Had two interesting (two me) calls today. One with a large online travel website, who said the hotels in Rio are completely screwed. No one is going apparently. You can get a room and any event ticket you want, on the cheap - and no one is biting (besides the mosquitoes, ahahahahahahah, sigh). Not really news, but apparently thanks to Zika, crime, and general unreadiness, no one is going.
The other call was less GYERelevant, but was on the economics of a used book reseller on Amazon. This company does $50m in sales a year on Amazon. For those 1 cent books, + $3.99 shipping, they make 7 cents per book. They buy their books for 10 cents a pound from Goodwill type places and libraries - sight unseen. Avg a pound per book. Only 12% of the books they buy are in good enough shape to sell. So really they are paying about 83 cents per sellable book. They send the other 88% to pulp mill for recycling for a small fee. The sellable books, they put on Amazon for $0.01, but Amazon makes them charge $3.99 shipping, so sell it for $4.00 total. Amazon takes 15% of the book cost (so nothing), but 30% of the shipping fees, so Amazon gets $1.20. They spend $1.90 in shipping on average per book. So they make $4.00 - $0.83 - $1.20 - $1.90 = 7 cents per book. Of course some titles they sell for $0.99 or $1.99, so they generate most of the profit there, but the vast majority are the $0.01 books.
