Category: Retail

  • Why Amazon’s house brands will win big

    On Monday, a pair of Bloomberg articles by Spencer Soper surfaced a recent Jungle Scout study arguing that Amazon’s house brands aren’t selling well. For example, in apparel, “only one percent of Amazon’s total sales account for its private label brands.” One of Soper’s articles, “Most Amazon Brands Are Duds, Not Disrupters, Study Finds,” ends in a…

  • Can self-driving cars save local businesses?

    In the Center’s Future of Transportation project, we’ve seen that the impending arrival of self-driving cars has implications far beyond getting people out from behind the wheel. For example, we asked our respondents if they’d be interested in special kinds of self-driving cars that featured on-the-go services like a meeting room for productivity, a living…

  • The half-life of brands: Amazon’s algorithmic strategy

    Although what comes next will offend generations of power-mad English teachers, red-pen-wielding copy editors, and Spelling Bee conquistadores, these days most people don’t need to learn how to spell. Spellcheck saves us from having to do work that we don’t care about and that we don’t have time to do anyway. Plus, more and more…

  • From the archives: the Amazon Tip Jar

    My Amazon obsession is longstanding, as evidenced by this piece from way back that I stumbled across today. The date was October 6, 2009, and the original title was “Open Letter to Jeff Bezos: Please Create an Amazon.com Tip Jar.” If you want to see the original context and comments you can find it here…

  • Amazon’s Robot Bodega

    Don’t miss this important piece from The Verge, which gives great context around this promotional video about Amazon Go, the robot bodega: As The Verge captures, there are no cashiers and no checkout lines: you grab what you want and just go. At the moment, there are human stockers at the Amazon Go beta in…