Michael. I guess we've come a long way with
Amazon from them just selling books online. I am
curious though as to how we arrived at this space
where we're now talking about them potentially being a wireless
service provider. You know, I, I've got
two great books to recommend both written by your colleague
, Brad Stone, uh the Everything store and I
forgot the name of the second one, but I
own it. Um, it, it, it
, it tells you everything you need to know about
Amazon. They, they've gone through a transformation of
truly trying to be in our lives every minute of
every day. And I think that adding cell service
is similar to Google, remembering your credit card numbers
when you're, you know, filling out a form
or buying something online. Um They're just trying to
make the Amazon prime service as sticky as possible and
make it as hard as possible to quit. So
I think that they've, they've reckoned that if you
sign up for cell service with them, you're just
never gonna not be a prime member and they're gonna
make it valuable enough to keep people, I think
. Well, well, that's what I'm curious about
and by the way, you mentioned Brad Stone,
we should just give him a nice little plug.
Amazon unbound Michael. That was the the latest book
follow up. And at the rate, Amazon is
going, he'll have to write a third book maybe
within the next five or 10 years. I am
curious though about the cost proposition for Amazon. How
does this fit within the overall strategy with how they
spend? And I guess more importantly what and forgive
me if I get this wrong, they do seem
to be willing to sacrifice profitability on some of these
projects, at least in the shorter term. Um
So service has gotten super cheap as, as you
know, and, and you, you're barely old
enough to remember when it was super expensive. But
prior to 2000, you know, I was paying
100 and 50 bucks a month for one line and
for probably 60 minutes a month and I paid extra
for long distance and voice mail. Now, you
know, I have four phones for 1 50 unlimited
everything. So the service has gotten super cheap.
Um The, the way the law changed with making
numbers portable, I think that was 2002. They
require carriers to, to lease their lines, lease
their towers to anybody. So we've seen pop ups
like Mint Mobile and like consumer cellular. Those are
real companies, I think Mint was bought by Sprint
but, but they're real companies that were just resellers
. So Amazon has watched consumer cellular do this.
It's an independent company but they market through Target and
Walmart and I think Amazon saw the success because the
Target Walmart customer, those guys are not Amazon customers
. So I think Amazon wants to compete with that
last man standing. Let's call it old gray haired
guys. I, I am an Amazon customer but
who haven't figured out the internet yet and if they
can hook them through a cheaper cell phone service that's
really valuable. So I expect that they will subsidize
it not to the tune of, you know,
free, but probably to the tune of 10 bucks
a month. And if you're a value conscious customer
, that's a pretty good deal. So your$40
service becomes 30 I think they can pull that off
. Do you anticipate? Let's say they do that
. This does become, and we should point out
this is just based on Bloomberg or reporting based on
the sources that they've spoken to. I am curious
as to whether we may start to expect Amazon actually
start to inch up the price of its prime subscriber
. Um They, you know, they will if
they have to and, and, you know,
throughout the pandemic, um shipping costs started to go
up, uh gas prices went up, you know
, so we came out of shelter place, uh
and they didn't do anything with it. So I
think that they've probably kind of gotten things in balance
right now. I don't expect the price increase for
two or three more years and even then maybe 20
bucks a year, but the value is so great
that I don't think most consumers really care, think
that we're getting tremendous value. They will, if
they start losing customers, they'll keep price low.
And if they start growing and they continue to grow
, they'll raise price. So it's price elasticity.
Let's see what demand is. I am curious about
when you look at the strategy on this particular thing
. But overall, I guess since Andy Jazzy actually
assumed the CEO role here, do you think that
this kind of fits within the same ethos of what
Bezos Bezos would have done? Had he still been
there? I think Jessie is the Bob Chape of
Amazon so that it is not. Um I think
he's doing exactly what his predecessor told him to do
and he's not doing it as well and I expect
that when Bezos is back from his honeymoon, uh
Jas, he's got a real risk of being gone
and Bezos stepping back in. I don't think Jessie's
good at anything other than a Aws. So I
, I think he's really botching it badly. I
think they're doing a lot of stupid things like requiring
people to come back to the office. We Bush
hasn't required me to come back to the office,
obviously. Um You know, so, no,
I, I, I, I think that the
Bezos strategy though was go after big markets. So
they went after grocery, it's 800 year in the
US. They, they went after Pharma that 600
billion cell service is bigger, you know, so
the, the opportunity to, you know, cell
phone, cell service is global. Uh there's five
billion cell phones out there. So if that's a
way to hook a customer, I think that's really
smart and maybe it'll keep Jessie's job. Boy.
If he continues to push retail stores, he's gone --> .