retail therapy

The junkification of Amazon.

This writer explored the incentives that drive this: “Some of the spatulas you encounter first will carry brand names you’ve heard of before, like KitchenAid or Rubbermaid, while others will have names like IOCBYHZ, BANKKY, or KLAQQED.” I learned that […]

tech, startups, internet

And here come multimodal Chain of Thought.

Amazon researchers paired text with images as input to drive LLM ability ever higher. And they did it with a model that’s only 770 million params (vs the 175 Billion in GPT-3.5). “Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the […]

retail therapy

In praise of Amazon’s hand scanners.

They have these at my local Whole Foods and I’ve always been a bit turned off by them. But maybe that’s a knee-jerk reaction? “Holding my hand a few inches over an Amazon One scanner next to the cash register […]

retail therapy

Amazon’s restocking issue.

Amazon places limits on how much inventory a 3rd party seller can store in its warehouses. Around holiday time, they tend to cut these limits, which creates a lot of extra stress (and stockouts) for those independent sellers. Why do […]

retail therapy

Retail can be a very hard business.

Packable, last year the #1 seller on Amazon Marketplace in the U.S., is liquidating. A year ago, they were planning a SPAC deal at a $1.5 billion valuation. I hope to someday read the inside story of how this business […]