Speaker 1: Mike Dubuski is the ABC News technology reporter, and Mike,
Speaker 1: of course knows what's going on in the world hopefully.
Speaker 2: Good morning, Mike, Good morning, guys. How are you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Good? I don't know if I gave you too much
Speaker 1: credit and saying you know what's going on.
Speaker 2: But about all the world. But you know we're around,
Speaker 2: right for.
Speaker 1: Some of the world, I mean a small part of
Speaker 1: the world. And when I mean all the world, I
Speaker 1: mean in your sort of expertise. All right, let's start
Speaker 1: with Amazon and Prime Day, which is really Prime Week,
Speaker 1: which is on its way to become Prime Month. And
Speaker 1: what's going on with that? You know, at some point
Speaker 1: doesn't it get to diminishing returns?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, Amazon certainly doesn't, hope. So Amazon Prime Day
Speaker 2: is ten years old this year. That's all started back
Speaker 2: in twenty fifteen. Is a pretty modest online sale. Amazon
Speaker 2: kind of trying to stake its claim in the middle
Speaker 2: of the summer. They didn't want to compete with at
Speaker 2: the time, the really dominant players in the space, the
Speaker 2: target It's the Walmarts of the world, who usually held
Speaker 2: big sales in the fall and the lead up to
Speaker 2: the holidays. Amazon thought the middle of the summer is
Speaker 2: a good place to distinguish ourselves to get people's attention,
Speaker 2: and they've ridden that to huge success. It it originally expanded
Speaker 2: into two days. Now it is a twice a year thing,
Speaker 2: and this year, for the first time, it is a
Speaker 2: four day long sale, really stretching the definition of day
Speaker 2: by hosting a ninety six hour long sale on Amazon.
Speaker 2: But even still, experts expect this to be a major
Speaker 2: windfall for Amazon, there not slowing down. Adobe Analytics predicts
Speaker 2: that online spending this week will surge to about twenty
Speaker 2: three point eight billion dollars by the time that Prime
Speaker 2: Day wraps up on Friday. But of course, the other
Speaker 2: piece of this is that the popularity of Prime Day
Speaker 2: has spawned a lot of similar sales from other retailers.
Speaker 2: Walmart has Walmart Deals events, Target Circle Week is this week,
Speaker 2: and Best Buy Black Friday in July is going on
Speaker 2: as well. And there's some evidence to suggest that people
Speaker 2: don't have it done a brand loyalty when it comes
Speaker 2: to score a deal on Amazon versus one of its competitors.
Speaker 2: A report from Numerator finds that thirty five percent of
Speaker 2: Amazon Prime members also shopped online at Target last year,
Speaker 2: same number for Walmart, and twelve percent also shopped online
Speaker 2: at best Buy. So people don't really care where they're
Speaker 2: getting a deal, they just want to save some money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm assuming that at some point, obviously these
Speaker 1: folks have done all the surveys and studies because Amazon's Amazon.
Speaker 1: But isn't it get to the point where there are
Speaker 1: so that Prime Day, for example, is going to last
Speaker 1: such a long period time, and it's twice and maybe
Speaker 1: it'll be three times a year where people just kick
Speaker 1: back and go, I'll wait, you know, Prime Day's coming
Speaker 1: up next month, and I'll just hang loose and buy then,
Speaker 1: and the website cannibalizes itself because of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's certainly a possibility. But even still
Speaker 2: in the numbers, Prime Day has grown successfully every year, Right,
Speaker 2: they make more money every Prime Day, So they're trying
Speaker 2: out this new four day thing that we'll see if
Speaker 2: that has any sort of diminishing returns. Again, twenty three
Speaker 2: point eight billion dollars is a lot of money, but
Speaker 2: it's not double what Amazon made last year during the
Speaker 2: two day Prime Day sale, which was closer to like
Speaker 2: fourteen billion dollars. Still huge, amounts of money, but you know,
Speaker 2: it's not like they're they're doubling it every time they
Speaker 2: expand the amount of time people have to shop. In addition, though,
Speaker 2: Amazon kind of has to do stuff right we talked
Speaker 2: about their competitors that are out there in the space
Speaker 2: maybe stealing some of Amazon's thunder, Well, they kind of
Speaker 2: have to do that because they don't want, you know,
Speaker 2: Target to come along and steal their sort of you know, attention.
Speaker 2: In addition to that, they're rolling out a lot of
Speaker 2: sort of attention grabbing things to get people excited about
Speaker 2: Prime Day. Lebron James was all over the commercials for this,
Speaker 2: so like celebrity endorsements, influencers also making major advertisements for Amazon,
Speaker 2: and recently they rolled out Rufus, which is an AI
Speaker 2: shopping assistant. This is a chatbot that is built on
Speaker 2: top of Amazon's large language model, which is designed to
Speaker 2: answer questions about any products that might not have the
Speaker 2: answer in the description. So you can ask questions like
Speaker 2: what material is this backpack made out of? Or how
Speaker 2: easy is this coffee maker to clean? That's kind of
Speaker 2: what this is meant to do. Of course, we have
Speaker 2: to say this every time we mentioned large language models
Speaker 2: and artificial intelligence. It's an imperfect technology. It makes mistakes,
Speaker 2: it makes things up. It hallucinates, so it's best to
Speaker 2: double check whatever rufus tells you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we've all been there. I used to pay
Speaker 1: a lot of money to hallucinate. Hey, you've tried the
Speaker 1: new ev from Volkswagen. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I was driving the id Buzz for the
Speaker 2: last week. This is Volkswagen's all electric reimagining of the
Speaker 2: micro bus from the sixties and the seventies. People associate
Speaker 2: this with like woodstock and sixties counterculture and the big
Speaker 2: flowery shirts and whatnot. At its core, that original vehicle, though,
Speaker 2: was a mini van, right, it was a bus that
Speaker 2: was micro The new one follows that same formula. It
Speaker 2: has sliding doors, a bunch of seats that all fold down. Bill,
Speaker 2: I moved apartments in the last week, and I threw
Speaker 2: tables and bookshelves and bureaus and a bunch of boxes
Speaker 2: in this thing and handled it totally fine. So it
Speaker 2: does do the practical vehicle thing really well. And then
Speaker 2: you drive it around and you see how many people
Speaker 2: smile or flag you down in traffic or stop you
Speaker 2: at a charging station, and it kind of becomes something
Speaker 2: a little more than a mini van. People have a
Speaker 2: lot of good memories associated with the old one, and
Speaker 2: they want to tell you about it. Young people. Old
Speaker 2: people just wanted to poke around this thing. The fact
Speaker 2: that it was white and bright yellow probably helped that
Speaker 2: a little bit. Of course, the trade off to all
Speaker 2: of this is that it's sixty eight thousand dollars and that's.
Speaker 1: A lot of it. EXI do they have a place
Speaker 1: for you to put your roach in?
Speaker 2: Its associated with that as well. I will say this,
Speaker 2: The one that I was testing did not have a
Speaker 2: sun roof, which meant that the you know, smoke conceivably
Speaker 2: hypothetically didn't really have that many places to go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's are EV's going down in price because they
Speaker 1: seem to me to be getting more and more expensive.
Speaker 2: So what we understand is that, yes, to a degree,
Speaker 2: they are still on average more expensive than their gas counterparts,
Speaker 2: about fifty five thousand dollars on average versus just under
Speaker 2: fifty thousand dollars for the average new car in general,
Speaker 2: but that used to be sixty six thousand dollars on
Speaker 2: average for a new electric vehicle, only about two years ago,
Speaker 2: so we are seeing that price come down. Volkswagen trying
Speaker 2: to make a bit of a nostalgia play here, it
Speaker 2: seems like so they are, you know, really kind of
Speaker 2: leaning into the sixties sort of vibe here with some
Speaker 2: fun colors, a lot of little Easter eggs throughout the vehicle.
Speaker 2: We'll have to see if all that nostalgia pays off
Speaker 2: for them, all.
Speaker 1: Right, Mike, I always appreciate it.
Speaker 2: You have a good day, you do the same ticket