Two telling news reports today about retailers from metropolitan Seattle. First:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Costco Wholesale Corp warned on Wednesday that its quarterly profit would miss current Wall Street targets because of soaring energy costs and other inflationary pressures, sending shares of the No. 1 U.S. warehouse club operator down as much as 13.5 percent.
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Amazon.com said Wednesday that quarterly earnings more than doubled, showing that the online retail giant is still able to put up strong sales numbers despite the slowing world economy.
Costco had been the one really big major bricks-and-mortar retailer not to be hurt by the economic troubles. Not anymore. And all this takes me back to 1999 and 2000 and Alan Abelson’s series of Barron’s columns (not available online, as far as I can tell) confidently predicting that Amazon had no business model and would soon spend itself into oblivion. So maybe this Internet thing isn’t a fad.