2019年6月8日
Walmart explains why it isn't racing to close its biggest gap with Amazon on next-day delivery 沃尔玛解释为什么它不会在第二天的交付中缩小与亚马逊的最大差距
Walmart and Amazon are going head-to-head in a battle to win over customers with free next-day shipping. That’s about 50 times the number of products that Walmart is offering for next-day delivery. Walmart is offering about 220,000 items for next-day delivery to start, and plans to eventually add another couple hundred thousand items.
Walmart e-commerce CEO Marc Lore suggested that it’s too expensive to offer everything under the sun for next-day delivery. “It’s a trade-off,” he said. “After you get past the top, let’s say, hundreds of thousands – or top million SKUs – with overnight or next-day delivery, it gets exponentially more expensive.”
“There’s limited pool of dollars and you have to decide where to invest in the value prop,” he said. “Do you invest beyond the top 80% of sales? Do you go for speed there? Or do you take those dollars and put it into same-day delivery of grocery?… So that’s sort of the trade we’ve made and that’s how we’ve differentiated the value.”
Amazon said in April that it would shorten its two-day-shipping promise for Prime customers to one day. Amazon’s Prime program costs $US119 annually. Three weeks later, Walmart launched free next-day shipping on minimum purchases of $US35. The service doesn’t require any membership fees. Walmart has said that its next-day shipping offer will be available to 75% of US consumers by the end of the year, and that the program will keep expanding next year.
Starbucks is plotting the debut of a new Unicorn Frappuccino-style beverage called the Tie-Dye Frappuccino
星巴克正在策划一款名为Tie-Dye Frappuccino的新型独角兽星冰乐风格饮料
Starbucks has a new Unicorn Frappuccino-esque drink in the works, as the coffee giant attempts another viral moment this summer. Starbucks gave employees a heads up that the Tie-Dye Frappuccino would be hitting menus on July 10.
Starbucks declined to comment on the Tie-Dye Frappuccino and the company has not yet shared the Tie-Dye Frappuccino ingredients with in-store workers, so it is not quite clear what the drink will taste like.
Starbucks has generally pulled back from Frappuccinos, including cancelling Frappuccino Happy Hour in summer 2018 due to declining sales. Instead, the chain has focused on its cold beverage line up more generally. However, the coffee giant has continued to dabble in extremely limited, Instagrammable Frappuccinos.
The mother of all Instagram Frappuccinos is, of course, the Unicorn Frappuccino. Available for just a few days in April 2017, the drink instantly went viral and sold out. However, some employees are already bracing for the impact of the drink once it hits stores. Frappuccinos can be annoying and time-consuming to make – especially when hoards of customers are clamoring to get their aesthetically-pleasing drink.
NASA is opening the space station to $35,000-a-night visits 美国宇航局正在开放空间站，每晚35,000美元
NASA rolled out a new, multi-part plan on Friday that would dramatically open the doors of International Space Station (ISS) to commercial companies, facilities, and even private astronauts. The agency said it’s looking to boost its offerings to companies so that “innovation and ingenuity can accelerate a thriving commercial economy in low-Earth orbit.”
One big change in NASA’s five-part vision is to enable “private astronauts to conduct approved commercial and marketing activities on the space station.” NASA now says it will allow private astronauts – two per year – to stay up to 30 days each on the space station. The conditions: They have to get there via a commercial US spacecraft, such as SpaceX’s or Boeing’s upcoming vehicles, and pay $US35,000 per day to cover for NASA’s life support, communications, and other expenses (like $US50 per gigabyte of data).
Garriott is one of seven private astronauts who have visited the ISS, and only because Russia was willing to take them. A decade ago, he said, NASA aggressively resisted their presence on the government-run facility. But the agency couldn’t prevent private citizens’ stays on the ISS due to international agreements and conventions.
Garriott believes the commercialization of space will help accelerate research required to send astronauts into deep space on extended missions, while also improving the amenities on the ISS.
One issue is that NASA has been asked by the Trump administration to return humans to the moon in the 2020s and establish a permanent base there – but the government has yet to grant the agency enough money to achieve that herculean task. Meanwhile, NASA continues to pay about $US3-$US4 billion a year to maintain and operate its space station.
NASA considered pursuing a full commercialization of the space station in the mid 2020s – in other words, simply handing the ISS over to companies – but the agency didn’t sense enough demand to make that happen. By opening up the ISS to some more commercial activity but covering most operating expenses, the agency may instead be able to justify its ongoing expenditures for the ISS and work toward getting the added budget it needs to reach the moon.
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