storm you have a business card storm. Jason: [1:48] 1 of 2 of 3 of I like that. Scot: [1:50] But in all seriousness you are now the chief Commerce strategy officer tell us what's this entail and the upwardly-mobile thing what's going on. Jason: [2:03] That was a lie the very least would like to think of others agree but yeah it innocence for the last six years have been working for a particular agency that was originally razorfish and then you know we merged with Sapient and became sapientrazorfish. But that agency is part of a much bigger a holding company called the pupusas group and so essentially, took a new role at the group level so you know hopefully I'll get to keep working with a lot of the. The colleagues and clients from from sapientrazorfish that I've always enjoyed but I'll have more responsibility and work opportunity to work with. A broader selection of group clients across a bigger geography and. Like most of these holding companies were a little more Silo then we should be done to best serve customers and so a big part of my job is to kind of. Pull together all the the capabilities within the group to better serve our Commerce clients and so. [3:15] That should be fun and you may know it was important that I get that promotion on my birthday because. When you have a birthday on LinkedIn you get a lot of well-intentioned well wishes. [3:34] And annoyingly LinkedIn won't actually send you emails with your mail from LinkedIn though just sending you an email each time you get something saying, go to LinkedIn to read this one sentence can the message and so basically on your birthday your email is is, put under a denial-of-service attack by LinkedIn and so that also happens when you change your your job and so I felt like, smart to do both on the same day so that like I might email would only be down for one day. Scot: [4:05] Cuz it's me you give me like a bull in a china shop in there tearing down silos and making people work together. Jason: [4:14] Hopefully it's a little more carrot than stick wouldn't be the first time I was inadvertently a little overly aggressive so I shall Endeavor to find the right balance there are a ton of of great capabilities and in groups in pupusas and it's it's, as far as I'm concerned I went from the the 32 pack of crayons to the hundred pack of crayons and so you know it's going to be fun to paint more colorful pictures. Scot: [4:47] I know it's hard to put a number on it but would you say over 80 to 90% of getting this new gig is related to the podcast should we thank listeners for their contributions. Jason: [4:59] Possibly that's slightly conservative. Scot: [5:02] We forget individual performance I think the the pr halo effect from, this kind of cited ever that we have this is probably responsible for most of your career trajectory hear the last at least 58 weeks. Jason: [5:19] I feel like that's absolutely true I feel like the listeners absolutely would have put me over the top but you alone are so influential with all the the leadership in Paris that I feel like just you putting in a good word, was was enough to drive the new promotion so thanks very much to Scott and thanks very much to all the listeners for supporting me. Scot: [5:40] I said you listen up French dude Jason needs promotion and he doesn't need one of these like. Everyday sea-level gigs he needs to be a double sea level and they came up the new tunnel ccso your CC level you like c-squared level. Jason: [5:58] Etsy I like that c-square that's how I'm that maybe it's cuz I'm more sort of exponential growth than I am linear growth I like that I like that alot. Scot: [6:08] I didn't go to the sea level meeting cuz I'm c-squared level. Jason: [6:13] Exactly I feel like the one negative ramification as we are now going to have to do a deep dive on the Peter Principle. Scot: [6:20] Well you hit the ground running and you have been in New York I've been watching your tweets my favorite is your Covergirl tweet that was a little. It's surprising and shocking to see on the cover of Covergirl so congratulations on that. Jason: [6:37] Yeah I feel like that would be more than any person needs to be thinking about but then I got in a Twitter conversation today with with some of our favorite journalist talking about the latest trends in women's fashion and now they're all super excited about seeing me where like flare denim at dinner cropped flare Denim and interrupt this year so so sorry for all the Twitter followers that had to read that. Scot: [7:07] Yeah that's going to be good with there will be pictures I will take them and post them. Jason: [7:12] But in all seriousness it is sort of a annual tradition than I have around my birthday is I pick a city that has a bunch of retail going on and I like to do a bunch of store visits around the holidays is is, people will know or might imagine. There's a lot of in addition to the sort of all the Evergreen retail there's a lot of popups that they Brands open around the holidays and if you're a retail and you're going to watch a big new flagship it wouldn't be uncommon that you try to get it launched. In time for Holiday Inn so usually it's a good time of year to see some new new retail Concepts or at least see the evolution of some. Some retail Concepts so this year I went to New York City for a couple days and I walked about 14 miles and visited 33 stores. Scot: [8:02] Give us give us the highs the lows The Good the Bad the Ugly how whatever kind of format you want to do. Jason: [8:10] So I mentioned 33 stores there were 11 that really jumped out at me as. As irrelevant and interesting for for one reason or another there were kind of for that I. I'm putting in the doghouse that were disappointing for one reason or another and then you know the rest I kind of characterizes middle of the road, the reason I pick New York this year was specifically was because Nike had just opened the new store on Fifth Avenue at flagship store called House of innovation 0:01. And now there's been a lot of buzz in our industry that this was a super Progressive omnichannel digital first retail store and so I had read a lot about it and I wanted to make sure I had a good. Good first-hand experience so that was kind of the anchor that pulled me to New York and then I put together a list if anyone is super masochistic. What I tend to do is put all these things in in Google Maps which little-known feature of Google Maps is great for custom maps. And it works on all that the apps on all the different mobile platform so I can actually put a link in the show notes to my Google Map and you can you can see why these doors are if you happen to be visiting New York and one. Want to check any of them out but so jumping into that Nike store I felt like it really lived up to the hype. [9:35] So this is a big store on Fifth Avenue you know some of the most expensive real estate in North America. It's a 6-story store and some of the Marquis experiences they talked about are these kind of. [9:51] Blend of digital and experiential. So for example they have a great Reserve online fry in-store experience you can if you live in New York you can shop on the mobile phone, I find some shoes in a size you want to try on and someone will pull those shoes and put them in a locker. Waiting for you and so when you get to the store you can use the mobile app to unlock the locker try on the shoes if you decide you want to buy them you can do at self-checkout on the mobile app and so essentially you can. [10:30] Get stuffed Asian in dressing room try it on. And buy it without ever having to have any interaction with an employee if you don't feel like you needed employee. [10:41] And said to me that was like an interesting sort of. Improvement in the frictionless reserve online try and store experience another Marquis Ranch they had is this mannequin shopping so you knows is a lot of folks might know. Apparel that you put on mannequins tends to sell dramatically better than the apparel that's just on the racks or on the Shelf. But it often can be tricky to shop the outfit on a mannequin cuz you see something on the mannequin and you don't necessarily know. What model that is or where you can go get that particular Peril in that you're the one thing the store can do is they can put the exact apparel on the mannequin on. On an end cap or display right next to the mannequin but then that creates all kinds of problems for the store where the inventory is fragmented some of its out on that is custom display and some of its in line in the rack and, when someone does a boat is order or something else now they can't find the apparel because it's floating all over the store. And so what Nike did is they actually put a QR code on every mannequin and you can scan this QR codes with the Nike app and it opens up. [11:52] At the digital experience with all the. The apparel that's rest on that mannequin and again you can click on any of those things to have them sent to a dressing room in your size you can self-checkout or you don't get help from a sales associate but it, it's kind of a cool digital way to shop the look on mannequins in the store. Scot: [12:16] I've seen some of the shoe stores are now doing some of the 3D printing word out of separate experience. Jason: [12:29] Yeah no no no Nike is all in on customized and custom products so. [12:36] Nike actually has a Big 5 store in Tribeca did the bottom floor is totally dedicated to customization and it supposed to custom shoes and custom jerseys so I can round the World Cup. [12:46] Like embroidering your name on on your team's Jersey and stuff like that in real time was huge and this. House of innovation takes that even a step further in this store you actually can have your your shoe models custom ink. I mean you literally wait for the ink to dry and then they give you. That the completely custom product in the store so the ground for the store is totally dedicated to custom. They have all these kind of experiential components to the floor where you can see like. The embroidery shop they have all the people like sewing on the machines and you can watch him making the custom product they have the die shop and you can you know these that you can look through the glass walls and watch all the people handcrafting. Your custom products and they have a bunch of digital stations where you can work with a sales associate and design your own shoe from scratch or. You can pick a custom-designed shoe that was designed by an influencer that you're aligned with so that could be a celebrity or it could be. You know some some talented independent designer that Nike had partnered with so if you don't want to just. Pick a random design from scratch you can you can rely on the talent of someone else to still make a shoe that's kind of unique in that everyone doesn't have and that isn't available at Foot Locker. [14:12] Yeah so they're definitely in on custom. They also at another store we've talked about it with Nike is this Nike at Melrose which is in Los Angeles, and it's big spin is it's localized so they pay close attention to what people shop for and that store and change the assortment really rapidly. In response to the the Nike Shoppers in in Los Angeles and so the bottom floor which is a sub-basement for and this this store is called Nike Speed Shop and it is essentially is dedicated to the best-selling. Products in New York City and again, yui you walk in on you see like that you know fastest selling items while the changes you know quite frequently depending on what the popular items are and you you can scan a QR code and how many of those items popped into a, a self-service Locker for you so again there they're kind of leveraging the the crowd generation and the the seamless. Self Service experience you can self checkout for anything in the store so you don't you don't have to get in line at a particular cashier they have self-checkout station throughout the store where you can like get bags and things like that. The. [15:27] So overall I'd say like this store does a better job of seamlessly integrating digital in a physical environment than almost any other store have been in and it's pretty exciting for that. The downside is. Most of these experiences are not ones that Shoppers are already used to and so the sales associates are having to do a heck of a lot of Education that teach people how to use all these amenities in the store. And it's kind of a cannon to when Banks first ride rolling out ATM machines you know they had to staff the self-service ATM machines with the last app to teach people how to use them or you know when the airlines you step to teach people how to use. That the digital boarding passes you know the Hope Is overtime everyone learns how to shop that store and use those amenities and they can cut back on the amount of staff that they need to train customers but then on the flip side. [16:18] Fifth Avenue is like one of the the highest tourist traffic shopping areas in the United States and so. You know the frequency of visit is probably a lot lower it's probably you know the one and only time a bunch of these people are going to shop that store so I think that the. [16:37] Education think could be an ongoing Challenge and one of the sort of pet peeve or suggestion I would have for Nike is the. All of these digital experiences are totally dependent on you having the Nike app which I. I hate having that app dependency because it's really hard to get users to download the app and to help users get their password and to get users to consistently use the app. And you know these days with Progressive web apps we could have all the same experience on a web experience. All these QR codes that are all over the store the the Apple phones now natively Sant scan QR phones in the app in the the camera app so you know you could have. Given the customer 90% of the same functionality with an iPhone with no app in it and Nike intentionally chose not to do that so when you scan any of those QR codes. That work in the Nike app with the the iPhone camera for example instead of giving you the the digital experience it takes you to the iTunes Store and tries to get you to download the Nike app so. You know they're there I can understand their goal to try to get good penetration of the app but I'd rather see him give him more seamless experience to the customers. Scot: [17:51] Yeah cuz the apps are pretty beefy and you know you're in the store on cell and is 4 Wi-Fi never really works it's always get glitchy and yeah. Talking to it and it just kind of creates a lot of friction. Jason: [18:07] Yeah I know and you know getting their stores that are worse like that Amazon go stores that you'll see a huge queue outside these doors that require an app to shopping. Yeah they they call him frictionless doors cuz it's just walk out technology and the irony is they just move the friction from the the cashier to the front door to the store. Scot: [18:26] Yeah it is one time that which is good. Jason: [18:28] No totally true. I mean I overall super favorable impression on the Nike store or I'll be excited to watch it continue to evolve as always anything new it's pretty easy to find a, a few refinements and and you know hopefully Nike works for those overtime if you go to that Nike store literally right next door to that Nike store is a Dyson Factory Store and I haven't seen this store talked about very much but this to me is a great store, in terms of experiential retail so like obviously Dyson is super premium product like that you know tend to be at at very premium price points to their competitors in the marketplace and so it requires it's already considered sale it requires a lot of explanation and demonstration about why the products are better and so this Dyson store does a really good job of, immersing you in all their products they show you exploded you know versions of all their product so you can see the inside and you can see all the craftsmanship and design in the products and Wyatt's. [19:32] Better and more expensive and then they do all kinds of clever things to let you experience the product so that the world's most expensive hair dryer as far as I know and so in the back of the store they have a Blow Bar where you know if you want you can go in and have your hair styled and they'll blow it out and dry it using that Dyson product info, you know you get this kind of great story that you you went shopping on your vacation on 5th Avenue when you got your hair done at Dice and then you got to experience this, this one-of-a-kind hair dryer and and hopefully it sold you the hair dryer if you want to buy a vacuum. [20:12] They next to all the vacuum displays they have like a complete assortment of. For treatment so they have carpet and tile and hardwood and they have a funny wall of. Different desserts that you can pick so you can you can like literally grab a beaker of dirt or a beaker of confetti or rubber balls or whatever you want to test and throw it on whatever kind of floor surfaces you want an, and literally vacuum up those those products and so I just to me it's a great example of experiential retail and really. Helping customers understand the value proposition in kicking in this, this a psychology we called the endowment effect where you feel like you already own the product in the store and and you feel like you have. Remorse if you walk to Home walked out of the store without taking the product. Scot: [21:06] Did you take advantage of the dry bar the blow dry bar. Jason: [21:09] I did not I do like sometimes it's funny I try to go in and test products that are maybe not, not targeted at me but I did not have time to get my my sending unit 3 centimeter hair. Can and I kind of think it would have dried in the time it took for my hair to get off the base into the chair so maybe when it worked anyway. Scot: [21:34] Yeah that have I think they're sold out of that hair dryer that I mean it is very expensive but it's quite popular it's kind of the the bee's knees. Jason: [21:43] Yeah I actually am thinking about getting hair extensions just so I have a reason to get one of those hair dryers. Scot: [21:49] I think you should definitely do that before then our attic so so we can all I'll see you with your I think I'm imagining a mullet I will look. Jason: [21:57] Not that hard to imagine there's probably some of your book somewhere. [22:03] Not not true so hit a couple other stores on 5th Avenue and maybe we'll talk about it later but then I shot down to Soho in Tribeca and Albert just had a pop up there for a while that do I frankly was not a very interesting store and they just open their first. Permanent store and I think they also did a terrific job I call Brazil courses a. A shoe brand that's that's doing particularly well but very similar to Dyson. They did a beautiful job I call the visual merchandising in this store is great but they really did this Rich storytelling about all of the materials that are used in all the Auburn products and they really kind of immerse you in the war of the products. And just you know much more so than like walking into a Footlocker and seeing a wall of sneakers you feel like you get an origin story for every material that then is used in every shoe. You know and you know they just made the product feel really aspirational and they try to use sustainable products in the shoe and they like you know really made you believe in the purpose and I just thought it was really, well design store from a visual merchandising standpoint like they're not relying on a lot of digital technology in that store but I felt like. [23:30] That's for combined with some of the other stores that I visited that are kind of newer I'll call them digitally native Brands although that's debatable in the case of all birds or Dyson, and I really felt like like some of the best retail we're seeing right now is from these new emerging brands. And an Auberge was another good example and a huge progression from their prop up to this permanent store so definitely congratulations to them on that. Scot: [23:55] They do a lot of really cool kind of seasonal exclusives in City exclusives like. Jason: [24:09] Yeah and exclusive that are the trigger scarcity is a huge play across a bunch of these brands in a bunch of these products and really really smart you know again in a world when you're a teenager that has to act cool amongst your thousand followers on Instagram you know. Getting the same product that's available in every mall in America you know does not fly very well but being able to get you know something that's exclusive or scares you know that's super well and we're seeing that and you know all of these these you know unique limited edition shoes from Adidas and supreme and g-star and all birds and all of those brands are seeing them in the super young kids toys all the laugh out loud surprise toys I know you buy a bunch of these Star Trek, Kinder surprise toy or Star Wars excuse me that was a horrible, not for a DM but a horrible swppp. The I don't know it maybe it's Friday and in some super weird creepy way that we don't want to get into. Scot: [25:15] Klingons. Jason: [25:17] Yeah but yeah scarcity I think is super smart are you are you a big all birds guy. Scot: [25:24] I think I have one pair but if I like him. Jason: [25:30] And that store is now like literally across the street from the Amazon forest our store we we've talked about that's or a lot in the past I did go back to that store I was interested to see how it involves since I was there on the grand opening and obviously that's a story that's. Allegedly completely curated by customers and so I walked in there in a very curious to see how much of the assortment had really changed since the last time I was in and I was pleasantly surprised that. A lot of it had changed like all the feature displays that you see when you walk in the front of the store were prominently featuring, different merchandise than they were at the Grand Opening and even a lot of the product categories. In the store had changed or evolved and so you know my my early indications are you no props. Amazon for living there promise on on sort of. Frequently and rapidly changing the mix in that store based on on customer curation. Scot: [26:31] I wonder if they do it or if they just kind of like close down and reshuffle for a day or if they're just kind of like nibble away at it, like you know 2% a day. Jason: [26:40] No it's a great question and I I don't know the answer. But yeah I would have to live there or visit a lot more frequently 10 notice that but I did I took a ton of pictures the first time I was there and I retook all those pictures and so on. I'm probably going to do a deeper dive in comparing the two sets of pictures but anecdotally it definitely felt like a lot of stuff at churned and obviously we're much closer to Holiday now and they're all these right. Seasonal products for holiday that are selling really well so not surprisingly those products all moved forward. You're secretly I feel like that store is first and foremost designed to sell Amazon branded products and those are kind of the Evergreen product that did not change. Oh, there's some new product since last time I was there so that the first time I got to see the microwave in person. Scot: [27:29] I'd like it. Jason: [27:30] I was surprised it's smaller than I was anticipating it does not feel like I feel like that was a load capacity microwave them then I have so I would have been a little scared to. Scot: [27:43] Talk out at the gym have Alexa make you some popcorn. Jason: [27:46] I did not I was pleased to see that it was plugged in so you could infect talk to it but you like they did not give you product and give you a chance to actually. Cook anything in it and I'm curious if the demo unit even had that hopefully it did not have them element in it but who knows. Scot: [28:03] The at this is a little bit off topic but the switching of the storm made me think of everyone's in retails favorite store in York stories did you get swing by there. Jason: [28:14] I did not swing my story I always love to go to this is story about the it just wasn't geographically convenient with all these other stores I did go to Macy's. Macy's is now a minority owner of story and I was curious to see if they had a disa story iteration in Macy's. And if they did I was not able to find it but the. Beta who's been on the store has has the shopping shops inside of Macy's and I went to that Macy's expecting. Then I go down to the basement where where they historically have put a lot of these Concepts and I was actually constantly surprised the beta store. Is like prominently featured at the front door in like one of the highest traffic entrances and so kind of smart around the holidays since a lot of the beta product is. Is very holiday gift friendly items but that all of the pods in the the beta display inside the Macy's were really hopping and it felt like. The exact same experience you'd get if you walked into a dedicated beta store and then. Scot: [29:22] Call Diem one of our interns just handed me a note make sure we reference episode 139 when we had beta founder the boo on telling us all about that. Jason: [29:33] Yeah absolutely and if you do remember that episode of Yuri wissen he'll tell you a story about how he called me early on in the evolution of that concept and I gave him some stupid advice, is his version and my version is I told him that in the long run, that he would be funded by a bunch of retailers and he would be shopping shops inside of a bunch of these stores, and your side note almost all the betas are now in Macy's and so I'm saying I'm right here saying I gave him bad advice you can judge for yourself. Scot: [30:06] He is not a c squared executive Teresa CEO. Jason: [30:12] He just has the one one see you in like Risk a bunch. Scot: [30:14] Yeah it's your on a whole nother like you're in another orbit like. Jason: [30:17] Yeah he would tell you this lame story about how he left his cushy job at Google to take this big entrepreneurial risk and worked really hard to build something and all that but you know as opposed to just like telling other people what to do and then running before they actually do it. Scot: [30:32] Helios One C drop the mic. Jason: [30:36] Potato potahto exactly. The also sort of in that that area I visited the Casper store you know again another great kind of showroom a store that has a bunch of experiential components like they have all these, design house vignettes where you can in fact, close the door and sweep on all these various mattresses but they even had they actually have and they have a cool branded term for it that I'm going to not remember unfortunately at the back of the store is is actually dedicated to a service where you essentially can rent a in isolation pod with a bed in it and take a nap, and if they've done like a really good job of creating this like super relaxing atmosphere and you know it. The hustle and bustle of a busy City you can come and take a timeout and catch up power nap and then kind of recharge I looked at that thing and said man like these guys up to be partnering with we work like you ought to have one of these. Nap stations in all the the work on demand. Scot: [31:50] If it's at Casper ride to go people are always surprised how many skus they have I think everyone kind of Associates in with kind of essentially once you a mattress live really expanded the offerings have got some pet stuff now right and they've got pillows and sheets. Jason: [32:09] Yeah betting and so that they have all that but also I thought you're going is they have a variety of different. Material treatments on the mattresses so there is a pretty good diversity of mattresses you can buy a different price points and so you can imagine, people wanting to to actually try those out in the United States they talk a lot about how you know retail and trying is an important part of their. Their growth strategy that that you know they like the pure digital experience and obviously they're kind of original Innovation was the ability to make a UPS shippable mattress and bypass the store but in the long run like you know the total addressable Market of people that are willing to buy a mattress sight unseen is much smaller than the, you know all the households in the US and so even these retail showrooms have been, become a big part of their growth strategy I can't remember if I threw it up on social media or not but they also have kind of a social photo booth in the store and that's why I took a picture in the Casper store and to me the, that these these instagrammable scenes inside of retail stores is another strong retail Trend like we talked on the show little bit in the past. There are these dedicated Concepts to instagrammable moments like the ice cream factory in in San Francisco and idea here is. [33:38] Pay a significant amount of money I 20 to 40 bucks to go into what amounts to a bunch of like unique photo sets to take your your selfies and all these you know unique and interesting ways. And there scarcity because that museum goes away after a couple of months and it creates a cool, sort of photo that you can share on on Instagram in a bunch of retailers have jumped in on this action and so the the Casper score was one, you mentioned earlier that cover girl had a pop up in Time Square and they had a great social photo booth so you got to go take, a glamour still Anna and impact video in the store and so I use that that glamour photo booth and put my shepherd girl picks her up, it's super smart as they capture your email address which you give them in order for them to send you the photos and you you share those photos on your social channels and amplify it and become an influencer for Casper CoverGirl, or a bunch of the other retail brand so I feel like that was a common trend. [34:46] Also up near 5th Avenue Rockefeller Center FAO Schwarz reopen. So that you know they were longtime icon on 5th Avenue their space is now being used for Apple. They went out of business but a new company bought the brand and they reopen the toy store in what used to be the NBC Experience Store in Rockefeller Center. And I. Scot: [35:13] Does it have the f e o clock in like that same kind of vibe that the old one. Jason: [35:17] Yeah it totally does it has all the iconic displays that the old store has it has the cost you and Toy Soldiers dancing outside the store and taking selfies with everyone and again another one of these instagrammable moments. And you know a round holiday in Rockefeller Center this was the busiest store in the area and had a shoe deal 9 to get into the store and so again like, you know creating scarcity just buy, you know you go to Rockefeller Center to check out what's going on and look at the ice rink and see the Christmas tree and blam there's a huge line of people waiting to get in somewhere and it instantly makes you want to get in there too and it it it. It seems like there's definite evidence that the debt brand still carry some weight with consumers and at least around holiday. Seems like it was doing terrific. Scot: [36:07] Did a baby geek get like a drivable little Rolls-Royce Wraith. Jason: [36:13] She did not I have as I think documented on some of these other shows already made the mistake of buying him some drivable Vehicles like only two. How to get home and come to my senses and realize that I'm now paying for a separate City parking space for my son's truck my three-year-old son's truck yes. Scot: [36:33] Five of them in one city park. Jason: [36:35] Yeah that's true I probably could fit more but we don't need to tell him that. So glossy are is another great digital brand is doing really well in the beauty and cosmetics base and they open the store in Tribeca again. These guys do a lot of custom assortments instead of the whole store is really a showroom and you shop the store you you, you know try Cosmetics you pick stuff that you want and then you go to a will call window and actually pick up your custom, serrated bag with your name on it of your Cosmetics you can do that online and they have a a pick up station at the very front of the store for for online orders or or you know they have an in-store pickup station, for folks that have shop the in-store experience and this door was hopping like there was a line at almost every display for people to check out, and again a big chunk of the store was dedicated to both them like doing your makeup and glamming you up and taking an Instagram photo in you know a bunch of staged. [37:42] Scents that they had and so you kind of Sharon amplify The Experience so another good example of that. Google has a pop-up store in Chicago and New York called Google Hardware I visited the one in in Chicago earlier and talked a little bit about it on the show The New York one is sort of a, bigger better laid out version of the exact same store again a great place to experience a lot of the Google hardware and get you know live demos and some real-world vignettes but the whole you know downstairs of the store again is dedicated to, taking cool photos of you in a unique environment and sharing those on all your social platforms with all your friends and so for Google it's a double win there they're getting you to take advantage of this social photo booth experience or catching an email all the same things as all the other retailers but they're also getting to demonstrate some of the unique features of the Google pixel camera and as a speaker called best shot so essentially they put you on this way cool interactive swing set and take a bunch of pictures of you and the AI in the Google Phone app, looks at all the photos they took of you and pics of the two or three best photos and shows you though so kind of a double win there. Scot: [39:01] Did you agree with the ones I picked. Jason: [39:03] Yeah it seems optimized for obvious thing so you know I picked the ones where you're smiling and looking directly at the camera and that are in good Focus I don't know that I took enough pictures to. To pick up beyond that what it's it's criteria were but definitely the the photos it recommended were keepers. And yet it just a cool well design kind of theatrical set like it's in there cases funny cuz you walk up and it looks like a really Bland background with a bunch of wood paneling and a swing and you sit on the swing in there I have this doesn't seem like all that interesting of a, have a background but then the guy triggers the display and as the swing starts moving, all of the wood panels drop down in there all these colorful animated things moving around and it becomes a Thun Thun set for a photo so it's just fun. Watch the surprise and Delight moment when. When that happened to other people as well. [39:58] And then the 11th of my my favorite retail stores is a new store. In kind of the upper end of Tribeca called show fields, and to me this is a similar concept 2 Beta so this is a a Marketplace store it's a permanent store that. Emerging Brands can rent a Pod in all of the pods have facilities for live demonstrations they all have digital signage, until you got a bunch of like digitally native products you know that each had their own kind of, shop and shop inside of this Schofield space then I guess the one thing that was different about Schofield from beta is, the beta store is staffed by Beta employees and all the displays are largely self-service except for the beta employees most of the Schofield vignettes were actually staffed with branded employ so when you went to each of India, you are likely to get a representative from the brand that was in that vignette talking to you. Yeah so it seems like the the. Marketplace at vacation of physical retail is continuing the happened so Scott. You may have been right that marketplaces are a thing. Scot: [41:23] Yeah the other they're catching on. Jason: [41:26] Yep. So we're super deep into the show project more time than we intended on the store visits super quick, for they were a little bit of a letdown for me Restoration Hardware has this great reputation they move their store to the Meatpacking District, is there a flagship store New York went to the store it's a beautiful piece of visual merchandising and has tons of their product in it, but I just really think that it's a hard store to shop there's no way finding others no way to know what inventory is in the store I could keep that a lot of folks have a Restoration Hardware is. You know you want to try this furniture before you buy it, they have a website with all these different formations of all their products but no one on the website can you find out which store has the products you want to try, and you just kind of have to pop into the store and you're going to see one sofa that represents a family of 10 and not get a very good story about the other nine so, I just feel like it was a lost opportunity for a Restoration Hardware to take their retailing a little further than they had in the past and it seems like they stuck with. [42:31] Beautiful visual merchandising and architecture but not really anything new or interesting and customer experience so that was a disappointment to me, on 5th Avenue there's a the original Saks Fifth Avenue they made a bunch of hay earlier this year about doing a huge remodel to their Beauty Department which of the second floor of the store are you walking the store on the ground floor and they're all these signed same check out Beauty 2.0 on the second floor and they really hype up this beauty 2.0 concept. Until you know it frankly raises your expectation that they are inventing a better way to shop for cosmetics and beauty and you know when I got up there and Shop did it felt like a very traditional department store Beauty experience to me like the. The again the fixtures in the visual merchandising might have been a little nicer but you know you work at like all the exponential stuff going on at Sephora or an Ulta or the ability to shop based on a use case or need instead of exclusively by brand you know they're all these opportunities to kind of reinvent Beauty and to me, like sacks raised expectation by calling Beauty 2.0 in it it to me it was Beauty 1.1 Maybe. [43:46] I hit up about for Apple stores in New York City and you know I continue to have this, this impression when I walk in Apple stores that they had become to me super boring and the problem I think is did they have curated down they dramatically diminished the amount of third-party product they offer in an Apple store and so, you know it's almost all first-party product you know most of us know all of Apple's product before we walk in the store so we're not going to see some new Apple branded product at school or that we want to see you except maybe once a year and you know that the stores always super busy but it's also always super busy because there's a bunch of people in line at the Genius Bar to get help getting their iTunes password so they can download the Nike app for the Amazon Go app it that stores really become a customer service door and they're just really isn't a lot of. Serendipitous Discovery or surprise and Delight like you know I just don't feel like I have a reason to go there and find anything that's going to be exciting for me I don't know, Scot do you still go to an Apple Store when you're in a a new shopping district. Scot: [44:54] But Jason it's a town hall don't you just go there to meet people diet ice cream I used to I used to get the most joy out of kind of a few know looking at they had a kind of robust drone section and all these wacky accessories like Golf Club thing you can play with and I save if they've taken that stuff away I do think it's Dimension a part of it is once they get into the headphones Beats that's a big section out. Jason: [45:23] Yeah they kicked over all the third party headphones out and yeah. Scot: [45:26] Yeah so so it is a bit of a bummer because like you I think I pretty much have every product covered so there's no new Apple product I really need to discover. Jason: [45:37] Same same deal so if I forget to pack a power supply I might pop pop in the Apple to get a replacement but yeah I miss the surprise and Delight moments I hope I hope they find a new way to bring those back and then last store in this is sadly for me cuz I really wanted to be excited. [45:57] My raspberry award is going to a digital native brand that folks on the show are probably familiar with all the way which is. Kind of a great digital suitcase that's doing really well. And the reason I'm disappointed is I had visited their pop-up store and thought it was fabulous right so, you listen to the founders talk about the away brand and they say like hey we recognized early on we do you want to be about selling suitcases we wanted to be around selling aspirational experiences and destinations and so you went to the pop-up store and it was, merchandise to be all these exotic locations that you wanted to go to and it just so happens that there was a luggage in each one of those locations that you could check out and it made you want to buy the luggage so that you could go to, to Milan and you know have the experience, and I thought that was really smart and it it you know the you know their presentations at Shopkin and shop at Oregon places like that you know they told the story that really kind of match the retail environment so, now they've opened a permanent store and I and you go me and I like the pup I'm expecting you know some big stuff out of the permanent store and I feel like the permanent away store took a giant step back and it's a bunch of shelves with suitcases and no storytelling and, and none of that destination merchandising or aspiration like it did have kind of a a like. [47:23] Unremarkable Cafe inside the store but mostly it was you know it it felt just like your typical Mall luggage store that just happen to have a bunch of away suitcases on. Scot: [47:33] I am a proud owner of a real of masochist. Jason: [47:37] Do you get yelled at every time you get on the plane that you have to take the battery out. Scot: [47:40] I know it pops I got the later generation that works pops right up. Jason: [47:44] Yet so I think that's most of the products but there is a slight slightly unfortunate thing that one of them are key features if they have a smart suitcase that has a big battery in it that you can use to charge a lot of your gadgets and there must have been some bad experience on the airline somewhere because like it's now built into the FAA announcements on a lot of planes but if you have an away branded suitcase you must take the battery out before you come on the plane and again away his design the suitcase to allow that so it's not a big deal but I'm online from a brand or erosion standpoint it's. Anime be favorable maybe negative that every single time you get on a plane they make an announcement saying like you have to do something with an away suitcase or you're not safe. Maybe it helps that they're reminding everyone that there's this new pool suitcase call the way. Scot: [48:31] Yeah it's not nearly as bad as when they said if you had a Samsung Note they would just like grab it. Off the plane. Jason: [48:38] Exactly incident I guess the last take what's a bunch of great retail I do feel like a bunch of the new emerging brands or are the ones that are really moving the ball forward a lot of the the start of. A long time retail Brands I feel like I'm seeing glass Innovation out of them even Nike you know I mean arguably they been in retail since 1990 but as a major retailer like they're moving the ball forward and and you know the Saks Fifth Avenue's of the world not as much. That one other kind of antidotal take away I have talked a bunch of times on the show about electronic shelf labels and you know I would point out of the 33rd three stores I visited four of them now I have 100% electronic shelf label so you know potentially we're starting to see the the slow Evolution to this more real-time updatable Dynamic pricing retail environment so I hope we see more of that. Scot: [49:37] Well we just give me the last show of the year so we want to give you guys kind of the double bang for your buck so in addition to Jason's detailed report we're going to do, quick 10-minute news run and it wouldn't be a Jason Scott show without. Jason: [50:01] The news your margin is there opportunity. Scot: [50:10] Cool so briefly the big news for Amazon right now here we are in the heat of pizza delivery time is not surprisingly deliver you were in it so there's been a bunch out around delivery. [50:23] I can see light interesting stuff on Amazon Jason by frequent Amazon order this time of year for estimator and it's really interesting they're kind of my Prime orders are defaulting to to de-flea a message in there that says choose one day and you'll get your item tomorrow and it's really it's a really weird user experience like why why are they making me choose it there's no extra cost I did notice a day I didn't order and it did that and I chose it and then it did this interesting math over on the side where it said your shipping charge is $20 and then Midas out the shipping charge almost to make me feel like you know I was getting 20 $20 worth of value it felt like some kind of an A B test there but that's just been pretty unusual one here in Chicago you've probably already always had kind of same-day delivery in and next day but that's pretty rare North Carolina so you know I'm definitely seeing that they're using language like. [51:27] Using our express shipping partners and stuff like that so and around this area I'm seeing a lot of the Prime vehicle so I will talk about that little bit so since it's been pretty interesting as a user the Bloomberg had a friend Spencer super over there I had a great peace out today about the Amazon delivery Network and you'll notice he's there around delivery. [51:55] Very intimately familiar with these various platforms most famous and well Love's truck platform is from Europe in is the Mercedes Sprinter and so Amazon in September a news article came out that they had ordered 10,000 of these thousand and what they've done very rapidly is they have out the field but it feels like a lot of them they have set up people in their own businesses these 1099 businesses I am they will guarantee your route though rent the truck to you very inexpensively and this article had some really interesting case studies profiled someone that had a 42 and 70 drivers they're doing 250 deliveries per day per driver I am making $1,000 a month in profit so if you're interested in that kind of thing will put in the show notes and I definitely recommend you read that and then you saw one to Jason. Jason: [52:53] Yep so inside notice there's a slight irony to me the same time you're seeing all these Amazon branded Sprinter Vehicles showing up it's also the time of year when UPS and FedEx don't have enough trucks until you start seeing a lot of Enterprise rental vans with with UPS drivers getting out of them in the course there's always the problem of, people thinking they're not not legitimate UPS drivers when they roll up in the in the unmarked white van. [53:21] So you like people going in different directions there is an interesting thing that Amazon did this year you know there's always this battle for free shipping amongst retailers and who's going to lower their, their threshold for free shipping and what they're going to charge and so you know Walmart does free 2-day shipping for any order over $35, Target came out for holiday and said hey free shipping on anything and you know it's always curious, Target made this better shipping offer than Walmart would Walmart match him in Walmart didn't, and I I kind of thought that was interesting and that would be the end of it but then Amazon surprised is all about coming out with a new offer for this holiday that they were offering free shipping, for the holiday even without a Prime Membership in this this is not their 2-day shipping but that it was interesting that Amazon was getting more promotional around holiday we've all been watching to see if that might Force Walmart. To react so far we haven't seen that but now they're extending this free shipping and they're starting to really promote their, they're cut off date so you know I think tomorrow is the last day to get free slow shipping from Amazon but as you pointed out they've beefed up there. Their same-day delivery options in a bunch of markets and so you'll be able to continue to Christmas shop up to the 24th in a lot of markets and still get them. [54:47] As you mentioned Chicago was one of the first so I for a long time I've had this experience where, you order something that's available with one day delivery and then in the cart it defaults to 2-day delivery and it goes you can get it's Tuesday you can get this on Thursday for free or you can cook this to get it Wednesday for free, cuz even though it says same day it usually is after the the early morning cut off so you get it the next day and so you know you constantly have this thing where of course why wouldn't I pick, to get it a day earlier for the same free price of a new thing I just saw this week on on my own Amazon experience in Chicago is there launching some new service called Amazon weekly delivery and it seems like they're trying to incentivize me to bundle more of my purchases and have them delivered one day a week instead of on an ad-hoc basis and so it almost feels like Prime Pantry for. Non-prime Prime Pantry items so I have to dive into that and get a little more details but that was a new GUI I had never seen before. Scot: [55:54] What's the incentive. Jason: [55:56] Yeah so that was part of the problem it did not like it was a new button I could put to put it on my weekly delivery which to my knowledge I didn't have a weekly delivery but it did not seem like there was any monetary benefit to do that so it was again it was weird it was like free same-day delivery get it on Monday standard 2-day delivery to get it on Tuesday or put it in your weekly delivery on Wednesday. Scot: [56:21] They will there be there always playing around with incentives for slow shipping so I've noticed now they seem to have detected on my pretty heavy Prime now users they're offering me kind of somewhere between 5 and $10 for slow shipping at all do in a prime now single use coupon, iPad audible coupons Whole Foods variety of different free song a free app to put around look like a thousand things on that side. Jason: [56:49] Yeah no for sure and I agree with you I think they they seem pretty smart about seeing which offers you're most likely to accept and then turning up the volume on those offers. I do an audible and I keep getting more and more audible offers on or better offers on that regard stuff definitely get that you link to an article this morning about Amazon's new air hub in the Fort Worth airport so that his listeners that will probably already know they have a big air Hub in Cincinnati now they're adding a second big Hub in Dallas and again you know these guys are getting more airport capacity and more planes and and it just seems totally obvious that they're their bulking up there their internal delivery capacity and you know it it's it's hard to imagine it's not a competitive threat to our friends at UPS. Scot: [57:48] Amazon names are fulfillment centers after the airport so for a long time there are us tracking this and Phoenix had the most so they would do like PHX and when they open the second one they Rebrand the first one to one and then they start new muriatic so Phoenix had like PHX 1 2 3 and 4 in the Dallas for long time didn't have anything there then suddenly when the span of like four or five years David have all the way from DFW 1 to 6 and then and then they expanded out the rest of the day of the Houston and Sentra so no it's it's a it's a huge state for Amazon so I imagine you know that that's going to be a busy Hub and then it's interesting cuz they diagrams for the kind of have a book helps Earth Day kind of building the supply chain that looks it's kind of a hybrid of like what Walmart Walmart does to get stuff to a store and what FedEx UPS do so they have this kind of benefit of Products near you and then if it goes out then it goes to this other level and another level up there it is really fascinating how they're the kind of layer to supply chain, elements on top of each other maybe we'll do a show where we get a supply chain Guru in to explain that privately digested. Jason: [59:05] Yeah and I would add just one thing like these are not just hubs where they're like shipping Goods to then drive them to your house this is mostly about moving Goods around between the various for filming Center. And there they're just getting crazy Advanced like I literally think we have a pop-up fulfillment center in Chicago right now so it appears Amazon his rented all the parking under Millennial Park and they like literally staged a temporary fulfillment center in downtown Chicago for holiday. Scot: [59:36] Brickell lots of machine learning lots of data. Longtime listeners will enjoy this article because it's pretty much a topic we spent a lot of time on a I didn't think there is much you in there but it is paid gated tarp a waltz and it really talks about introduces the concept of crap can't realize a profit and that you know it makes it sound like news that Amazon's pushing back on manufacturers to to change their packaging and figure out how you solve this problem of you know that these items that are too bulky you too heavy to low asp2 to make money who's a good read good summary of of kind of what Amazon's doing but, I kind of made it feel new and and we know that they've been doing this for years. Jason: [1:00:26] Yeah I didn't think I'd almost argue that there's a slight trim the other way there that I feel like Amazon's been progressively getting more and more aggressive about targeting crap and more recently liked in last few months and feels like they they may have loosened things likely in some category. Scot: [1:00:44] Yeah yeah and then there was a smattering of Amazon go you touched on it and your your trip reports what are. Jason: [1:00:54] Yeah so they're there is some rumors that one of the use cases for Amazon go could be airports and that is one of the categories where it seems like you could, Amazon go would be a really good fit so I really fast grab-and-go Self Service experience in an airport and as we talked about like a lot of the go merchandise is food and so you think about, man what happens a lot of airports you have a limited time to get something to eat before you get in the plane and you know you're not going to get served anything to eat on the plane now and so seems for a lot of reasons the Amazon goes strength online really well with that airport use queso that that made a lot of sense I won't be surprised to see that deploy and deploy fast they also open their first. [1:01:45] Small for my Amazon go store so this is like a hundred square foot store and it is kind of like a self-contained shop and Shop, where you know you can have a bunch of quick grab convenience items, in a you know Anna is self-contained pop up store format and you know from the first time I saw I go one of these cases I always thought of was like the hotel. Gift shop for the hotel snack shop kind of thing where it doesn't make sense to staff the store with the a person but you know you can sell a lot of snacks to the guess that just check in and they're going up to the room and so this the small-format store seems like a perfect fit for a potential Hotel use case for exam. [1:02:30] And then I think go is now going to the UK so we've seen like three new new retail for mastering Amazon open up in in London in recent times and now they're going to get their first ghost tour. Scot: [1:02:42] Cool it's everyone laughed when they said they weren't there could be thousands of these so you put 10 in each airport and 50 in each City and boom you're there. Jason: [1:02:52] Exactly so they are not sitting still there doing a lot of interesting stuff it's been fun to follow them. Scot: [1:02:59] Awesome so I know we're up against time but there is that concludes our Amazon news there was one big news item that I wanted to pick your brain on and is there she might this kind of slid under my radar I'm sure you were really you're attracting it but there was this announcement that IBM sold a bunch of software stuff to this company called HCL I don't know who that is and the ones that made the headlines I saw where I was he Lotus Notes and just some kind of, old stuff that seemed then I saw a kind of kerfuffle on LinkedIn where several of the smaller e-commerce platforms were really kind of riling up retailers and saying you know, where you going to do now that IBM no longer supports websphere which is there their kind of you know their e-commerce platform that a lot of the largest retailers are on and. Turns out that they have sold that whole platform to this company HCL what I'm sure a lot of our listeners out there I'm sure if they're on websphere they're they're painfully aware this but I was a little shocked about that what do you what do you make of it does this mean IBM just as getting out of the retail game or why would they sell it and then what do you think it means going for. Jason: [1:04:14] Yep it's even potentially more confusing than that so it's totally cut me out of left field the, you know if you'll get the last call at 5 to 8 years in retail there have been these three Enterprise platforms that have emerged as sort of the most competitive, platforms for launching your e-commerce site so you know IBM has had Webster Commerce which is one of the products they sold the ACL Oracle has that a product called atg was originally stand alone company Oracle bottom, there's originally a German stanaland company called hybris the sap bot and so you know if you were a big retailer or you wanted to you know be selling hundreds of millions of dollars online, you likely were going to pick one of these three platforms to launch your website and and you would likely have a shootout between two or three of them, and you know that pay a company like razorfish millions of dollars to to implement it for you and and pay the vendor, you know hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year in maintenance on that platform and so in some ways like totally shocking IBM which you know. [1:05:27] Arguably had the biggest retail market share of those three platforms. So the entire websphere business to HCL HCL is a very large integrator and so you know frankly from my standpoint, whatever traction IBM had in the marketplace that platform is totally going to lose now that a single integrator, because you know all the other integrators in the world are not very likely in to be promoting and implementing a platform, it's owned by one of their competitors so you know usually when an integrator buys a platform it's kind of the end of life for that platform and it just becomes, an in-house piece of Ip that that that integrator uses you don't becomes much harder to see other third parties. Integrate that's an IBM had this Rich echo system of integrators that were aggressively selling their stuff so there's a ton of customers that are on it it's but yours was super fragmented about this. [1:06:31] They sold the on-prem version of the software 2hcl at the moment IBM still owns, the cloud version of the software which is the newest version but the cloud version is based on the on Prim codebase so if you're one of the few customers that bought the, Cloud version of IBM or you were thinking about migrating now you have to ask yourself. Is HCl going to keep updating that code base so that IBM's Cloud version continues to stay. Competitive or contemporary or what's going to happen there IBM owns a bunch of other retail software that a lot of retailers still rely on most famously they own order management system called Sterling. It's still doing really well and they did not still sell sterling so in the old days. You know I didn't had a lot of success getting people to use their o&s and their web platform together because obviously most most businesses need order Management in and then you conversate. Now those things are getting split up so at the moment there's a lot more questions than answers. I probably already taking too much time but the one thing I will say is in my mind all of these Enterprise platforms are losing momentum and losing customers and so you know the likely reason I'm selling it is. They just feel like the super expensive enterprise software is kind of end-of-life because. [1:07:54] To me what's happening is the very largest e-commerce sites are are all largely on custom and house built stuff. And increasingly the biggest customers that were on these Enterprise platforms are. Writing more the software themselves and using less of the Enterprise platform and negotiating to Payless licenses for that software. Everyone wants to move to the cloud and none of these products are particularly graceful at offering a cloud version, and then every new business that's been born every new brand that's been born in the last eight years that was more likely to be digital natives, probably started doing e-commerce on something like Shopify or Bigcommerce and they're actually finding that those those platforms continue to meet all their needs even as they scale and so you know even if you outgrow Shopify once you're used to paying $10,000 a year for your eCommerce platform you know it becomes really hard to pay for a you know orders of magnitude more for that you know and then orders of magnitude more on top of that to implement it just became a tough value prop for these old Enterprise platform so a lot of us in the e-commerce software space have a lot of nostalgia for IBM at the you know they were definitely King Of The Hill in retail for a long time but you know I do probably selling them because you know it was becoming a financial loser for them and and it does not seem like that's where the growth is going to be in retail. Scot: [1:09:23] Feels like Financial. Kind of yeah she'll games though too. Maybe a negative phrase but maybe I'm just wanting to show Wall Street more SAS Revenue so that's probably why they kept that piece but you know you can't possibly do well if you're not enjoying the underline code and if I'm an integrator I don't want to make this a surgeon that are so seems like there's instant mi

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VF 18: Rob and Emily from The Road is Our Home

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 14, 2018 31:00

Rob and Emily are a young couple who just completed a beautiful self-built nautical style Mercedes Sprinter van conversion. Rob enjoyed the project so much he has started to take a few commissions to help others enjoy a custom campervan conversion. Their van was designed for long-term use from the beginning. They plan to move into it this coming Spring for extended vanlife adventures as they travel the UK and Europe. Tune in to hear about their most important features on a campervan designed for extended travel, how they worked through a major build failure and their preparations for vanlife. Related Links Rob and Emily's website, The Road is Our Home VF Episode 18, Interview with Greg Virgoe on Insulation Tomislav Perko's TED Talk, How to travel the world with almost no money

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Episode 88: 2004 Mazdaspeed Miata vs. 2018 Mazda MX-5 Miata, Arctic Circle Mercedes-Sprinter Adventures, 2018 Honda Pilot, Volvo's Secret Autonomous Car Language, BMW Lightning Round

Unnamed Automotive Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2018 59:51

Did adding a turbo to the Miata teach Mazda an important lesson about not messing with the MX-5 formula? After a week behind the wheel of a 2004 Mazdaspeed Miata from Mazdas' classic collection, Benjamin certainly seems to think so. Sami, on the other hand, can't get enough of Benjamin's weird winter tales of driving the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van to the Alaskan Arctic Circle after he himself samples the new model in warmer climes. Before wrapping things up, Sami posits that the 2018 Honda Pilot is really just a fancier minivan - and is totally ok with that - and then the pair riff through Volvo's new 'languge' designed to help its autonomous bed-office-living-room cars communicate with mere human beings, as well as a BMW lightning round featuring the longest SUV name in automotive history.

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Hockey and winter are coming! Plus an interview with pioneer and Columbus hockey legend, Henry Dill – eppie 6

Between 2 Birds Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 27, 2018 94:04

Join the boys as we discuss: the upcoming season Domi to Montreal, Galchenyuk to Arizona Tavares move to Toronto Maple Leafs Vegas’ inaugural season success an interview with Columbus local legend and homegrown hockey pioneer, Henry Dill why dynamic warm-ups are so important in hockey how many hockey players can fit in a Mercedes Sprinter? … Continue reading "Hockey and winter are coming! Plus an interview with pioneer and Columbus hockey legend, Henry Dill – eppie 6"

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Riding in a Mercedes Sprinter Van with a Broken Woman

Stop Hating Yourself

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 30, 2018 49:15

We made it to 10 episodes for real this time! To celebrate, Carl and Catfish welcome their first ever guest to discuss imposter syndrome. Athena is an expert at feeling like she is not good enough for her job, but she shares a bit about how to get through it. We learn that you can't spell demand without a man. And Catfish drops a jinx on Carl, forcing himself to have to do the intro on his own. #fakeittilyoumakeit Like, share, comment, rate, and subscribe! Send your favorite/most reviled affirmations or other BS to @stophatingcast on twitter and instagram, like us on Facebook, and send hate mail to stophatingcast@gmail.com

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ep. #29 - The Man in the (demo) Van: Chuy Reyna

The Wire by Firewire Surfboards

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 20, 2018 43:26

If you grew up in California in the 80's or 90's you saw Chuy Reyna on TV. In magazines. In surf videos like Blazing Boards alongside Mark Occhilupo. If you're growing up today in California you've seen him beachside with more surfboards than you've ever seen fit inside a Mercedes Sprinter. He's the man in the van and to put it bluntly in pidgeon - 'Chu surf mo' bettaa dan u' today and yesterday and probably for a lot of tomorrow's to come. He's 50 and his turns look as fun today as they looked in 88'. In addition to managing Firewire's Demo program in the United States, Chuy also stays on the front lines of product development alongside Rob Machado, Daniel Thomson, and Kelly Slater. He's talented at fine-tuning shapes and surfboard building technologies because he hasn't just surfed every surfboard shape and surfboard building technology in Firewire's history, he also surfs at the most important level of talent when it comes to deciding what surfboards will land at surf shop racks and which ones won't - he shreds hard enough to hang in a lineup with professionals, but he's not a freak, he's normal. He bridges the gap between everyday surfers and sponsored surfers, and his opinions matter to everyday folks. That's why he's the man in the (demo) van.

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Exploring the Class B Motor Home

Girl Camper

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2018 66:16

On this weeks show we are continuing our exploration of the different types of RVs available and their advantages and disadvantages. My guest is Class B owner Carole Steinberg who has been full timing in her Mercedes Sprinter for four years now. Carole purchased a new Sprinter and outfitted it to fit her needs. Before […] The post Exploring the Class B Motor Home appeared first on Girl Camper.

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AD #2286 – Tesla Losing More Money Than Ever, Ford Ranger Gets Raptor Treatment, New Kia Looks Like a Range Rover

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 8, 2018 7:07

- Tesla Reports 2017 Earnings - Ford Transit Connect Wagon Updates - Ford Turns KA Into a Crossover - New Ford Ranger Raptor - Kia Unveils SP Concept for India - New Mercedes Sprinter Details

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AD #2286 – Tesla Losing More Money Than Ever, Ford Ranger Gets Raptor Treatment, New Kia Looks Like a Range Rover

Autoline Daily

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 8, 2018 6:56

- Tesla Reports 2017 Earnings- Ford Transit Connect Wagon Updates- Ford Turns KA Into a Crossover- New Ford Ranger Raptor- Kia Unveils SP Concept for India- New Mercedes Sprinter Details

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Episode 61 Bill Goldberg WWE Superstar - The Classic Auto Show - Mercedes Sprinter Talk with Backwoods Adventure Mods with Guest Host Producer Meg

Skidmarks Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2018 43:03

Bill Goldberg known for his WWE career, football, acting and car collection talks candidly about his career, cars in the garage and having the flu. Kicking off the 2018 season with guest host Producer Meg who joins Jeff Allen on the mic and spills the beans on the behind the scenes of “Skidmarks Show”. You may know her as “Money Meg” from CNBC’s “The Car Chasers” but what many don't know, is she is a television producer and the producer of this humble broadcast “Skidmarks Show” Hear about the Sophomore car show, “The Classic Auto Show”, being held at the LA Convention center that will have the who’s who of the car industry in attendance. Plus Jeff talks about his 67 Camaro build benefitting the Ronald McDonald House Charities. Backwoods Adventure Mods joins Jeff and talks about his 2017 Mercedes Sprinter build-out complete with post apocalyptic metal work. This isn't your normal tiny house on wheels this is more your 4x4 all terrain mobile command center. Skidmarks Show is a bi-weekly Automotive and Rock-n-Roll radio shows broadcasting all year long. With your hosts Jeff Allen from CNBC’s “The Car Chasers” and owner of Flat 12 Gallery and Ethan D. host of the morning radio show “The Rock Show” on FMX. Skidmarks Show is now award winning! Thanks to the Texas Auto Writers Association for recognizing us in automotive radio! SKIDMARKS SHOW is on iTunes, Podbean, Soundcloud, Podcastcharts.com, Castbox for Androids and SkidmarksShow.com #SkidmarksShow

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AD #2245 – Lexus Considers UX for U.S., November Sales Stronger Than Expected, FCA and Hyundai Discuss Tech Partnership

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 4, 2017 8:37

- November Sales Stronger Than Expected - Top 6 Sales Results - Luxury Brand Sales Results - Mercedes Reveals New Sprinter Interior - VW Launches New Ride-Sharing Service - FCA and Hyundai Discuss Tech Partnership - VW May Buy Stake In GAZ - Lexus Considers Bringing UX To U.S. - New Wrangler Features Design Cues from Moab Concepts

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AD #2245 – Lexus Considers UX for U.S., November Sales Stronger Than Expected, FCA and Hyundai Discuss Tech Partnership

Autoline Daily

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 4, 2017 8:26

- November Sales Stronger Than Expected- Top 6 Sales Results- Luxury Brand Sales Results- Mercedes Reveals New Sprinter Interior- VW Launches New Ride-Sharing Service- FCA and Hyundai Discuss Tech Partnership- VW May Buy Stake In GAZ- Lexus Considers Bringing UX To U.S.- New Wrangler Features Design Cues from Moab Concepts

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AD #2198 – Daimler Tests V2V Platooning, OEMs Don’t Like Paying Tesla EV Credits, Subaru and Suzuki Tokyo Concepts

Autoline Daily

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 26, 2017 7:23

- The North American Commercial Truck Show- Daimler Trucks Tests Platooning in the U.S.- Mercedes Teases New Sprinter Van- Subaru VIZIV Performance Concept- Suzuki Concept Has Jeep Flare- Automakers Don’t Like California’s EV Mandate- Super Cruise Takes CT6 Fleet Cross Country

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AD #2198 – Daimler Tests V2V Platooning, OEMs Don’t Like Paying Tesla EV Credits, Subaru and Suzuki Tokyo Concepts

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 26, 2017 7:35

- The North American Commercial Truck Show - Daimler Trucks Tests Platooning in the U.S. - Mercedes Teases New Sprinter Van - Subaru VIZIV Performance Concept - Suzuki Concept Has Jeep Flare - Automakers Don’t Like California’s EV Mandate - Super Cruise Takes CT6 Fleet Cross Country

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Ep. 20: Instagram vs. Snapchat

Mindset Digital

Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2017 27:50

Instagram and Snapchat keep cloning each others features. In this episode, two of the office millennial square off in a no-holds-barred who-has-the-better-stories-feature death match while Creative Director Pete Brown tries to keep up. Plus, an update to our Episode 16 review of Digit. Instagram Stories hits 200M users, surpassing Snapchat as it copies its AR stickers (TechCrunch) https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/13/instagram-stories-bigger-than-snapchat/ Instagram Stories clone now more popular than Snapchat (USA Today) https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/13/instagram-stories-clone-now-more-popular-than-snapchat/100443696/ Instagram Stories VS. Snapchat Stories: What It Means for Marketers SimplyMeasured http://simplymeasured.com/blog/instagram-stories-vs-snapchat-stories-what-it-means-for-marketers/#sm.00006xrker686cxxx7q1yr8r6czsb Snapchat users stay loyal, but Instagram could block its growth (TechCrunch) https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/09/snapchat-survives/ Ford Transit vs. Mercedes Sprinter vs Dodge ProMaster (Car and Driver) http://www.caranddriver.com/comparisons/diesel-cargo-vans-compared-ford-transit-vs-mercedes-benz-sprinter-ram-promaster-comparison-test Episode 16 https://mindsetdigital.com/msd-podcast-ep-16-check-app-digit/ Digit app: https://digit.co/ iTunes: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=digit.android&hl=en Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=digit.android&hl=e Follow us! Mindset Digital @mindsetdigital Pete Brown @petebrownsays Briavel Schultz @beevel7 Jessica James @jessmjames4 Danika Stahl @danika_stahl Matt Weiner @mqdubs Email us: podcast@mindsetdigital.com Audio mastering by Jeff Gehlert of Allegro Media Design. Some music is courtesy of the website Audionautix.com, and is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0.

TPZ102: Adventure Cycling & Travel with Dakota & Chelsea :

The Pursuit Zone

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2015 44:53

Two years ago, Dakota and Chelsea rented their home and hit the road in a Mercedes Sprinter van they converted into an adventure camper. Their road trip through the Southwest US turned into an open-ended adventure as they eventually cycled 4,000 miles across the US and most recently cycled 2,400 miles from London to Prague. […] The post Adventure Cycling & Travel with Dakota & Chelsea : TPZ 102 appeared first on The Pursuit Zone.

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AD #1346 – NHTSA Mandates Backup Cameras, New Mercedes Sprinter Van, Driving a CNG Ford F-150

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2014 7:39

- NHTSA Mandates Backup Cameras - Tesla Reaches Deal With NY and OH Dealers - Model S Gets New Battery Shield - GM Top Automotive Advertiser - New Mercedes Sprinter Van - Driving Impressions: CNG Ford F-150

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AD #1128 – BMW Joins Airbag Recall, Tesla’s Profitable EV Credits, 2014 Mercedes Sprinter

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2013 6:35

A number of Japanese automakers have been plagued by faulty airbags made by Takata. Now a prominent European brand joins the fray. Tesla could tally up another $250 million in its bank account when it cashes in on California EV credits. We have our first up-close look at the 2014 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter. All that and more, plus Drew Winter from WardsAuto has some thoughts on the surprising results of this year’s 10 Best Interiors list.

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AD #1123 – Chrysler’s Earnings Plummet, Mercedes Sprinter Van, Volvo Tests New Hybrid System