from Hacker News

Amazon Is Never Going Back to Normal

by nondeveloper on 5/1/21, 12:35 AM with 1 comments

• by tracer4201 on 5/1/21, 2:40 AM

  > The crisis is laying bare the cracks in Amazon’s ability to be there for its customers when they need it most, much less to “delight” them,” wrote Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal in April 2020 in an article titled “Will We Forgive Amazon When This Is Over?” A year later, the answer is yes.

  > Effective April 22nd, 2021, Amazon removed product-level quantity limits and instead set new account-level limits. The change again attracted critique because for many sellers, it further reduced available warehouse space, but also because it was announced and became effective on the same day.

  My takeaway from this article is Amazon gave virtually limitless space to sellers, and now they’re trying different strategies — presumably because they only have so many warehouses but an increasing number of sellers, and presumably, the supply of warehouses is outpacing sellers.

  And I imagine there’s a hard logistical/optimization problem of how/where to distribute and organize all the product so you can deliver it same day or next day. You try to over optimize and people will wear out and quit. If they fully automate all of this with robots, I imagine there would be public anger from all the lost warehouses jobs (assuming the tech is even possible).

  A business grows and faces new constraints. What’s the surprise here? The sky is blue, and water is wet. You can’t scale infinitely.