They have a long tradition of keeping it simple going back long before the web. The annual reports had no pictures or puffery unlike most companies, though much better writing.
"If you have any comments about our WEB page, you can write us at the address shown above. However, due to the limited number of personnel in our corporate office, we are unable to provide a direct response."
Maybe the novelty of Amazon has worn off. I occasionally purchase from their UK site, and it’s filled with tricks to get me to sign up for Prime upon checkout. Really horrible workflow and design decisions, cheapening the experience. I now see similar changes to the US version: ‘you saved $15 in shipping by being a Prime member with this purchase’ and ‘last year you made 211 sustainable product purchases’.
Guys, quit being so desperate. Concentrate on quality items at competitive pricing and fast delivery. Don’t turn into TJ Maxx.
My Echo, that I use solely to voice activating lights and switches, is now an ad machine and one bad day away from going in the trash. Next time you do a wave of layoffs, please include everyone involved in these horrible decisions.
Amazon has been quite useful for me as a single bachelor living in an Indian metropolitan city.
1. I get very useful items at very good prices, many of which I would have to wander the city for hours to find, or couldnt find at all:
- Eg: I got a pair of adjustable dumbbells at <2K INR. Some of you would call it a cheap knock. But it has been super useful and I would have not bought it if it cost 8k INR. I brought a whole bosch repair toolkit at good price and it has been invaluable for fixing electric/plumbing etc.. issues. I got a high volume travel bag - I didn't even know 40L travel bags existed and wouldnt have brought one if not for amazon. I could go on.
2. Amazon Fresh is usually cheaper for groceries and maintain consistent quality compared to local supermarkets. I will also avoid the need to walk long with the grocery bag.
3. Electronics are significantly cheaper on amazon and again the need to search.
Maybe all of this can be even better as you said. But bottom line is that their operations look pretty efficient to me. Their catalogue is pretty much unmatched. (They may be losing money on retail business - but that's not my position to care as a customer. As other commenter pointed out, it may not even matter much for stock price.)
> My Echo, that I use solely to voice activating lights and switches, is now an ad machine
I've been wondering if it is even possible for a publicly-traded company to deliver a voice assistant product without these incentives involved. I have to imagine the UX of these devices would be much different if they were built by a private company without the same market pressures. It would need to be self-contained and local, so that the infrastructure burden (e.g., data and AI in the cloud) wouldn't create a need for subscription service or data collection revenue to cover the cost.
This is why devices that are basically loss leaders should always be illegal. The end value product is an update that will come later down the line that screws everything up.
For those considering smart home devices, please just buy a home assistant device. It is easy for the non-technical and also not that much more expensive
My peak number of orders p.a was in 2023: 215 orders
In 2025 it was 27 orders
I expect it to be even lower this year. I didn't even buy my eero router upgrade from Amazon.
I largely attribute this to poor quality products, horrible search interface, trying to sort through the dropship spam, and prices no longer being as competitive.
Amazon used to have decent-quality "amazon native" brands like Anker, Eufy, Eero etc. but there are better alternatives to buying all of these products now
I still like to buy my cheap and esoteric Chinese stuff from Amazon. It's a good balance of not-too-slow-delivery and not-too-expensive for very specific stuff. And it's easy to return if it doesn't work.
Example last purchase: An optical SPDIF/TOSLINK to 3.5 mm DAC box (5V/USB-powered) to put behind the TV with a broken/very low quality audio output. It was about $15 including 25% VAT. Probably like $5 on Aliexpress, but I didn't want to wait 6-8 weeks.
Never really buy anything for more than $50 from them though. And never anything containing Li-Ion batteries.
Are they the echo show? I don't get ads on my dots but the show shows ads most of the time, when I really want it to show the clock face instead.
Region might matter. I set it to Australia/New Zealand region and for about a year it didn't show ads. But it does, now, even though it talks with an Australian accent.
The Alexa's with video screen will start to show ads no matter now many times you set it to no ads. There are settings for No Ads, and after a few days, that setting is reset to allow ads. I had one so I could quickly see my Blink camera, but I threw it away because it kept showing ads.
Everyone raced to the bottom so now Walmart almost feels better than the rest. I have somewhat more confidence in products I search there, or at least I can tell when the seller may be shady.
I mean if I want two day/fast shipping, it's still the only place that can do it without costing me $45, and even then a lot of places won't get it in the mail that fast. They also have a much more reliable and robust return policy, which is a headache for other sites. While I agree the experience has worsened it's still the best online store as far as I'm aware
My view of Amazon's decline comes from being a "partner" in their seller and publisher ecosystems for years.
The seller platforms in particular (Brand Registry, Vendor Central, Seller Central, Transparency, etc.) have crippling levels of technical debt. The situation has only gotten worse with Jassy's reckless directive for the entire organization to push into Generative AI (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...). So much basic stuff is just breaking down, and seller support is overwhelmed or unable to intervene to fix the mess.
You can see a small sample here involving problems with product attributes (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...). Google "Amazon AWD delays" or "Amazon CSBA problems" or "Amazon remote fulfillment problems" to see examples of programs that are unable to provide even basic levels of the services promised to sellers.
Meanwhile, Amazon has been so greedy with fees since Jassy took over that sellers of all sizes and many small to midsized brands are being squeezed out of existence or driven off Amazon. Its PPC ad platform is completely predatory, loaded with dark patterns and hidden defaults that add billions to top-line revenue while strip-mining the accounts of sellers who often have no choice but to participate in the auctions.
It's clear that Amazon is running scared when it comes to dealing with new competition, including the Chinese shopping sites and the looming prospect of agentic AI and other new AI-powered shopping tools eating its lunch. For the first time ever last month, I saw an Amazon search results (via Rufus) that actually directed shoppers to third-party brand sites. This would have been heresy 5 years ago.
Blaming AI for Amazon’s accelerating downturn is a cop-out. This has been going on long before genAI was allowed there. Even now many teams within the products you called out aren’t using it at all.
> Its PPC ad platform is completely predatory, loaded with dark patterns and hidden defaults that add billions to top-line revenue while strip-mining the accounts of sellers who often have no choice but to participate in the auctions.
At least they mark ads as 'sponsored', even though it isn't super prominent.
I always scroll until I see organic results, myself.
They mark some of them. Not all of them. Last article I read said 80% of placements on the search results page are paid ads. And they only mark like 4-5 of them as "sponsored"
Large stock sales always make headlines but they don't automatically signal bearishness or really anything else. After all what's the point of investing if you never realize gains?
I think in Berkshire case they do, as they are swimming in cash and notoriously don't sell unless their business outlook changes dramatically.
In any case, I would not take what Berkshire does with much weight.
As Buffett himself said, if you took out their 5/6 best performing investments out of their equation they would be matching the sp500, and if you took out 20, they would be trailing it.
They know that their over performance came from a small number of incredibly well performing bets.
Yes, but you’d be foolish to realize your gains if you think the stock still has a long way to run. That just triggers taxes and eliminates any further upside. So, we can reasonably conclude that either BH thinks Amazon’s run is nearly exhausted, or it’s one of the stocks with minimal forward prospects in BH’s portfolio and they want to deploy the capital with something that they feel will have a greater return (maybe Amazon still rises, but whatever else they want to invest in they think will rise more/faster).
Amazon's core business does not make sense. Despite being so massive, their retail operation makes almost no money. There is little market share left for them to win, the best they can do to grow is shave expenses.
AWS has been their real money maker, but also the explosion of AI and server farms has worked against them in threes ways: there is much more competition on infrastructure, the costs to run infrastructure keep going up, if you're looking for a growth industry there are other more appealing stocks now to park your capital.
It seems like AMZN has significant growth priced-in to the stock, but retail growth will become increasingly challenging as their market share increases.
Amazon's free cash flow rises year over year (apart from the post-COVID period) [0] while Walmart's doesn't [1] and price multiples are largely determined by expected FCF over time not directly revenue/EBITDA. FCF rain or shine maps roughly onto possibility of paying out dividends/buybacks, which determines the value of an equity in capital markets ("discounted present value of a company's future cash flows").
Their business models are increasingly converging with both generative revenue through seller fees, subscriptions, and advertising. Amazon is ahead in most of these areas and also has the higher margin revenue from AWS. Amazon also has a large base of prime subscribers they can sell incremental services to.
>You have to believe that Amazon is poised for much higher growth than they are to justify their current stock price.
How many decades now have we lived in a world where the demand for investment far outstrips sane investment opportunities? In such a world, do stock prices have to be justified as you insinuate? And what happens when the prices are far higher than can be justified? I ask not rhetorically, but rather whether I should be hoarding shotgun shells and canned goods and hiding in the basement.
I'm down to about one Walmart trip per year. It may have been as many as 3 years since I've been inside Target. Kmart is a dusty memory. On my last Walmart trip, it is a shabby caricature of what I remember from the early 2000s (maybe even on up into 2011 or 2012. I can't be sure, but I believe aisles have been made wider so they could fit fewer shelves and keep those looking fuller. What fills them is the cheapest looking junk I have ever seen, and I had no favorable opinion of Walmart's goods to start with. Truly much of it looks like the sort of trinkety crap you would have found at flea markets and gas stations years ago. Target was (3 years ago) still worse, I think they do most of their ordering off of Temu.
If there is something I might prefer to not wait on Amazon for, I will not find it at Walmart even if I remember Walmart once carrying that product. This is without fail. Each new (rare) trip to Walmart reinforces the lesson.
I have never been fond of Walmart's grocery department. I suspect (long ago) that they were able to sell produce 1 cent cheaper than anyone else by buying the least-wanted, unsold inventory from agricultural distributors, and the quality always reflected that theory. I could buy strawberries from Walmart, buy them again from the local grocery chain 10 minutes later, put them in the fridge simultaneously. And the Walmart-bought produce was slimy the next day, the grocery store produce not (unless I stacked the Walmart clamshell on the grocery store one... cross-contamination).
Worse still, they have reduced their personnel to skeleton crews, all shifts. The stores tend to look like they were looted after hurricanes. I do not know how anyone shops at Walmart, and it scares me that if my circumstances were less agreeable I might be forced to shop there too. Walmart might aim for stealing marketshare from Dollar General as a growth strategy, the overlap must be nearly absolute.
> Despite being so massive, their retail operation makes almost no money
You misunderstand the point of retail. It's now a marketplace where they use their name recognition and (alleged) consumer friendliness to collect fees from sellers. It costs to list, it costs to do FBA, and it costs to run ads so that your products appear in search results. Amazon ads is incredibly profitable.
That's also why Prime has such a grab bag of benefits. By keeping Prime membership sticky, the overall value of that marketplace supports the fees charged to sellers.
I am not so sure this is an accurate analysis? Notably, a major thing that kept it so that retail made no money, was the massive expense of expanding the retail operations. That is, expanding retail footprint is a massive cost. And you have to expand if you want to reach more customers.
This is different from AWS where your reach is essentially "all of the internet" for anything that you launch. But this really just meant that reinvesting the revenue from AWS was harder for them to do, compared to revenue from retail. As a result, they didn't. Not nearly as aggressively.
Relevant data point on AWS - GCP is giving out a ton of cloud credits to startups. On average $100k in comparison to $10k-20k from AWS.
Before Claude Code, a full cloud migration could easily be a couple months. We migrated our whole stack to GCP in about a week. It's trivial to switch clouds now with K8 stack and Claude Code.
> There is little market share left for them to win, the best they can do to grow is shave expenses.
I think Amazon netted something like $70 billion last year. What's the problem with them just staying the course and earning tens of billions of dollars in profit year-after-year-after-year?
They say one of the reasons supermarkets move isles layout is so people don’t learn to navigate the store and they put milk in the back to make sure people have to walk the isles.
The purpose is to get shoppers to look at more stuff and impulse buy.
I honestly believe search is bad for the same reason.
Depends how you define their "core business" I suppose.
You're right, but their retail business does support the bulk of their ad business which is extremely profitable. Arguably it might actually make sense for them to run their retail business as a loss leader to support their high-margin ad business.
I have a simple lagging indicator for the US economy, and it's this: when the ads you see focus on price not features, and especially of food, the economy is in a hole and no amount of government sunshine (from either party) persuades me otherwise. In those times, head towards essentials. Food, consumer staples, healthcare. Stay out of tech.
We have ads now for discounts at Taco Bell. Not even Pizza Hut. Taco Bell!
The purchasing experience when you buy direct from companies now is usually much easier than it was years ago. A lot of people instinctively turn to Amazon because its one click and stuff is on its way, but with the new payment integrations even small companies have a pretty close to 1 click experience as well. So when I think of buying something on Amazon I always check the actual brands website first now, because I don't want to support Amazon at all or force sellers to eat the overhead.
A surprisingly large percentage of products on Amazon are now companies that sell only a small number of very specific things and have a name like KUFLPOW.
Yup, they are called Chinese-all-caps. Or that’s at least how I call them. Get bad reviews? Generate a new CAC name and start over. Rinse and repeat. Same product made by one factory in China sold by 100s of CAC Amazon entities.
Amazon spent last year 100B in Capex. They announced they will spend 200B this year. These numbers are INSANE. Greater than GDPs of entire countries.
They literally don't have the cash to do it. Either they need to grow their cash flow significantly, or deplete their cash reserves or take a huge loan (likely a combination of them).
Jassy is playing Russian roulette with the company and his career.
I don’t understand this? Amazon is a profitable company, on the scale of tens of billions of dollars per quarter. They very literally do have the cash.
Am I missing some subtlety in their financial reporting?
What is that spend compared against though? They already spend hundreds of billions of on various things in a year, but what is the marginal spend?
When you present these numbers alongside each other, you imply that they will go from making ~$20b/quarter to losing ~$30b/quarter, which is not plausible to me.
You can have a profitable business but be cash flow negative. Similar to how someone can have assets but have no cash.
Yes 100B in capex is unprecedented for Amazon (let alone 200). Last time they peaked Capex was at ~60B in 2021 when they decided to double their supply chain network.
So the marginal capex on gpus is likely 70-80% of their total capex
Just considering alternatives on that sort of numbers. Billions just letting that money sit. And if you want more than that and actually to pay it back in say 10 or 20 years... Which I question with some capex stuff going around... It just doesn't make sense for my poor engineering brain.
Looks like Berkeshire Hathaway is one way to invest in US shares ex-AI. Except for their smallish holding in Google, they now don't own the big AI spenders, whose shares have risen so much in the past year.
I guess they don't see value in Amazon shares any more. AI spend will probably hit their aws profits.
Note that the listing of shares they own doesn't include the companies that are subsidiaries. Like Geico and other insurance companies, BNSF Railway, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, etc.
My understanding is that Warren gave up his seat as CEO but is still the chairman, and is still at least peripherally involved in investment decisions at Berkshire
Amazon is pretty volatile stock at the moment, as are most companies that chase the AI bandwagon. I don’t think Amazon is doomed but the companies chasing AI are in for a rough time.
Plus continuing waves of layoffs will lead to more frequent and longer AWS outages, and lower quality of retail products will hurt that side of Amazon.
That's because Twitter only really does one thing. Also, despite not having any hard stats twitter has been down an awful lot more these past few years
Next time Amazon goes low I'm sure he'll buy it all back at a discount. With all his wealth he can get away with slow patient investing with swathes of cash.
Not sure if they can all of a sudden buy it right now, at some point that starts looking like market manipulation. Wait a few years or months, see a ton of companies tank, buy at a discount. We've seen them do this several times.
Just to clarify because it seems like most of the comments aren't understanding. Berkshire sold the Amazon stock in the fourth quarter of last year meaning it is likely the last large move Warren Buffett is going to make as head of Berkshire as he stepped down on December 31 of 2025. That's why the article is titled that way and partly why its significant. Warren Buffett has traditionally been averse to tech stocks but picked up a slug of Amazon in 2019.
Did Amazon hit any major setbacks? Like some antitrust issue? There was talk in Europe about how Amazon should be legally responsible for everything sold on the platform in terms of safety, authenticity and so on even if things are sold directly by third parties. Has that actually happened anywhere? It would make sense but it feels like it would be a financial blow to amazon.
Adding the obligatory disclaimer: Berkshire Hathaway selling $1.7B of Amazon stock is likely a decision by Ted Weschler or Todd Combs, still notable but not necessarily Warren Buffett himself.
It's right in the post, but just to save folks a click it's a 77% drawdown in the position so it's a substantial move. I see they also trimmed Apple, but, for comparison's sake, looks like that was only a decrease of 4.3% of the position.
I’ve heard that Amazon’s capital expenditures have exceeded its annual cash flow, leading it to borrow and cut jobs to fund AI investments. Unlike Microsoft and Google, which appear able to fund capex internally, Amazon seems to be in a costly growth race with deeper-pocketed competitors. My view, this could mean continued heavy borrowing and limited to no profitability in the near term.
After Amazon has been a great friend to the Trump administration, by partnering with Flock, by funding the Melania documentary to basically bribe Trump, etc - why should Americans or others trust them or give them business? Amazon isn’t that interesting anymore. You can buy most things directly from a trusted manufacturer or other websites. I don’t see them doing anything innovative at all. What’s the last useful thing they did - AWS? And that stopped being novel more than 10 years ago.
The problem is, megacorp with infinite capital get to make these massive mistakes and stumble through failure after failure, when everyday entrepreneurs get crushed for the tiniest problem.
> You can buy most things directly from a trusted manufacturer or other websites.
My experience over the last year has been the opposite. More and more of the specialized bits and pieces I need or want are only sold online via Amazon.
I don't share the Amazon hate everyone has, I've had very good experiences with Amazon retail. But I do sometimes try to spread out my purchases to other vendors due to monopoly concerns.
It's amazing how many times you buy direct from a vendor and then it comes via Fulfilled by Amazon.
The other issue is when anything goes wrong I've had a hell of a time with some vendors. It's a crapshoot - some vendors ship quickly and competently, and handle customer service like returns quite well. Others you might end up with your product not even shipping for a week much less arriving, even though the store says "in stock ships tomorrow". Due to this, when I really must have something on time or if it's a risky purchase I have a good chance of needing to return I tend towards just getting it with Amazon.
A lot of smaller shops simply don't want to deal with logistics and customer service - it's hard to compete on Amazon for shipping costs. And warehouse/returns/etc. is just a nightmare for a small shop. I absolutely understand why a small speciality manufacturer with a few dozen low volume SKUs would prefer to just use FBA and be done with it.
If you consider Amazon to be a retail company, then the comparison is with other retailers. When was the last time a retailer introduced an innovative new product? That's not what retailers do - they figure out where and how to sell <stuff>, other people make the <stuff> and it gets sold. The innovation happens to the <stuff>, not the retail.
Obviously, there are long term trends like the acceptance of credit cards that took place between the late 1970s and late 1980s in the US. But retail isn't exactly known for being a hotbed of innovation.
If you are thinking about other aspects of Amazon (obviously, AWS), then ... I can't comment on that.
Personally, I just buy stuff from a store and return it if I don’t like it. I don’t need to trust the store because the US has good enough consumer laws. It’s a store not my wife. I don’t need to have these ethical dilemmas over getting Coke Zero delivered.
One positive out of this is that it could bring MacKenzie Scott's net worth down a bit (she still holds significant Amazon stock), leading to her spending less on harmful donations...
Berkshire Hathaway has my favorite website (or, WEB page, as they style it) of any big company: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
I half expected to see an "under construction" gif and a "powered by GeoCities" tag at the bottom
It's definitely missing a website hits counter.
Why?
This doesn’t give the vibes of an amateur personal site - it’s a timeless business site.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
This brings back some (unpleasant) memories.
But otherwise I admire the minimalism.
Incredibly clear and direct. Amazing to see a big company like that keeping it so old school. Thanks for pointing it out!
here's another good one: https://terraformindustries.com/
My god, static text with no graphics!? In 2026!?
They have a long tradition of keeping it simple going back long before the web. The annual reports had no pictures or puffery unlike most companies, though much better writing.
I wonder how much Geico payed for that add placement…
They own GEICO...
Oh; well that’s embarrassing haha
he owns geico
"If you have any comments about our WEB page, you can write us at the address shown above. However, due to the limited number of personnel in our corporate office, we are unable to provide a direct response."
it's certainly fast!!
Maybe the novelty of Amazon has worn off. I occasionally purchase from their UK site, and it’s filled with tricks to get me to sign up for Prime upon checkout. Really horrible workflow and design decisions, cheapening the experience. I now see similar changes to the US version: ‘you saved $15 in shipping by being a Prime member with this purchase’ and ‘last year you made 211 sustainable product purchases’.
Guys, quit being so desperate. Concentrate on quality items at competitive pricing and fast delivery. Don’t turn into TJ Maxx.
My Echo, that I use solely to voice activating lights and switches, is now an ad machine and one bad day away from going in the trash. Next time you do a wave of layoffs, please include everyone involved in these horrible decisions.
Amazon has been quite useful for me as a single bachelor living in an Indian metropolitan city.
1. I get very useful items at very good prices, many of which I would have to wander the city for hours to find, or couldnt find at all: - Eg: I got a pair of adjustable dumbbells at <2K INR. Some of you would call it a cheap knock. But it has been super useful and I would have not bought it if it cost 8k INR. I brought a whole bosch repair toolkit at good price and it has been invaluable for fixing electric/plumbing etc.. issues. I got a high volume travel bag - I didn't even know 40L travel bags existed and wouldnt have brought one if not for amazon. I could go on.
2. Amazon Fresh is usually cheaper for groceries and maintain consistent quality compared to local supermarkets. I will also avoid the need to walk long with the grocery bag.
3. Electronics are significantly cheaper on amazon and again the need to search.
Maybe all of this can be even better as you said. But bottom line is that their operations look pretty efficient to me. Their catalogue is pretty much unmatched. (They may be losing money on retail business - but that's not my position to care as a customer. As other commenter pointed out, it may not even matter much for stock price.)
amz is beholden to cheap products and labor. you have both in india.
elsewhere it's awful, for the exact same features you describe.
they even bought a premium supermarket chain so their produce stop being returned in the US.
Yeah this is something really beautiful about India: life is cheap and there are tons of desperate people who will kill themselves for you.
In the Netherlands you'll be waiting an hour for your meal to be delivered by a bored teenager on an ebike. And you're going to be grateful.
> My Echo, that I use solely to voice activating lights and switches, is now an ad machine
I've been wondering if it is even possible for a publicly-traded company to deliver a voice assistant product without these incentives involved. I have to imagine the UX of these devices would be much different if they were built by a private company without the same market pressures. It would need to be self-contained and local, so that the infrastructure burden (e.g., data and AI in the cloud) wouldn't create a need for subscription service or data collection revenue to cover the cost.
This is why devices that are basically loss leaders should always be illegal. The end value product is an update that will come later down the line that screws everything up.
For those considering smart home devices, please just buy a home assistant device. It is easy for the non-technical and also not that much more expensive
My peak number of orders p.a was in 2023: 215 orders
In 2025 it was 27 orders
I expect it to be even lower this year. I didn't even buy my eero router upgrade from Amazon.
I largely attribute this to poor quality products, horrible search interface, trying to sort through the dropship spam, and prices no longer being as competitive.
Amazon used to have decent-quality "amazon native" brands like Anker, Eufy, Eero etc. but there are better alternatives to buying all of these products now
Home Assistant and other open-source projects seem like they may be the only way that we get consumer-friendly devices.
https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/the-local-first-...
Amazon has become a marketplace for cheap sometimes harmful chinese knockoffs. Amazon doesn't even check what is being sold. I only order directly from places I trust. http://nbcnews.com/business/recall/cheap-chinese-faucets-dan...
These just aren't the relevant concerns behind Amazon's stock performance in the last month. It's the capex.
> Don’t turn into TJ Maxx.
They are the TJ Maxx of software development.
I personally haven’t expected anything more of them for years. Once you’ve seen how the sausage is made and all that.
Amazon has become AliExpress at this point, so I just skip the middleman half the time
It's a shame that all these stores have such a terrible UI/UX.
Amazon is pretty good at optimizing buying things but outside of that everything else sucks really bad especially on mobile
That's what I call it, "American AliExpress" lol
I still like to buy my cheap and esoteric Chinese stuff from Amazon. It's a good balance of not-too-slow-delivery and not-too-expensive for very specific stuff. And it's easy to return if it doesn't work.
Example last purchase: An optical SPDIF/TOSLINK to 3.5 mm DAC box (5V/USB-powered) to put behind the TV with a broken/very low quality audio output. It was about $15 including 25% VAT. Probably like $5 on Aliexpress, but I didn't want to wait 6-8 weeks.
Never really buy anything for more than $50 from them though. And never anything containing Li-Ion batteries.
In Europe, most of Aliexpress delivery is 10 days (except during Chinese New Year).
I think that varies a lot by country/national post service?
I have two Alexas but never get ads.
How is it that you’re getting ads?
Are they the echo show? I don't get ads on my dots but the show shows ads most of the time, when I really want it to show the clock face instead.
Region might matter. I set it to Australia/New Zealand region and for about a year it didn't show ads. But it does, now, even though it talks with an Australian accent.
The Alexa's with video screen will start to show ads no matter now many times you set it to no ads. There are settings for No Ads, and after a few days, that setting is reset to allow ads. I had one so I could quickly see my Blink camera, but I threw it away because it kept showing ads.
Did you actually throw it away or returned it?
Amazon is Walmart for progressives.
Everyone raced to the bottom so now Walmart almost feels better than the rest. I have somewhat more confidence in products I search there, or at least I can tell when the seller may be shady.
They're an ads company now. Not a store. Not a device vendor.
I mean if I want two day/fast shipping, it's still the only place that can do it without costing me $45, and even then a lot of places won't get it in the mail that fast. They also have a much more reliable and robust return policy, which is a headache for other sites. While I agree the experience has worsened it's still the best online store as far as I'm aware
My view of Amazon's decline comes from being a "partner" in their seller and publisher ecosystems for years.
The seller platforms in particular (Brand Registry, Vendor Central, Seller Central, Transparency, etc.) have crippling levels of technical debt. The situation has only gotten worse with Jassy's reckless directive for the entire organization to push into Generative AI (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...). So much basic stuff is just breaking down, and seller support is overwhelmed or unable to intervene to fix the mess.
You can see a small sample here involving problems with product attributes (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...). Google "Amazon AWD delays" or "Amazon CSBA problems" or "Amazon remote fulfillment problems" to see examples of programs that are unable to provide even basic levels of the services promised to sellers.
Meanwhile, Amazon has been so greedy with fees since Jassy took over that sellers of all sizes and many small to midsized brands are being squeezed out of existence or driven off Amazon. Its PPC ad platform is completely predatory, loaded with dark patterns and hidden defaults that add billions to top-line revenue while strip-mining the accounts of sellers who often have no choice but to participate in the auctions.
It's clear that Amazon is running scared when it comes to dealing with new competition, including the Chinese shopping sites and the looming prospect of agentic AI and other new AI-powered shopping tools eating its lunch. For the first time ever last month, I saw an Amazon search results (via Rufus) that actually directed shoppers to third-party brand sites. This would have been heresy 5 years ago.
Blaming AI for Amazon’s accelerating downturn is a cop-out. This has been going on long before genAI was allowed there. Even now many teams within the products you called out aren’t using it at all.
> Its PPC ad platform is completely predatory, loaded with dark patterns and hidden defaults that add billions to top-line revenue while strip-mining the accounts of sellers who often have no choice but to participate in the auctions.
At least they mark ads as 'sponsored', even though it isn't super prominent.
I always scroll until I see organic results, myself.
They mark some of them. Not all of them. Last article I read said 80% of placements on the search results page are paid ads. And they only mark like 4-5 of them as "sponsored"
Oh god, was working within seller central when brand registry was being spun up. Id rather not relive some of those experiences (or use them).
I think Amazon should cede the cheap chineesium to Temu or SHEIN and focus on its own products and products from companies who actually exist
Berkshire Hathaway, not Warren Buffett.
Large stock sales always make headlines but they don't automatically signal bearishness or really anything else. After all what's the point of investing if you never realize gains?
I think in Berkshire case they do, as they are swimming in cash and notoriously don't sell unless their business outlook changes dramatically.
In any case, I would not take what Berkshire does with much weight.
As Buffett himself said, if you took out their 5/6 best performing investments out of their equation they would be matching the sp500, and if you took out 20, they would be trailing it.
They know that their over performance came from a small number of incredibly well performing bets.
Yes, but you’d be foolish to realize your gains if you think the stock still has a long way to run. That just triggers taxes and eliminates any further upside. So, we can reasonably conclude that either BH thinks Amazon’s run is nearly exhausted, or it’s one of the stocks with minimal forward prospects in BH’s portfolio and they want to deploy the capital with something that they feel will have a greater return (maybe Amazon still rises, but whatever else they want to invest in they think will rise more/faster).
Kind of both. It’s the last direct decision that he made for Berkshire as the guy in charge.
Amazon's core business does not make sense. Despite being so massive, their retail operation makes almost no money. There is little market share left for them to win, the best they can do to grow is shave expenses.
AWS has been their real money maker, but also the explosion of AI and server farms has worked against them in threes ways: there is much more competition on infrastructure, the costs to run infrastructure keep going up, if you're looking for a growth industry there are other more appealing stocks now to park your capital.
> Amazon's core business does not make sense. Despite being so massive, their retail operation makes almost no money.
Net profit margins for retail are only around 3% across the industry.
Amazon isn't actually doing anything unusual in that regard. Retail is just a very low profit margin business whether it's physical or online.
These numbers are always confusing to those of us in the tech world where SaaS net profit margins are always very high.
This is correct, but it doesn't explain why Amazon would have a 2x market cap over Walmart when they both roughly make the same revenue.
You have to believe that Amazon is poised for much higher growth than they are to justify their current stock price.
> This is correct, but it doesn't explain why Amazon would have a 2x market cap over Walmart when they both roughly make the same revenue
Because Amazon and Walmart are two different companies with very different product offerings.
Retail can only grow so far. AWS continues to grow at a relatively incredible rate compared to Walmart's business.
The revenue curves do indeed look a bit different:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=revenu...
Even more so if you compare EBITDA:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=ebitda...
It seems like AMZN has significant growth priced-in to the stock, but retail growth will become increasingly challenging as their market share increases.
These are different businesses. Walmart has a massive retail footprint, where Amazon does not.
Amazon’s huge 3p seller network means it can offer advertising as a revenue stream in a way Walmart can’t compete with.
Amazon's free cash flow rises year over year (apart from the post-COVID period) [0] while Walmart's doesn't [1] and price multiples are largely determined by expected FCF over time not directly revenue/EBITDA. FCF rain or shine maps roughly onto possibility of paying out dividends/buybacks, which determines the value of an equity in capital markets ("discounted present value of a company's future cash flows").
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/free-c... [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/free-c...
Their business models are increasingly converging with both generative revenue through seller fees, subscriptions, and advertising. Amazon is ahead in most of these areas and also has the higher margin revenue from AWS. Amazon also has a large base of prime subscribers they can sell incremental services to.
> ”it doesn't explain why Amazon would have a 2x market cap over Walmart when they both roughly make the same revenue.”
Why does Tesla have 15x the market cap of BYD, despite BYD selling more cars, having more revenue, and much faster revenue growth?
Comparing to Walmart, though, I would expect higher growth. Would you not?
>You have to believe that Amazon is poised for much higher growth than they are to justify their current stock price.
How many decades now have we lived in a world where the demand for investment far outstrips sane investment opportunities? In such a world, do stock prices have to be justified as you insinuate? And what happens when the prices are far higher than can be justified? I ask not rhetorically, but rather whether I should be hoarding shotgun shells and canned goods and hiding in the basement.
Walmart doesn’t have a cloud computing side business that’s wildly profitable.
> There is little market share left for them to win
Despite controlling about 40% of US online retail, Amazon only has about an 8% share of total US retail. There’s still plenty of room to grow here.
https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-will-surpass-40-of-...
What is there for Amazon to grow? They're closing their physical fresh stores etc. Is the intention to compete with Walmart and Dollar General?
I'm down to about one Walmart trip per year. It may have been as many as 3 years since I've been inside Target. Kmart is a dusty memory. On my last Walmart trip, it is a shabby caricature of what I remember from the early 2000s (maybe even on up into 2011 or 2012. I can't be sure, but I believe aisles have been made wider so they could fit fewer shelves and keep those looking fuller. What fills them is the cheapest looking junk I have ever seen, and I had no favorable opinion of Walmart's goods to start with. Truly much of it looks like the sort of trinkety crap you would have found at flea markets and gas stations years ago. Target was (3 years ago) still worse, I think they do most of their ordering off of Temu.
If there is something I might prefer to not wait on Amazon for, I will not find it at Walmart even if I remember Walmart once carrying that product. This is without fail. Each new (rare) trip to Walmart reinforces the lesson.
I have never been fond of Walmart's grocery department. I suspect (long ago) that they were able to sell produce 1 cent cheaper than anyone else by buying the least-wanted, unsold inventory from agricultural distributors, and the quality always reflected that theory. I could buy strawberries from Walmart, buy them again from the local grocery chain 10 minutes later, put them in the fridge simultaneously. And the Walmart-bought produce was slimy the next day, the grocery store produce not (unless I stacked the Walmart clamshell on the grocery store one... cross-contamination).
Worse still, they have reduced their personnel to skeleton crews, all shifts. The stores tend to look like they were looted after hurricanes. I do not know how anyone shops at Walmart, and it scares me that if my circumstances were less agreeable I might be forced to shop there too. Walmart might aim for stealing marketshare from Dollar General as a growth strategy, the overlap must be nearly absolute.
> Despite being so massive, their retail operation makes almost no money
You misunderstand the point of retail. It's now a marketplace where they use their name recognition and (alleged) consumer friendliness to collect fees from sellers. It costs to list, it costs to do FBA, and it costs to run ads so that your products appear in search results. Amazon ads is incredibly profitable.
That's also why Prime has such a grab bag of benefits. By keeping Prime membership sticky, the overall value of that marketplace supports the fees charged to sellers.
Their profit margin on retail is similar to other discount retailers like Walmart. Retail just doesn’t have huge margins.
I am not so sure this is an accurate analysis? Notably, a major thing that kept it so that retail made no money, was the massive expense of expanding the retail operations. That is, expanding retail footprint is a massive cost. And you have to expand if you want to reach more customers.
This is different from AWS where your reach is essentially "all of the internet" for anything that you launch. But this really just meant that reinvesting the revenue from AWS was harder for them to do, compared to revenue from retail. As a result, they didn't. Not nearly as aggressively.
Trying to make every business have software margins is going to destroy society.
Relevant data point on AWS - GCP is giving out a ton of cloud credits to startups. On average $100k in comparison to $10k-20k from AWS.
Before Claude Code, a full cloud migration could easily be a couple months. We migrated our whole stack to GCP in about a week. It's trivial to switch clouds now with K8 stack and Claude Code.
> There is little market share left for them to win, the best they can do to grow is shave expenses.
I think Amazon netted something like $70 billion last year. What's the problem with them just staying the course and earning tens of billions of dollars in profit year-after-year-after-year?
Number must go up. It's a problem with capitalism in general.
they could improve their product search page so it's actually useful
They say one of the reasons supermarkets move isles layout is so people don’t learn to navigate the store and they put milk in the back to make sure people have to walk the isles.
The purpose is to get shoppers to look at more stuff and impulse buy.
I honestly believe search is bad for the same reason.
It's useful for making sellers pay for promoted product positions
Depends how you define their "core business" I suppose.
You're right, but their retail business does support the bulk of their ad business which is extremely profitable. Arguably it might actually make sense for them to run their retail business as a loss leader to support their high-margin ad business.
They could just increase prices. They deliver fast (often same day) and always accept my returns. Add 5% to prices, pure margin.
They already do. About half the time the prices I see on amazon are higher than buying directly from the manufacturer or from another online store. One example I saw recently was this lego set (https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Penguins-Love-Building-Set/dp/B0...) which cost over $50 on amazon, I checked lego.com and it was $15.00! (they included it free with a large purchase too!). It's $20 here (https://bricksandminifigsontario.com/products/40886-penguins...)
I have a simple lagging indicator for the US economy, and it's this: when the ads you see focus on price not features, and especially of food, the economy is in a hole and no amount of government sunshine (from either party) persuades me otherwise. In those times, head towards essentials. Food, consumer staples, healthcare. Stay out of tech.
We have ads now for discounts at Taco Bell. Not even Pizza Hut. Taco Bell!
The US economy for regular people is not good.
Interesting how most people here (a hardcore tech site) are commenting on their experience with Amazon retail
Here is a Berkshire Hathaway portfolio tracker if anyone is interested:
https://www.quiverquant.com/institutions/BERKSHIRE%20HATHAWA...
Berkshire also sold around $2.8B of Apple stock, although that was a much smaller move as a percentage of their position.
So 60% of this portfolio is in just 4 stocks? Apple, American Express, BofA, and Chevron. Didn't expect that.
The purchasing experience when you buy direct from companies now is usually much easier than it was years ago. A lot of people instinctively turn to Amazon because its one click and stuff is on its way, but with the new payment integrations even small companies have a pretty close to 1 click experience as well. So when I think of buying something on Amazon I always check the actual brands website first now, because I don't want to support Amazon at all or force sellers to eat the overhead.
A surprisingly large percentage of products on Amazon are now companies that sell only a small number of very specific things and have a name like KUFLPOW.
Yup, they are called Chinese-all-caps. Or that’s at least how I call them. Get bad reviews? Generate a new CAC name and start over. Rinse and repeat. Same product made by one factory in China sold by 100s of CAC Amazon entities.
The complete failure of the brand initiative cannot be overstated.
There is only so much cash a company can burn.
Amazon spent last year 100B in Capex. They announced they will spend 200B this year. These numbers are INSANE. Greater than GDPs of entire countries.
They literally don't have the cash to do it. Either they need to grow their cash flow significantly, or deplete their cash reserves or take a huge loan (likely a combination of them).
Jassy is playing Russian roulette with the company and his career.
> They literally don’t have the cash to do it.
I don’t understand this? Amazon is a profitable company, on the scale of tens of billions of dollars per quarter. They very literally do have the cash.
Am I missing some subtlety in their financial reporting?
They have 86.8 B cash but are going to spend 200 B this year.
What is that spend compared against though? They already spend hundreds of billions of on various things in a year, but what is the marginal spend?
When you present these numbers alongside each other, you imply that they will go from making ~$20b/quarter to losing ~$30b/quarter, which is not plausible to me.
You can have a profitable business but be cash flow negative. Similar to how someone can have assets but have no cash.
Yes 100B in capex is unprecedented for Amazon (let alone 200). Last time they peaked Capex was at ~60B in 2021 when they decided to double their supply chain network.
So the marginal capex on gpus is likely 70-80% of their total capex
Yeah, a quick Google tells me that Amazon is holding 123 Billion in cash and marketable securities
Just considering alternatives on that sort of numbers. Billions just letting that money sit. And if you want more than that and actually to pay it back in say 10 or 20 years... Which I question with some capex stuff going around... It just doesn't make sense for my poor engineering brain.
Looks like Berkeshire Hathaway is one way to invest in US shares ex-AI. Except for their smallish holding in Google, they now don't own the big AI spenders, whose shares have risen so much in the past year.
I guess they don't see value in Amazon shares any more. AI spend will probably hit their aws profits.
Note that the listing of shares they own doesn't include the companies that are subsidiaries. Like Geico and other insurance companies, BNSF Railway, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, etc.
In the dot com boom and crash Berkshire stock moved opposite to the nasdaq hitting its year low on the same day the nasdaq peaked.
Makes sense. Amazon is making VERY bad investments just to pump Bezos' personal investments in related industries
Warren Buffet retired. This is Berkshire Hathaway.
He's in the office every day. I bet they at least ran this by him.
My understanding is that Warren gave up his seat as CEO but is still the chairman, and is still at least peripherally involved in investment decisions at Berkshire
Also these are year end portfolio changes, so could very well be Warren.
Amazon is pretty volatile stock at the moment, as are most companies that chase the AI bandwagon. I don’t think Amazon is doomed but the companies chasing AI are in for a rough time.
Plus continuing waves of layoffs will lead to more frequent and longer AWS outages, and lower quality of retail products will hurt that side of Amazon.
People predicted that about Twitter but it didn’t really happen
That's because Twitter only really does one thing. Also, despite not having any hard stats twitter has been down an awful lot more these past few years
Next time Amazon goes low I'm sure he'll buy it all back at a discount. With all his wealth he can get away with slow patient investing with swathes of cash.
Who cares? This isn't wallstreetbsts.
Amazon just shed $450 billion in value. It's low right now.
Not sure if they can all of a sudden buy it right now, at some point that starts looking like market manipulation. Wait a few years or months, see a ton of companies tank, buy at a discount. We've seen them do this several times.
Another Prime membership fee increase, incoming!
Just to clarify because it seems like most of the comments aren't understanding. Berkshire sold the Amazon stock in the fourth quarter of last year meaning it is likely the last large move Warren Buffett is going to make as head of Berkshire as he stepped down on December 31 of 2025. That's why the article is titled that way and partly why its significant. Warren Buffett has traditionally been averse to tech stocks but picked up a slug of Amazon in 2019.
Did Amazon hit any major setbacks? Like some antitrust issue? There was talk in Europe about how Amazon should be legally responsible for everything sold on the platform in terms of safety, authenticity and so on even if things are sold directly by third parties. Has that actually happened anywhere? It would make sense but it feels like it would be a financial blow to amazon.
Please fix the title: Berkshire Hathway dumped it, not Warren Buffet.
Adding the obligatory disclaimer: Berkshire Hathaway selling $1.7B of Amazon stock is likely a decision by Ted Weschler or Todd Combs, still notable but not necessarily Warren Buffett himself.
It's right in the post, but just to save folks a click it's a 77% drawdown in the position so it's a substantial move. I see they also trimmed Apple, but, for comparison's sake, looks like that was only a decrease of 4.3% of the position.
These clowns are trying to charge a family member for an item they received an incorrect item for,
and returned.
They need competition.
I’ve heard that Amazon’s capital expenditures have exceeded its annual cash flow, leading it to borrow and cut jobs to fund AI investments. Unlike Microsoft and Google, which appear able to fund capex internally, Amazon seems to be in a costly growth race with deeper-pocketed competitors. My view, this could mean continued heavy borrowing and limited to no profitability in the near term.
IMO AI is going to make buying things you need for your household without going through the clownshow that is Amazon a lot easier.
Berkshire, Not Buffet.
Also, why would anyone want to work at Amazon at this point?
One of the worst companies to join with the worst margins out of the big tech companies.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46809296
High comp, opportunity to work with unparalleled scale, interesting tech, high performance bar.
Desperation and relatively high compensation.
Every friend I've ever had work for them was burnt out but stayed because they were too burnt out to look for a new job
After Amazon has been a great friend to the Trump administration, by partnering with Flock, by funding the Melania documentary to basically bribe Trump, etc - why should Americans or others trust them or give them business? Amazon isn’t that interesting anymore. You can buy most things directly from a trusted manufacturer or other websites. I don’t see them doing anything innovative at all. What’s the last useful thing they did - AWS? And that stopped being novel more than 10 years ago.
The problem is, megacorp with infinite capital get to make these massive mistakes and stumble through failure after failure, when everyday entrepreneurs get crushed for the tiniest problem.
> You can buy most things directly from a trusted manufacturer or other websites.
My experience over the last year has been the opposite. More and more of the specialized bits and pieces I need or want are only sold online via Amazon.
Extremely depressing.
I don't share the Amazon hate everyone has, I've had very good experiences with Amazon retail. But I do sometimes try to spread out my purchases to other vendors due to monopoly concerns.
It's amazing how many times you buy direct from a vendor and then it comes via Fulfilled by Amazon.
The other issue is when anything goes wrong I've had a hell of a time with some vendors. It's a crapshoot - some vendors ship quickly and competently, and handle customer service like returns quite well. Others you might end up with your product not even shipping for a week much less arriving, even though the store says "in stock ships tomorrow". Due to this, when I really must have something on time or if it's a risky purchase I have a good chance of needing to return I tend towards just getting it with Amazon.
A lot of smaller shops simply don't want to deal with logistics and customer service - it's hard to compete on Amazon for shipping costs. And warehouse/returns/etc. is just a nightmare for a small shop. I absolutely understand why a small speciality manufacturer with a few dozen low volume SKUs would prefer to just use FBA and be done with it.
> it's hard to compete on Amazon for shipping costs.
Not so much that it is hard, as that Amazon more or less forces vendors on its platforms to eat shipping costs.
Good, I want the platform to squeeze vendors as much as possible. This is how consumers win
We all wear multiple hats in our lives. Consumers. Citizens. Employees. Many more.
Amazon has been really good for us when we wear our consumer hats. Not so much when we wear the others.
You can count the number of times Jassy has lead amazon to an innovative new product during his tenure as CEO on zero hands.
If you consider Amazon to be a retail company, then the comparison is with other retailers. When was the last time a retailer introduced an innovative new product? That's not what retailers do - they figure out where and how to sell <stuff>, other people make the <stuff> and it gets sold. The innovation happens to the <stuff>, not the retail.
Obviously, there are long term trends like the acceptance of credit cards that took place between the late 1970s and late 1980s in the US. But retail isn't exactly known for being a hotbed of innovation.
If you are thinking about other aspects of Amazon (obviously, AWS), then ... I can't comment on that.
“Why should Americans trust them”, I’d go further and say you shouldn’t trust any company.
Personally, I just buy stuff from a store and return it if I don’t like it. I don’t need to trust the store because the US has good enough consumer laws. It’s a store not my wife. I don’t need to have these ethical dilemmas over getting Coke Zero delivered.
One positive out of this is that it could bring MacKenzie Scott's net worth down a bit (she still holds significant Amazon stock), leading to her spending less on harmful donations...
Can you enumerate which parties have been "harmed" by her donations, and the precise nature of the harm(s)?
I wasn't aware of her political donations. Can you say a little bit more on that?
> harmful donations…
Her philanthropic work and contributions focus on racial and LGBTQ+ equality, HBCUs, affordable housing, etc… Real “harmful” stuff there… /s
mamma mia! didn't he step down? very cool that he's back in the game
Warren Buffet stepped down as CEO from Berkshire Hathaway. He's still involved as Chairman with under 50% stake, afaik.
This was Berkshire Hathaway, not Warren Buffet, despite the misleading title.