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
57
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.
With available high technologies providing user experience, retailers can get more potential buyers.
选项
答案
L
解析
[L]段指出,零售商需要通过移动手机终端和网站提供用户体验,实现买家与订单的无缝连接。题干中的available high technologies是对定位句中mobile apps and websites的概括总结;potential buyers对应原文中的a would-be purchaser,故选[L]。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/skP7777K
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
A、Itsavestime.B、Itincreasesparkingcapacity.C、Itensuresdrivers’safety.D、Itreducescardamage.B
A、Lastweek.B、Threeweeksago.C、Twomonthsago.D、Threeyearsago.B由选项可知,此题考查时问。录音详细说明了购物中心的情况:花费三年打造,终于在三个星期前正式营业,比预期晚了两个月,故
A、Hostingatelevisionshow.B、Reviewinganewbiography.C、Interviewingamoviestar.D、Discussingteenagerolemodels.A从选项预测本
A、Bodyclock.B、Educationquality.C、Mobiledevice.D、Lifequality.A录音中段提到,PaulKelley的建议是基于对生物钟的深入了解,而生物钟对人类的注意力、清醒程度和工作能力起决定作
中国目前拥有世界上最大最快的高速铁路网。高铁列车的运行速度还将继续提升,更多的城市将修建高铁站。高铁大大缩短了人们出行的时间。相对飞机而言,高铁列车的突出优势在于准时,因为基本不受天气或交通管制的影响。高铁极大地改变了中国人的生活方式。如今,它已经成了很多
中国北方的大部分地区,包括北京在内,常被雾霾(heavysmog)——一种空气颗粒污染(particulatematterairpollution)——所笼罩。长期接触空气中的细小颗粒,尤其是在浓度极高的情况下,会增加患呼吸系统疾病(respirat
中国吉祥图案(auspiciouspattern)指一些在中国广为流传的、蕴含吉祥意义的图案,如龙、凤(phoenix)、鱼、桃、松树等。在一些节日或喜庆的日子,人们都喜欢用这些图案装饰自己的房间和物品,以表示对幸福生活的向往。中国的吉祥图案内容非常广泛
古话
符号
全球化是描述全球社会时使用的一个术语,即在这个社会中,世界上某一个区域在经济、政治、环境、文化方面发生的事件会很快对世界其他地区的人们产生影响。全球化是通信、运输、信息技术发展的结果。它体现了个体、社区、公司以及各国政府间日益增长的经济、政治、科技和文
随机试题
A、尿中可查到结核杆菌,仅可发现少量白细胞B、尿中可查到结核杆菌,尿液呈酸性,有膀胱刺激症状C、继发于肺结核D、全身结核症状临床肾结核的特点是______。
十二经别的生理功能主要是
处方的前记包括()
标准马歇尔试件质量按1200g计,1200g乘以油石比即为所需沥青的质量。()
下列哪一项具有学生行为问题的特征?( )
气象条件及其变化不仅影响人的生理健康,对心理情绪的影响也非常明显。有利的气象条件使人情绪高涨、心情舒畅;不利的气象条件使人情绪低落、懒惰无力,甚至导致心理及精神病态和行为异常。研究表明,高温、高湿、阴雨以及一些异常天气事件,都不利于人的心理健康。世卫组织的
简述行政立法与权力机关立法的区别。
Onlybyshoutingatthetopofhervoice,______.
A、Narrowdownthetopicofherarticle.B、Readandreviseheressay.C、Providesomefactsforheropinion.D、Givehersomeadvic
近年来,越来越多的中国学生赴美留学。去年,美国进行了一项针对高校留学生的调查研究。该调查表明,2011—2012学年间来自中国的高校留学生总人数超过了19万,这使得中国连续三年成为美国最大的留学生来源国(senderofstudents)。而在2002
最新回复
(
0
)