tuesday, november 12 , 2019. the washington post eZ re A21
The tech news website CNET
first reported on the new loca-
tion, after the company pub-
lished job postings for it. One
opening encouraged job seekers
to join the company as “we
launch Amazon’s first grocery
store in Woodland Hills.” The
Wall Street Journal reported in
March that Amazon was eyeing
expansion in the grocery busi-
ness.
Food has long stymied the
online retail giant, in part be-
cause of the fickle nature of
consumer shopping habits and
the difficulty of predicting how
much fresh food to order and
when. The company scaled back
its Amazon Fresh delivery ser-
vice in some Zip codes in 20 17
after struggling to make it work.
The company has learned
from its acquisition of Whole
Foods that same year, however,
and has been rapidly expanding
its footprint in two-hour grocery
delivery. Recently, the company
also started including Fresh de-
livery free with Prime member-
ship.
The company has yet to break
through in the grocery business
with the Amazon brand. The
market is already crowded, and
consumers tend to have strong
preferences when it comes to
where they shop.
The new stores won’t be
Whole Foods, and, unlike Ama-
zon Go’s cashier-less checkout
systems, they’ll have conven-
tional checkout lanes. And un-
like the natural-food focus of
Whole Foods, the new locations
are likely to carry brand-name
sodas, cereals, sweets and more
to cater to a wider base of
customers.
Revenue from Amazon’s phys-
ical locations stalled in the last
quarter. In the three-month peri-
od that ended Sept. 30, sales
from grocery locations as well as
its bookstores and other bricks-
and-mortar b usinesses s lid 1 per-
cent to $4.2 billion. Amazon’s
overall sales in the quarter grew
24 percent to $70 billion.
[email protected]BY JAY GREENE
Amazon confirmed it plans to
open a new grocery store brand
in the Los Angeles area next
year, initiating the latest phase
of its bricks-and-mortar expan-
sion.
The move, which has been
rumored for months, will ex-
pand grocery offerings beyond
the upscale selection shoppers
typically find in Whole Foods
locations and its smaller ca-
shierless, convenience-like Am-
azon Go stores.
It’s the latest move by Ama-
zon into bricks and mortar, a
category it spurned for much of
its early existence as it funda-
mentally shifted the retail land-
scape and prompted more and
more shoppers to buy online
with its Prime fast-shipping
membership program and other
perks. The market research firm
eMarketer expects Amazon to
account for about 37.7 percent of
all U.S. e-commerce sales this
year.
Over the past few years, how-
ever, Amazon has become fo-
cused on physical retail as a
strategic initiative, including
opening pop-up stores, book-
stores and other locations.
Opening mainstream grocery
stores is a “natural evolution” f or
Amazon, UBS Securities analyst
Eric Sheridan wrote in a recent
report. The company could use
the locations of the new markets
as a distribution point for gro-
cery delivery, something it al-
ready does with Whole Foods
stores.
If Amazon makes delivery con-
tingent on being a member of its
lucrative Prime program, it
“could act as a tail wind for
Prime membership growth over
time,” Sheridan wrote.
(Amazon chief executive Jeff
Bezos owns The Washington
Post.)
The company plans to open its
new grocery store location in
Woodland Hills, Calif., just north
of Los Angeles, in 2020, Amazon
spokeswoman Pia Arthur said.Amazon grocery store
planned north of L.A.
been trending on social media
platforms.
Uber has long feared another
social media backlash o n the scale
of #DeleteUber. Warning against
potential risks in its stock market
filing in April, the company said
“if a campaign similar to #Dele-
teUber occurs... our revenue
would decline, and our business
would suffer.”
The company noted how the
earlier campaign led to d eletions,
further propelled by allegations of
discrimination and other reputa-
tional issues within the company.
“We believe that maintaining
and enhancing our reputation
and brand is critical to our ability
to attract and retain employees
and platform users,” the company
said in the filing.
[email protected]
[email protected]promoted sexual harassment and
a video surfaced of its then-CEO,
Travis Kalanick, lashing out at a
driver who complained about
dwindling returns on fares. Ka-
lanick was forced to publicly grap-
ple with his leadership shortcom-
ings before being forced out in
June 2017.
Khosrowshahi, the former CEO
of Expedia, was brought on the
same year. He was seen as a safe
choice who could r estore s tability.
Khosrowshahi was credited with
steering the company to its initial
public offering, though he has
been criticized since for lacking
the innovative spirit that pro-
pelled Uber to market d ominance.
An Uber spokesman declined a
request for a follow-up interview
with Khosrowshahi.
Since t he Axios interview aired,
the hashtag #boycottUber hasdom’s sovereign wealth fund, sits
on Uber’s b oard of directors.
Khosrowshahi on Sunday
called Rumayyan a “very con-
structive” board member.
“From a Saudi perspective,
they’re just like any other share-
holder now. We’re a public compa-
ny,” h e said.
The weekend incident is the
latest in a string of public rela-
tions missteps for the company,
which has struggled to retain its
user base since #DeleteUber in- That movement, kicked off
by allegations that the ride-hail-
ing service had disrupted a taxi
strike in protest of President
Trump’s immigration ban, led to
hundreds of thousands of dele-
tions and fed many directly to the
app for r ival Lyft.
In the following months, Uber
faced allegations that its culture
membered by a team of 15 agents
inside the Saudi Consulate in Is-
tanbul just over a year a go.
The Saudi royal family denied
coordinating the killing. Still, in
November, the CIA concluded
that Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman ordered the assassina-
tion, based on audio recordings,
intercepted phone calls and other
intelligence.
The State Department later
classified the killing as a human
rights abuse, and Saudi prosecu-
tors charged 11 people in the slay-
ing. They plan to seek the death
penalty for five of the accused.
Uber stock has hit record lows
since the c ompany went public six
months ago. It reported a $1.2 bil-
lion loss in the l atest quarter.
Saudi Arabia is the company’s
fifth biggest shareholder, and Ya-
sir al-Rumayyan, head of the king-tinued, “The CIA suggested that
the crown prince had a role in
ordering the assassination. That’s
a different thing — you didn’t
intentionally run someone over.”
(The National Transportation
Safety Board will meet Nov. 19 to
rule on a probable cause in the
crash.)
About an hour later, Khosrow-
shahi contacted Axios to clarify
his comments on Khashoggi.
“I said something in the mo-
ment that I do not believe. When it
comes to Jamal Khashoggi, his
murder was reprehensible and
should not be forgotten or ex-
cused,” he wrote in an email, ac-
cording to the publication.
U.S. intelligence has said that
Khashoggi, a Washington Post
contributing columnist and
prominent critic of the Saudi gov-
ernment, was strangled and dis-BY DEANNA PAUL
AND FAIZ SIDDIQUI
Uber chief executive Dara
Khosrowshahi called the slaying
of Jamal Khashoggi “a serious
mistake” by the Saudi govern-
ment in an interview with Axios
on Sunday, comparing it to the
crash involving the tech compa-
ny’s self-driving car that killed a
pedestrian last year.
“It’s a serious mistake. We’ve
made mistakes, too — with self-
driving, and we stopped driving
and we’re recovering from that
mistake,” he said in the episode of
“A xios on HBO.” “ I think that peo-
ple make mistakes; it doesn’t
mean they can never be forgiven. I
think t hey have taken it seriously.”
The car crash was caused by a
bad sensor, the interviewer re-
minded Khosrowshahi, then con-
Uber CEO calls Khashoggi killing ‘mistake’ and compares it to crashing car
BY ANNA FIFIELD
AND LYRIC LI
BEIJING — China’s “Double 11”
day makes the United States’s
Black Friday and Cyber Monday
look tame. In the first 68 seconds
of Nov. 1 1, Chinese c onsumers had
spent $1 billion snapping up bar-
gains online. Within the first hour,
they’d spent $14.3 billion — about
half the total recorded last year
during the Thanksgiving shop-
ping season i n the United States.
Even though the Chinese econ-
omy is flagging — or perhaps be-
cause the Chinese economy is
flagging — consumers are eager
for bargains on the most frenzied
shopping day of the year.
“There were so many discounts
available that it makes me feel
that I have to buy something, or I
would be missing out big-time,”
said Zhang Hui, 31, w ho works at a
public-relations firm in Beijing.
She snapped u p a pair of boots and
an overcoat on Ta obao for a total
of $142.
Nov. 11 has long been celebrat-
ed in Asia as “singles’ day” —
because the 11/11 date looks like
four singles — and has been com-
mandeered in Japan and South
Korea by Pocky and Peppero, re-
spectively, the makers of choco-
late sticks that look like ones. It is
marketed as a kind of anti-Valen-
tine’s Day, where singles can
spend o n themselves.
China began marking the day
in the 1990s, when university stu-
dents celebrated being single on
the day, known here as “Double
11.”
But in 2009, e-commerce giant
Alibaba started marketing it as
the best day of the year to go c razy
on its shopping websites, Ta obao
and Tmall. Many people now
stock up on household goods in
particular, buying a year’s worth
of shampoo or toilet paper on Nov.
11, when online retailers offer dis-
counts and coupons.
“Our goal is to stimulate con-
sumption demand and support
lifestyle upgrades in China
through new brands and prod-
ucts,” Fan Jiang, president of Ta o-
bao and Tmall, said in the lead-up
to the shopping day.
The Chinese economy has been
cooling markedly in recent years,
with growth slowing to a 30-year
low of 6.2 percent, according to
the most recent official statistics.
To whip up excitement for this
year’s shopping frenzy, Alibaba
had American singer Ta ylor Swift
headline its 11.11 Countdown
Gala, which was broadcast live on
television. Swift performed three
songs in a Te chnicolor extrava-
ganza at a S hanghai stadium.
The numbers racked up on Chi-
na’s biggest shopping day of the
year are mind-boggling.
Alibaba said it hoped Ta obao,
its main shopping portal where
online store owners offer their
wares, would attract more than
500 million users on Nov. 11, or
100 million more than last year.
Alibaba’s cloud computing sys-
tem, Aliyun, was processing
540,000 transactions per second
at o ne point on Monday morning.
Before 8 a.m., Alibaba’s logis-
tics arm had dispatched more
than 100 million packages of pre-
ordered goods. The State Post Bu-
reau said it expected to handle2.8 billion packages this week, up
a quarter from last year. That’s
two packages for every single per-
son in China.
Some small-store owners make
a large percentage of their annual
sales o n Nov. 1 1. One retailer, Nan-
jiren, sold 166,119 four-packs of
men’s underwear, offered at less
than half price at $ 7, b y 4 p.m.
Three Squirrels sold 800,000
sets of assorted nuts — macada-
mias, cashews and acorns, with
sunflower seeds — by cutting the
price f rom $7 to $4.
More than 12 million people
watched American reality TV star
Kim Kardashian live-streaming
with Chinese influencer Viya on
Tmall on Thursday to promote
her KKW beauty line. She sold
15,000 bottles of perfume in sec-
onds, a ccording to Alibaba.
Even secondhand car dealers
were getting in on the act, al-
though the discounts were not as
steep. One was offering a Singles
Day discount of $30 off a $113,000
Porsche Cayenne SUV.
By 5 p.m., Alibaba’s measure ofsales — gross merchandise vol-
ume — had surpassed the 2018
day total of $30.8 billion. By com-
parison, American retailers sold
$7.9 billion worth of goods on
Cyber Monday last year.
Cathy Tu, 45, an education con-
sultant, dropped more than $700
on Ta obao in the first hour of
Singles Day. She bought Beats X
earphones by Dr. Dre, Givenchy
perfume and skin-care products
for herself, baseball caps and a
scarf for her teenage daughter,
and toilet paper, toothpaste and
other h ousehold goods.
“Daily necessities are a real bar-
gain at Singles Day sales: I used
store-exclusive coupons and
across-the-platform discounts,
and saved extra money on preor-
ders,” Tu said while showing her
shopping list on her phone.
“Some people are shopping out
of peer pressure or obsessive-
compulsive habits, but I am not; I
buy because I really need them,”
she said.
a [email protected]
[email protected]In China, online shoppers shatter records on 11/11
agence France-Presse/getty Images
Taylor Swift performs at a festival Sunday for the “Double 11 ” shopping day in Shanghai. Online sales
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