Mike Dubuski is the ABC News technology reporter, and Mike, of course knows what's going on in the world hopefully.
Good morning, Mike, Good morning, guys. How are you? Yeah?
Good? I don't know if I gave you too much credit and saying you know what's going on.
But about all the world. But you know we're around, right for.
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 doesn't it get to diminishing returns?
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
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. 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. 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, 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.
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 up next month, and I'll just hang loose and buy then, and the website cannibalizes itself because of that.
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 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 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, 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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
A lot of it. EXI do they have a place for you to put your roach in?
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.
Yeah, it's are EV's going down in price because they seem to me to be getting more and more expensive.
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 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.
Right, Mike, I always appreciate it.
You have a good day, you do the same ticket