@BillHandelShow – ‘Tech Tuesday’ with Mike Dobuski

ABC News tech reporter Mike Dobuski  joins the show for ‘Tech Tuesday.’ Today, Mike talks about AMAZON PRIME DAYS ARE HERE!!!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mike Dubuski is the ABC News technology reporter, and Mike,
of course knows what's going on in the world hopefully.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Good morning, Mike, Good morning, guys. How are you? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good? I don't know if I gave you too much
credit and saying you know what's going on.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
But about all the world. But you know we're around,
right for.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Some of the world, I mean a small part of
the world. And when I mean all the world, I
mean in your sort of expertise. All right, let's start
with Amazon and Prime Day, which is really Prime Week,
which is on its way to become Prime Month. And
what's going on with that? You know, at some point

(00:39):
doesn't it get to diminishing returns?

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yeah, well, Amazon certainly doesn't, hope. So Amazon Prime Day
is ten years old this year. That's all started back
in twenty fifteen. Is a pretty modest online sale. Amazon
kind of trying to stake its claim in the middle
of the summer. They didn't want to compete with at
the time, the really dominant players in the space, the
target It's the Walmarts of the world, who usually held
big sales in the fall and the lead up to

(01:04):
the holidays. Amazon thought the middle of the summer is
a good place to distinguish ourselves to get people's attention,
and they've ridden that to huge success. It it originally expanded
into two days. Now it is a twice a year thing,
and this year, for the first time, it is a
four day long sale, really stretching the definition of day
by hosting a ninety six hour long sale on Amazon.

(01:24):
But even still, experts expect this to be a major
windfall for Amazon, there not slowing down. Adobe Analytics predicts
that online spending this week will surge to about twenty
three point eight billion dollars by the time that Prime
Day wraps up on Friday. But of course, the other
piece of this is that the popularity of Prime Day
has spawned a lot of similar sales from other retailers.

(01:47):
Walmart has Walmart Deals events, Target Circle Week is this week,
and Best Buy Black Friday in July is going on
as well. And there's some evidence to suggest that people
don't have it done a brand loyalty when it comes
to score a deal on Amazon versus one of its competitors.
A report from Numerator finds that thirty five percent of
Amazon Prime members also shopped online at Target last year,

(02:09):
same number for Walmart, and twelve percent also shopped online
at best Buy. So people don't really care where they're
getting a deal, they just want to save some money.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah, and I'm assuming that at some point, obviously these
folks have done all the surveys and studies because Amazon's Amazon.
But isn't it get to the point where there are
so that Prime Day, for example, is going to last
such a long period time, and it's twice and maybe
it'll be three times a year where people just kick
back and go, I'll wait, you know, Prime Day's coming

(02:39):
up next month, and I'll just hang loose and buy then,
and the website cannibalizes itself because of that.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
Yeah, I mean it's certainly a possibility. But even still
in the numbers, Prime Day has grown successfully every year, Right,
they make more money every Prime Day, So they're trying
out this new four day thing that we'll see if
that has any sort of diminishing returns. Again, twenty three
point eight billion dollars is a lot of money, but
it's not double what Amazon made last year during the

(03:09):
two day Prime Day sale, which was closer to like
fourteen billion dollars. Still huge, amounts of money, but you know,
it's not like they're they're doubling it every time they
expand the amount of time people have to shop. In addition, though,
Amazon kind of has to do stuff right we talked
about their competitors that are out there in the space
maybe stealing some of Amazon's thunder, Well, they kind of

(03:30):
have to do that because they don't want, you know,
Target to come along and steal their sort of you know, attention.
In addition to that, they're rolling out a lot of
sort of attention grabbing things to get people excited about
Prime Day. Lebron James was all over the commercials for this,
so like celebrity endorsements, influencers also making major advertisements for Amazon,

(03:50):
and recently they rolled out Rufus, which is an AI
shopping assistant. This is a chatbot that is built on
top of Amazon's large language model, which is designed to
answer questions about any products that might not have the
answer in the description. So you can ask questions like
what material is this backpack made out of? Or how
easy is this coffee maker to clean? That's kind of
what this is meant to do. Of course, we have

(04:12):
to say this every time we mentioned large language models
and artificial intelligence. It's an imperfect technology. It makes mistakes,
it makes things up. It hallucinates, so it's best to
double check whatever rufus tells you.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, and we've all been there. I used to pay
a lot of money to hallucinate. Hey, you've tried the
new ev from Volkswagen. Tell us about that.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yeah, So I was driving the id Buzz for the
last week. This is Volkswagen's all electric reimagining of the
micro bus from the sixties and the seventies. People associate
this with like woodstock and sixties counterculture and the big
flowery shirts and whatnot. At its core, that original vehicle, though,
was a mini van, right, it was a bus that
was micro The new one follows that same formula. It

(04:53):
has sliding doors, a bunch of seats that all fold down. Bill,
I moved apartments in the last week, and I threw
tables and bookshelves and bureaus and a bunch of boxes
in this thing and handled it totally fine. So it
does do the practical vehicle thing really well. And then
you drive it around and you see how many people
smile or flag you down in traffic or stop you
at a charging station, and it kind of becomes something

(05:15):
a little more than a mini van. People have a
lot of good memories associated with the old one, and
they want to tell you about it. Young people. Old
people just wanted to poke around this thing. The fact
that it was white and bright yellow probably helped that
a little bit. Of course, the trade off to all
of this is that it's sixty eight thousand dollars and that's.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
A lot of it. EXI do they have a place
for you to put your roach in?

Speaker 2 (05:39):
Its associated with that as well. I will say this,
The one that I was testing did not have a
sun roof, which meant that the you know, smoke conceivably
hypothetically didn't really have that many places to go.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah, it's are EV's going down in price because they
seem to me to be getting more and more expensive.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
So what we understand is that, yes, to a degree,
they are still on average more expensive than their gas counterparts,
about fifty five thousand dollars on average versus just under
fifty thousand dollars for the average new car in general,
but that used to be sixty six thousand dollars on
average for a new electric vehicle, only about two years ago,
so we are seeing that price come down. Volkswagen trying

(06:17):
to make a bit of a nostalgia play here, it
seems like so they are, you know, really kind of
leaning into the sixties sort of vibe here with some
fun colors, a lot of little Easter eggs throughout the vehicle.
We'll have to see if all that nostalgia pays off
for them, all.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Right, Mike, I always appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
You have a good day, you do the same ticket