首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
The Amazon-Walmart Showdown That Explains the Modern Economy [A] With Amazon buying the high-end grocery chain Whole Foods, some
The Amazon-Walmart Showdown That Explains the Modern Economy [A] With Amazon buying the high-end grocery chain Whole Foods, some
admin
2020-11-04
61
问题
The Amazon-Walmart Showdown That Explains the Modern Economy
[A] With Amazon buying the high-end grocery chain Whole Foods, something retail analysts have known for years is now apparent to everyone: The online retailer is on a collision course with Walmart to try to be the predominant seller of pretty much everything you buy. Each one is trying to become more like the other—Walmart by investing heavily in its technology, Amazon by opening physical bookstores and now buying physical supermarkets. But this is more than a battle between two business titans. Their rivalry sheds light on the shifting economics of nearly every major industry.
[B] That in turn has been a boon(福音)for consumers but also has more worrying implications for jobs, wages and inequality. To understand this epic shift, you can look not just to the grocery business, but also to my closet, and to another retail acquisition announced Friday morning.
[C] Men’s dress clothing, mine included, can be a little boring. Like many male office workers, I lean toward clothes that are sharp but not at all showy. Nearly every weekday, I wear a dress shirt that is either light blue, white or has some subtle check pattern, usually paired with slacks and a blazer. The description alone could make a person doze. I used to buy my dress shirts from a Hong Kong tailor. They fit perfectly, but ordering required an awkward meeting with a visiting salesman in a hotel suite. They took six weeks to arrive, and they cost around $ 120 each, which adds up fast when you need to buy eight or 10 a year to keep up with wear and tear(破损). Then several years ago I realized that a company called Bonobos was making shirts that fit me nearly as well, that were often sold three for $ 220, or $ 73 each, and that would arrive in two days.
[D] Bonobos became my main shirt provider, at least until recently, when I learned that Amazon was trying to get into the upper-end men’s shirt game. The firm’s " Buttoned Down" line, offered to Amazon Prime customers, uses high-quality fabric and is a good value at $ 40 for basic shirts. I bought a few: they don’t fit me quite as well as the Bonobos, but I do prefer the stitching(针脚). I’m on the fence as to which company will provide my next shirt order, and a new deal this week makes it interesting: Walmart is buying Bonobos. Walmart’s move might seem a strange decision. It is not a retailer people typically turn to for $ 88 summer weight shirts in Ruby Wynwood Plaid or $ 750 Italian wool suits. Then again, Amazon is best known as a reseller of goods made by others.
[E] Walmart and Amazon have had their sights on each other for years, each aiming to be the dominant seller of goods—however consumers of the future want to buy them. It increasingly looks like that " however" is a hybrid of physical stores and online-ordering channels, and each company is coming at the goal from a different starting point.
[F] Amazon is the dominant player in online sales, and is particularly strong among affluent consumers in major cities. It is now experimenting with physical bookstores and groceries as it looks to broaden its reach. Walmart has thousands of stores that sell hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods. It is particularly strong in suburban and rural areas and among low- and middle-income consumers, but it’s playing catch-up with online sales and affluent urbanites.
[G] Why are these two mega-retailers both trying to sell me shirts? The short answer is because they both want to sell everything. More specifically, Bonobos is known as an innovator in exactly this type of hybrid of online and physical store sales. Its website and online customer service are excellent, and it operates stores in major cities where you can try on garments and order items to be shipped directly. Because all the actual inventory is centralized, the stores themselves can occupy minimal square footage. So the acquisition may help Walmart build expertise in the very areas where it is trying to gain on Amazon. You can look at the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods through the same lens. The grocery business has a whole different set of challenges from the types of goods that Amazon has specialized in: you can’t store a steak or a banana the way you do books or toys. And people want to be able to make purchases and take them home on the spur of the moment.
[H] Just as Walmart is using Bonobos to get access to higher-end consumers and a more technologically savvy way of selling clothes, Amazon is using Whole Foods to get the expertise and physical presence it takes to sell fresh foods. But bigger dimensions of the modern economy also come into play.
[I] The apparel business has long been a highly competitive industry in which countless players could find a niche(商机). Any insight that one shirt-maker developed could be rapidly copied by others, and consumer prices reflected the retailer’s real estate costs and branding approach as much as anything. That helps explain why there are thousands of options worldwide for someone who wants a decent-quality men’s shirt. In that world, any shirt-maker that tried to get too big rapidly faced diminishing returns. It would have to pay more and more to lease the real estate for far-flung stores, and would have to outbid competitors to hire all the experienced shirt-makers. The expansion wouldn’t offer any meaningful cost savings and would entail a lot more headaches trying to manage it all.
[J] But more and more businesses in the modern economy, rather than reflecting those diminishing returns to scale, show positive returns to scale: The biggest companies have a huge advantage over smaller players. That tends to tilt markets toward a handful of players or even a monopoly, rather than an even playing field with countless competitors.
[K] The most extreme example of this would be the software business, where a company can invest bottomless sums in a piece of software, but then sell it to each additional customer for practically nothing. The apparel industry isn’t that extreme—the price of making a shirt is still linked to the cost of fabric and the workers to do the stitching—but it is moving in that direction. And that helps explain why Walmart and Amazon are so eager to put a shirt on my back.
[L] Already, retailers need to figure out how to manage sophisticated supply chains connecting Southeast Asia with stores in big American cities so that they rarely run out of product. They need mobile apps and websites that offer a seamless user experience so that nothing stands between a would-be purchaser and an order. Larger companies that are good at supply chain management and technology can spread those more-or-less fixed costs around more total sales, enabling them to keep prices lower than a niche player and entrench their advantage.
[M] These positive returns to scale could become even more pronounced. Perhaps in the future, rather than manufacture a bunch of shirts in Indonesia and Malaysia and ship them to the United States to be sold one at a time to urban office workers, a company will have a robot manufacture shirts to my specifications somewhere nearby.
[N] If that’s the future of clothing, and quite a few companies are working on just that, apparel will become a landscape of high fixed costs and enormous returns to scale. The handful of companies with the very best shirt-making robots will win the market, and any company that can’t afford to develop shirt-making robots, or isn’t very good at it, might find itself left in the cold.
Nowadays, apparel is probably produced in developing countries and then transported back to the US for the white collars.
选项
答案
M
解析
[M]段指出,规模效益显著。当前,在印度尼西亚和马来西亚等国家生产的服装被运到美国后卖给城市中的办公室职员。题干中的developing countries是对Indonesia和Malaysia的概括;white collars对应原文中的urban office workers,故选[M]。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/okP7777K
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
随着中国经济的快速发展,汉语开始逐步在世界范围内升温。来自国家汉办(theOfficeofChineseLanguage)的数据显示,目前除中国之外,全球学习、使用汉语的人数已逾1亿人。已经有60多个国家通过颁布法令政令等方式将汉语教学纳入国民教育
A、Tapthe"X"ontheleftsideofthenotification.B、Taptheconfirmationmessage.C、Tapunsubscribe.D、Tapsubscribe.C
A、Smallcompanies.B、Industrialists.C、Tradeunions.D、Theyoungergeneration.B短文提到,工业家们并不反对政府这些计划,他们承认,缩减工作时间会帮助他们减少成本。由此可推知,工
A、9%.B、16%.C、30%.D、40%.D四个选项均涉及百分比,可以预测应该跟数字比例有关。讲座介绍了五种不同的听的方式,并举例说明了这些方式如何在不同条件下使用。讲座开头提到“一般人们会把40%的交际时间用来听”,因此D项“40%”为正确答
中国将削减煤炭消费量,以减少空气污染。关于有效利用煤炭的2015~2020年行动计划表明了中国使用绿色能源的努力和目标。减少煤炭消费量将涉及淘汰落后产能(outdatedproductioncapacity),并使用更清洁的能源,如核能、风能和太阳能。
生态环境
基本生活消费品
青藏铁路是世界上最高最长的高原铁路,全长1,956公里,其中有960公里在海拔4,000多米之上,是连接西藏和中国其他地区的第一条铁路。由于铁路穿越世界上最脆弱的生态系统,在建设期间和建成后都采取了生态保护措施,以确保其成为一条“绿色铁路”。青藏铁路大大缩
J此处需填入与socially(社交上)并列的副词,说明这些对同龄人说“不”的孩子更不愿意参加什么样的活动,academically“学术上”与socially补充说明allaround,故正确。
随机试题
患者,女性,25岁。颜面和双下肢浮肿伴少尿5个月。查血压140/95mmHg,尿蛋白(+++),尿中红细胞(++),Hb105g/L,胆固醇10.2mmol/L,白蛋白21g/L,补体C3下降,Cr145μmol/L。为确诊,应首选下列哪项检查
N0代表_______,M0代表_______。
医疗机构开展诊疗活动必须符合的条件是( )。
A、热证B、表证C、实证D、虚证E、寒证惊悸,临床上多见于
公路土工合成材料垂直渗透性能试验采用的是恒水头法。()
()是选择和保持能够使公司利润迅速增长的业务
以下5题基于以下共同题干:一座塑料大棚中有6块大小相同的长方形菜池子,按照从左到右的次序依次排列为:1、2、3、4、5和6号,而且1号与6号不相邻。大棚中恰好需要种6种蔬菜:Q、L、H、X、S和Y。每块菜池子只能种植其中的一种。种植安排必须符合以下条
Whenspeakingaboutsciencetoscientists,thereisonethingthatcanbesaidthatwillalmostalwaysraisetheirindignation,
Afirewallisa(67)systemdesignedto(68)anorganization’snetworkagainstthreats.
Apaper,Anatomy(剖析)ofaLargeScaleSocialSearchEngine,layingoutastrategyforsocialsearchhasbeengettingagooddea
最新回复
(
0
)