Sports Authority was ‘meaningless,’ says Ken Gart

I don't disagree much with Gart. But he misses one critical point about Amazon. Amazon has never made money on it's retail-style sales. Now that it has profit, that profit comes from cloud services (over 50%), digital content sales, and their devices. What this means is that Amazon INVESTORS are funding services that can't even last - but which contribute to the destruction of retailers like Sports Authority. People say "Wow, look at Amazon's great customer services". Except they are all money losers. It's an incredibly destructive type of competition. Public investors and retail marketers end up fight the wrong problem because no one stops and thinks it through. So it's no wonder they end up with wrong answers and a Sports Authority goes out of business. Here's my blog post adding up the Amazon numbers to try to understand what REALLY is going on rather than the myth Amazon PR puts out: http://atomicdirect.com/blog/uncategorized/amazon-retails-800-pound-gorillaor-crafty-coyote/