Great question! The mentors get a lot of real experience and broaden their network in a way that directly improves their current jobs and future job prospects. So far, mentors use Merit to:
- Learn or improve their people skills by helping people with real problems and challenges
- Diversify their own network beyond folks at their job and existing referrals
- Learn about real people and problems beyond their own
Many of our mentors are senior individual contributors, who are interested in exploring management in a lightweight manner, or early managers who are looking to meet more folks and learn about more real-world scenarios. The experience of mentoring others directly helps them learn these skills and apply them to their real life.
Amazon.ca and Amazon.com accounted for about 10% of all e-commerce sales in Canada for 2019.
I wish i had some stats for the raw # of total packages/shipments, because that's where I think Amazon's marketshare would match the picture of "50% of every package"
Link I found for 2018 e-commerce net sales in Canada [0] has amazon and amazon.ca combined for 4.7b, costco at 1b, walmart 0.9, apple 0.79, the bay 0.47 etc.
So amazon eclipses the other other 7 competitors all on its own.
Walmart, Costco, The Bay all did more than a billion in revenue for 2019. Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Best Buy, Home Depot had more than 500 million and less than a billion.
They wouldn't be doing these numbers if the state of e-commerce was as "eye-watering awful" as you make it out to be.
These numbers are for the Canadian market which ended with about 40 billion in total "e-commerce" sales for 2019.
Online? Those are all great retailers in-store. But online? That’s their online revenue? I doubt it.
Home Depot advertises 2 day shipping but then waits a week before actually starting the clock on their shipping. At least here in Canada. Walmart is the same.
Let me tell you about ordering from Canadian tire online. I did this once. I chose in-store pickup. When I got to the service desk (which actually had an “online pickup” sign on it), and asked for my order, the staff looked at me like I was from Mars. And this was a showcase-store on Grandview here in Vancouver - not some backwater CDN tire off in Moose Jaw. Then they discovered that actually, they don’t have that item. The website said my order was ready to pick up, but they didn’t have it set aside and they didn’t even stock it and had no idea how this “online pickup” worked. So I asked for a refund. And they couldn’t do it! It’s a separate company and they didn’t even have my order in their system to be able to refund me! I asked them what I was supposed to do at that point, and the store manager (of the largest CDN tire store in vancouver) actually advised me to dispute the charge on my credit card and get the charge reversed!
Yes, that was their online sales revenue in 2019, unless you think giants like Wal Mart (with nearly 400 supercenter stores in Canada) and Costco are doing only 1 billion in brick and mortar sales.
These numbers are readily available in their financial statements (Wal Mart doesn't separate out Wal Mart Canada's numbers - I happen to be in the industry.
Your Canadian Tire anecdote sounds unbelievable unless it was many years ago.
Canadian Tire is one of the few Canadian stores in 2020 where can check store stock/inventory online down to the aisle of the store. They had already started implementing pickup lockers in their store before covid.
I've placed a few online orders with them and have never had any issues (including in store pickup).
FYI, they did close to $600 million in e-commerce sales in 2019.
Walmart, Loblaws, etc process same day grocery pickup online (and they did this before the pandemic).
The Canadian e-commerce experience is not some backwater that you proclaim it to be.
These numbers are readily available in their financial statements (Wal Mart doesn't separate out Wal Mart Canada's numbers - I happen to be in the industry.
That’s kind of my whole point - Canada is different. I read all sorts of accounts from Americans about how e-commerce and online retail in the US has matured and you can reliably order goods from lots of big retailers online and expect to get your goods on a predictable date. And that just hasn’t happened in Canada yet. Online retail here is still comprehensively awful. Amazon is the only online option that delivers predictably and on time.
Just within the last two years I’ve ordered from both Walmart and Home Depot and both of them have sat on my order for 2 weeks before actually shipping it. I’ve had Home Depots delivery courier actually throw a box of light bulbs across my yard onto my concrete steps. And yes, that CDN tire incident was about 2 years ago. IKEA wants $20 shipping to send me a box of screws. The only bright spot in any of this is grocery delivery as you point out. But even then, Save-on’s payment processor has glitched my orders on two occasions.
The Canadian e-commerce experience is not some backwater that you proclaim it to be.
It’s still about 10 years behind the US. I still see too many retailers who are basically charging what their US equivalents are + the shipping cost difference to traverse the CBSA moat. The big retailers here can’t get it together and the small retailers are still just arbitraging Canada’s weird retail import tariffs. Super high shipping costs, bungled and lost orders, and unpredictable and late delivery is still the norm outside Amazon, or at least it was in 2019. Hard to say now with c19.
I tried to use Canadian tire for I store pickup and it was the most awful thing - “ready next day” and after 5 days I had to go into a store to cancel my order, then order it on amazon for 5% more and it arrived the next day < 24 hours later. I will never attempt it again.
I'm in Toronto, so we have Skip (Skipthedishes) instead of GrubHub along with UberEats and Doordash
1.) Skip doesn't allow the restaurant to jack up the price, so to the customer the total cost is the same
2.) These companies toss out tons of coupon codes and referral codes that bring the overall cost down (sometimes even cheaper than ordering directly from the restaurant)
3.) In dense urban centers, a ten minute "drive" is way more challenging/time consuming/effort than it would be somewhere else. In fact, these services use bicycle couriers in these areas.
I'm curious as to how a basic app could replace the on demand delivery logistics / handle the volume that a platform like UberEats sends to restaurants ?
Maybe my urban area is different but restaurants here are doing 10+ orders per hour across all delivery channels. The bottleneck becomes the # of delivery couriers available and smartly assigning them to deliveries.
I agree with this. It's seems to me that it's much more than "hiring a few developers to build a basic app."
There's the cost of delivery personnel, and having enough delivery windows to be practical for customers.
It seems to me there are benefits from scale, and a large, aggregated platform that make delivery feasible for many restaurants.
Condominium in Ontario (Toronto is in Ontario) is a form of ownership, it had nothing to do with the physical form of the home.
You can own a condominimum townhouse (a row of single family homes with front yard, driveways, garage attached by common walls) or a condominium apartment (in say a 30 storey building with 10 parents per floor)
And yes, you can rent out a condominium apartment. Approx 60 % of the rental units in the Greater Toronto Area are condominium apartments.
Well they did bring fibre to the two existing developments in the Canary District. And for a far better price than than Canadians are used to with the big 3. I don't really see a lot of innovation, they were just able to sign a 10 year contract with Beanfield.
The Canary District is far from finished, so perhaps some of that infrastructure will be built out when it is completed.
Also, a lot of the developments they mentioned have yet to be completed (Monde, Waterfront Innovation Centre, Tridel's Aqualina/Aquavista) and aren't even in the "Canary District".
I had no idea this Google Express app existed (It's not available in my region of the world).
It's a shame they force you to use it, over just adding to a shopping list in Google Keep.
I was considering getting the Home Mini but now I'm not so sure (grocery list, weather check, and general help (timer/conversions) while cooking would have been my main usage)
I've used maybe 15 Android devices since it's inception. HTC, Samsung, Sony, Motorola, and "Google" (two Nexus devices and 1 Pixel).
If I had to choose I would take stock Android in terms of aesthetics, ten times out of ten.
However, over time Android has indeed taken MANY features from HTC, Motrola, Samsung and other OEMS and added them to vanilla android.
I know I'm forgetting a lot more but off the top of my head:
- multi-app support
- always on displays
- readibility
- night mode
- smart gestures
- Stamina mode which is now Doze on stock Android
- voice commands
- even things like Google Now (minus the smart assistant) to the left of the home screen, were actually provided earlier by OEMs (as a method to differentiate) like HTC's blinkfeed
- heck, the first stock Android devices, didn't even have smart dialers (HTC added that as part of their Sense dialer)
Samsung's Touchwiz looked terrible until the most recent incarnation (it's now called the Samsung Experience) and it did contain some bloat, namely with duplicate apps but it's always been much more feature packed than stock Android. Some of the features were not so great but a lot of them were and eventually Google copied them. You can say the same to a lesser extent for HTC, Sony and Motorola.
None of them? There is absolutely no question that these vendors tried some novel things that were later integrated within Android.
And if we need to talk about experience, I started with a G1 on Android 1.0, then G2, HTC Hero, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Glide, GS2, Nexus 4, GS3, Nexus 5, one other HTC that I can't remember the name of, Nexus 6p, GS8. I've tried a lot of devices, and I've rocked them all.
And through those with unique vendor additions, it was always a mix of ups and downs, and later to see many of those innovations being swept into the Android base.
I also question any claim that Android is "without frills, without skins". Android is 98% frills. With each iteration we have a new laundry list of frills. At the same time the core OS took until about version 7 to finally get basics like smooth scrolling down (something that vendor skins got to a much better state much earlier).
The Apple watch has tap to wake, I find myself accidentally triggering it a lot. If I cross my arms and I'm wearing short sleeves, I often accidentally start a stopwatch.
