nickshanagher

“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...

I don’t fear Amazon, it’s One Stop, a senior wholesale executive told me recently. But a flick through The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age ofAmazon by Brad Stone might make him rethink. I am sure that Jeff Bezos will write a better book about his business ideas 20 years from now and while Stone’s book has been slated by some insiders, it is a great read. For anyone involved in distribution it is a must read. Famously frugal with company funds, the Amazon attitude to burning up money buying companies that failed during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s will dazzle you. Even more impressive is Bezos pursuit of the best brains from Walmart. He started his career in a New York hedge fund run by David E Shaw, whose mastery of maths and computing made him a billion dollars exploiting inefficiencies in the way Wall Street worked. DESCO had a policy of hiring the best brains and Bezos was a prodigy. He left this well paid job to set up an internet business that had a 70 ...

Local retailers need to sit down and take note. Two major retailers - Amazon and Waitrose - yesterday acquired media businesses. Close to home,Waitrose bought the 63 year old Good Food Guide from Which? to build on its presence as a "food expert across a number of communications channels." "We aim to be the go-to shop for food lovers and this guide will develop our brand as an authority on good food," said Rupert Thomas, marketing director. More dramatically, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon bought the Washington Post for $250m. He said: "Journalism plays a critical role in a free society and the Washington Post as the hometown paper of the capital city of the United States is especially important." Media moguls used to buy papers for political influence. Can big retailers be any different? However, for local retailers this underlines the need for you to have a social media strategy. You need to communicate with your shoppers and build their tr...

A thing that you notice about great retailers is how much credit they give their staff. While the big supermarkets project their credentials behind impressive (and often overstated) job creation numbers, collectively local shopkeepers match them. A reason society doesn't know this is perhaps the lack of a context for independents to-broadcast their success. Reading George Anders' inspiring book The Rare Find , published by Portfolio Penguin, a question springs to mind: What is the reward for local shopkeepers to recruit great staff? Anders writes about world leading talent and how it is unearthed. How is this relevant for small shops? And for their potential colleagues? Thinking about great retailers I have met, I think answers include how local shops help young staff develop, how first-employers keep track of their peoples' later career success and how shopkeepers nurture local superstars. Superstars with humble jobs like the janitor who President Kennedy met on a tour...