William Almonte’s Post

Thrilled that after three years of reporting my new book “The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power” I can finally start sharing parts with readers before its release next week! My first excerpt appeared in The Wall Street Journal this weekend. It showed how Amazon recruited a Trader Joe’s manager to work on its private label food brand. On her first week at the company, she stumbles upon a secretive room with brown paper covering the windows and doors that is filled with Trader Joe’s snack boxes. From there, the employee is pressured to give her manager internal Trader Joe’s documents. “You just have to give us the data!” he yells at her. The environment at Amazon where every year employees are cut from an already all-star pool of talent at a company with unprecedented access to data meant that accessing data to gain an edge—as well as using other tactics to hurt competition—was a powerful way to stay ahead and make it to their restricted stock units. There are loads of examples in the book where this dynamic plays out. As regulators around the world decry the company as being too big, Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy has told his senior leaders it isn’t big enough. Jassy recently told his deputies that Amazon could become a $10 trillion company—the world’s largest by valuation—over the next decade. This is truly just a sliver of what the book unearths about one of the world’s most powerful and feared companies. Can’t wait for you all to read the entire book. Read the excerpt here (no paywall) and get your pre-orders in now to get a free signed bookplate until April 24! Forward me your confirmations so we can ship them out. Place your order here: https://lnkd.in/gskH3S8y #amazon #bigtech #antitrust #retail #ecommerce

Amazon's foray into private label food brands involved ambitious strategies reminiscent of its broader approach to business expansion and competition. In developing its Wickedly Prime brand, Amazon attempted to emulate the success of Trader Joe's by replicating its top-selling products. The company enlisted a former Trader Joe’s senior manager, who discovered the project's true nature only after joining the team. Amidst secrecy, she was coerced into providing sales data under intense pressure, reflecting Amazon's cutthroat culture and aggressive strategies to outperform competitors and win market share. This intense corporate environment is further exemplified by Amazon's use of stack ranking and high employee turnover, designed to maximize performance and loyalty. However, such tactics, coupled with unparalleled access to vast amounts of data across various sectors, have positioned Amazon as a formidable force in retail and beyond, prompting ethical concerns and regulatory scrutiny. Amazon's strategy extends well beyond retail, leveraging data to disrupt multiple industries and integrate itself into daily consumer habits. Yet, as the company faces lawsuits from the Federal Trade Commission for alleged monopolistic practices, parallels are drawn with historic corporate giants like Standard Oil, suggesting potential regulatory repercussions. Amazon's story is marked by innovation and controversy, as it challenges traditional business practices and faces increasing scrutiny over its methods and market dominance. #AmazonStrategy #TraderJoes #RetailDisruption #DataDriven #MonopolyConcerns #FTCLawsuit #CorporateCulture #Innovation #MarketDominance https://lnkd.in/ePZsQWkb

Amazon’s “total addressable market” is “everybody else’s operating margin”. Put another way, if your company made money, Amazon viewed you as the competition and was coming for your business. This WSJ article is full of interesting information about Amazon’s business model and culture . A must read. #amazon

Amazon has targeted Trader Joe's for at least a decade, The Wall Street Journal reports, trying to crack the secrets to its #retail success and replicate — literally — its top-200 #products. If they cd only figure out which ones those were. [pro tip: mint chip ice cream and those salt-and-pepper chips shd be on the list … ] So … #recruit #managers and stock up on brown butcher paper to cover the windows. TJ’s, owned by ALDI SÜD I think, one of the German brothers scions, doesn’t sell #online which is weird, #AmIRight, #Amazon? so youse can’t figure stuff out from there. Do y’all know about the Fearless Flyer? “This reporting draws on hundreds of pages of internal documents and emails, and #interviews with more than 600 #employees, #partners, #competitors and #regulators. They show that Amazon often had its thumb on the scale, creating scenarios to give itself a leg up or create hit products at the expense of rivals.” This sounds like a super fun #article to report … and read. https://lnkd.in/ggxJKHW5 #beer #wine #cheese #grabngo #bananas!!!

As much as Amazon as both a business and a consumer makes me appreciate the ingenuity of the business model, their dominance in retail and apparent monopoly is a concern not just for us but many. They control around 40% of US online shopping - an insane amount of market power. We've all heard how Amazon reverse-engineers competitors and then breaks their strategy. But they allegedly had an entire "secret war room" just to analyse Trader Joe's top 200 products. What surprises me is Amazon choosing to bombard a player like Trader's Joe which might be only a fraction of what Amazon is. This is an interesting article questioning Amazon's dominance and the power it withholds which they don't shy away from using with an intensity that tells that they are going after every competition, big or small. #traderjoe #amazon #ecommercebusiness #consumerbrands

An Amazon Strategy *works* with a higher systemic logic, a completely different conceptual frame, almost as a sixth sense: it intuitively understands how to see and sustain itself as a self-generating market, one that is able to keep feeding an economic system that Andy Jassy believes has the potential to become a $10 trillion company — the world’s largest by valuation — over the next decade. Writes Dana Mattioli here, in an excerpt from her forthcoming book, The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power: "Amazon is the number one, two or three player in a staggering number of industries from e-commerce to cloud computing, giving the company unrivaled access to partner, seller and even competitor data. An intense culture combined with unparalleled leverage and data across industries has made Amazon one of the most powerful and most feared companies in business history." Markets aren't about technical push. They're about gravitational pull. #ModernStrategy

Not a terribly attractive view on Amazon's culture - a clip from an upcoming book. The first part of the article describes the aggressive war room approach to attacking Trader Joe's, which hasn't worked terribly well, but is revealing and rings true. Several employees were fired for obtaining proprietary data from Trader Joe's--presumably only because another employee triggered an investigation, but the pressure the culture placed on those employees is what really matters in the real world, and that pressure to rapidly grow and consume other companies and industries is what's driving big tech today. Due to the massive combined size of big tech, in order to continue to grow, they must destroy the businesses or even entire industries of customers, which was a minor issue by comparison during the MSFT antitrust era, for example. Nothing quite like this situation in history -- some elements of antitrust in each era in banking, railroads, and telecoms, but nothing quite like this combination. Suffice to say that it's going to be difficult for big tech to continue to grow unless they begin unbundling and spinning off what would be large companies. Should Amazon have acquired Whole Foods, FB Instagram, MS LinkedIn, or Google YouTube? Probably not from a market health perspective. Beyond acquisitions, however, are the large internal businesses like AWS. If Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were required to spin off their cloud businesses, it would have an enormous positive impact on the economy. Apple is a bit different, but similar in terms of impact if they were not allowed to dominate apps for iPhone, for example. The irony is I can see a path through spin offs where the combined values of these companies would approach today's values. Otherwise, it makes no sense at all to me. ~~~~~ Well beyond snacks, Amazon’s private-label employees for years have looked at the proprietary data of its third-party sellers on Amazon.com to reverse engineer bestsellers and undercut them on pricing. Entrepreneurs who have met with Amazon’s dealmaking or venture-capital arms complain that Amazon executives pumped them for intelligence about their inventions and shared proprietary information with other Amazon teams that stood to benefit only to ghost the entrepreneurs and create similar Amazon products. Adapted from “The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power” written by Dana Mattioli, to be published by Little, Brown and Co. on April 23, 2024. https://lnkd.in/g6uF22uS

https://lnkd.in/e7ccwfci Amazon is facing scrutiny for aggressive business tactics, including using competitor data to dominate the market. This investigative report explores how these practices could impact the future of global commerce and fair competition. Darin W. White

New 🍄 🏪 🥒 : In John Mackey's new memoir, the Whole Foods founder writes about taking MDMA and psilocybin in 2022, which helped him come to terms with changes Amazon was making to the natural grocer he founded. Now it seems like Amazon is inching toward even more serious changes. My column in The Information: https://lnkd.in/e2XhJhYN

So Amazon wants to crack Trader Joe's code? I don't blame them, but they're going about it the wrong way. This week, The Wall Street Journal published an article on Amazon's efforts to replicate the top 200 items sold at Trader Joe's—among other things—and the lengths they've gone to uncover the secret sauce behind their success, including literal corporate espionage. Trader Joe's has an absolutely rabid fan following and a winning formula that no one has successfully replicated. That's why I selected "Becoming Trader Joe" by the company's founder, Joe Coulombe, as this month's selection for the HSR Book Club. Even though it was written in 1967, it contains the secrets and blueprint that Joe used to build his business, which still forms a large part of their strategy today. https://amzn.to/444ofTy The team at Amazon could have had a much easier time trying to replicate the top 200 items Trader Joe's sells just by slowing down, looking at the information that's right in front of them, and reading this book to understand the ethos of Trader Joe's and the strategy behind their business approach. For Amazon, or anyone, looking to build a cult-like business and replicate what Trader Joe's has done, keep these top two things in mind: 1. Keep Your Target Customer in Sight: Trader Joe's mastery in catering to a niche market has been pivotal to its growth. The company has flourished by prioritizing what their customers enjoy and need above everything else. Dive deep into understanding your target demographic; rather than persuading them to buy what you offer, discover their desires and meet those needs directly. 2. Treat Your Employees Well: Echoing Richard Branson, Joe Coulombe believes, “The way you treat your employees is the way they'll treat your customers.” By treating employees with respect, kindness, and appreciation, you foster a work environment that enhances customer relations, bolsters brand loyalty, and creates a positive business image. If you're interested in joining the conversation this month, I am sharing my thoughts and prompts on how you can apply the learnings from "Becoming Trader Joe" to your life, business, or job in my weekly newsletter. https://lnkd.in/d-BeDbTT #startups #growth #traderjoes #amazon https://lnkd.in/dkAW5aGz