I live so far out in the boonies it takes Prime orders four days to reach us. I love it when checking out and the options are "free two-day delivery - will arrive in four days." Occasionally it runs to five days if it's over a weekend, and they used to arrive within three days, but now they usually get here in four. I was astounded when our daughter who lives in a city placed an order and it was there two hours later.
BTW, I'm not grumbling. Amazon has made items available to us that we would never have been able to purchase otherwise. I know there are trade offs for living where the stars can be seen at night - if one could only see them through the mosquitoes. :)
If I want something within 30 minutes I will go to the store -- the last thing we need is the sky cluttered with drones. And in some parts of the country, those drones will be shot down.
This is Amazon we're talking about. Their drones will probably be equipped with military-grade armor, stealth camouflage, and various surface-to-air evasion protocols.
Question 1 should be "were the only things" not the singular as the answer is plural. I was confused because I was trying to think of a specific book...
Realistically, Toys R Us went bankrupt because of a horrid debt burden brought on by a leveraged buyout led by Bain Capital. Before the buyout, in the mid 2000s, They were actually relatively profitable. Immediately after, they had a swing to losses of enormous magnitude.
Amazon didn't help them recover, but without the debt burden, they would have had plenty of cash flow to reestablish themselves and compete. But when all your cash is going to pay off debt at ludicrous interest rates, you can't reinvest to compete.
TRU brick & mortar stores basically became Amazon showrooms. A lot of people would go to a Toys Я Us location, assess the item in person, and if they liked it, get on their phones as they were leaving the store, and by the time they got back to their car, they'd ordered it from Amazon for less.
Actually, I thought that was the most clever part of the quiz. I don't have "Echo", so I didn't get that one. But I knew the question as written was not a mistake, but rather a clue. In retrospect, I should've figured it out. But I thought it was indicative of a name like "Tom-Tom" or something like that.
What "smart speaker" is made by Amazon?" I thought this was a mistake... until I saw the answer. Clever!
Amazon didn't help them recover, but without the debt burden, they would have had plenty of cash flow to reestablish themselves and compete. But when all your cash is going to pay off debt at ludicrous interest rates, you can't reinvest to compete.
Edit: Didn't close parenthesis
Or maybe it was that the web hosting portion of their company, makes up a much larger share of their business than most people are aware of.