Walmart and Amazon’s Race to Rule Shopping

Nearly every one of us in the US and Canada has bought something from either Walmart or Amazon in our lifetimes. Not only are these two retailers ubiquitous, but they have forever altered the way we buy goods through their experiments with things like free shipping, competitive pricing, speedy delivery, membership services, and innovative brick-and-mortar experiences.

Amazon and Walmart are obviously different in many ways, but the two companies are also surprisingly similar. This becomes particularly evident when you chart the history of their rivalry, as they race to compete for online shopping gains, or when they battle it out to acquire the same companies. Journalist and author Jason Del Ray writes about the dueling giants in his new book, Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets, which traces the moves both companies have made in their decades-long slugfest.

This week, we talk to Jason Del Rey about Amazon and Walmart’s technological advances, their strategic acquisitions, and how the pandemic forced them both to change course.

Jason’s book, Winner Sells All, is out now from HarperCollins. Read all of our Amazon and Walmart coverage.

Jason recommends season 2 of The Bear on Hulu. Mike recommends “Life After Roe,” WIRED’s series of stories about the current state of abortion rights. Lauren recommends buying gifts for people year-round, storing them in your home, then delivering them at the one time of year when you see them.

Jason Del Rey can be found on Twitter @DelRey. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: Lauren.

Lauren Goode: If you had to describe your relationship with Amazon, would it be that you're in a relationship, you're just friends, or it's complicated?

Michael Calore: It's complicated.

Lauren Goode: OK. What about Walmart?

Michael Calore: Ooh, I think I've been inside like one Walmart in my life.

Lauren Goode: Are you American? Like, what? How have you only been inside one Walmart?

Michael Calore: I don't know. It's just the way that I've rolled, I think.

Lauren Goode: I guess they don't have enough vegan food. OK. Do you know the names of their big bosses? Not necessarily the current CEOs, but the people associated with founding these companies?

Michael Calore: Oh yeah, sure.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Michael Calore: Sam and Bud Walton, Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, Doug McMillon.

Lauren Goode: What if I told you that you are actually the boss?

Michael Calore: Ooh, that's intriguing.

Lauren Goode: Yes, because how you spend your money and where you spend your money is ultimately what is most important to these companies. And so you hold a lot of power as a consumer with disposable income.

Michael Calore: OK, you have my attention.

Lauren Goode: All right, let's talk about this.

[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]

Lauren Goode: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: And I am Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: We're also joined by longtime ecommerce and retail reporter Jason Del Rey. Jason is the author of a new book called Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets. And not to bury the lead here, but perhaps most importantly, Jason is a former colleague of mine from the Recode days. Hi, Jason. It's so great to have you on the Gadget Lab again.

Jason Del Rey: Lauren, always, always a pleasure, whether over dinner or behind a mic.

Lauren Goode: That's right. There's a whole story there about the last time we had dinner together, but we'll save the steak story for later. Some of you might be thinking, "Well, this isn't a Titans of Industry podcast. Why are we talking about the business of Amazon and Walmart on the Gadget Lab?" But the fact of the matter is we all shop, every single one of us, and these retailers, perhaps more than any retailer in American history, have forever changed the way we buy things. So Jason, in the first part of this show, I want to talk about the ways not only in which Amazon and Walmart are so obviously different, with Amazon being focused on ecommerce and Walmart having these huge stores, but also the ways in which they're similar and how that has changed commerce. And then in the second half of the show we'll get to the future of shopping—all of the wild, invisible, contactless ways that retailers want to keep us coming back to stores. So in your book, you write about the ways in which Amazon actually borrowed from the Walmart playbook. Which tenets of Walmart's business informed Amazon's strategy in the early days?

Jason Del Rey: So there are a couple of key ones from the early days of Amazon that we could say Jeff Bezos "borrowed" from Walmart. One big one is frugality. So that's the idea that when you're running your company internally, you shouldn't have any excess spending. Amazon is not the Silicon Valley tech companies that have free lunches and dry cleaning on campus and the like. And that comes from a Walmart idea of everything being about lowering the price for the customer. And if we're spending any excess money internally or on packaging or, I mean, on employees was in another way, then that is all going to lead to higher prices, and that's a no-no. So frugality was something that was a big deal for Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, and for Jeff Bezos as well. Another one was bias for action. That's an Amazon leadership principle. Essentially it means we need to move fast when we're trying new things. So we might be able to be 80 percent sure that this new idea is great in about two weeks of planning, and maybe it would take us six months to be 100 percent sure we have the right plan. But it is better to move quicker with the best amount of information you have than to hem and haw about new product decisions, new initiatives, and the like. And that is something that comes from the early days of Walmart as well. And then the last one that comes right to mind is—Amazon has changed on this front over the years, but Jeff Bezos saw in Walmart the idea that your pricing strategy is your marketing strategy. Essentially, if you keep prices very low, you really don't have to advertise very much because customers will realize this. It'll be part of your DNA, part of what consumers expect and trust when they shop with you. And that, at some point in Amazon's early history, became a key part of how they thought about pricing online.

Michael Calore: With regards to pricing structures, I think that we have to talk a little bit about Prime. When Amazon first introduced Prime in 2004, the folks at Walmart mistakenly believed that not a lot of people would pay $79 a year for it, but in fact, it turned out to be a crazy good value proposition. So how did Amazon end up making Amazon Prime such an appealing option for so many people?

Jason Del Rey: So Prime, it was not super successful early on, but over time a couple of things happened. One was they added warehouses all across the country and that allowed them to get stuff to us quicker and more cheaply because it didn't have to go on a plane. Another thing was they added video, and they had this idea that even if the video, even if the TV shows were not great, customers would see them as just an extra benefit. So maybe they didn't have the best programming, but it was something new and something that they didn't have before and added value. And over time they tried to add a bunch of other pieces to the Prime value chain while still trying to keep a balance that they weren't diluting the value, so let's add more here, add more there. And the more you add, the idea was the less likely it would be that someone would leave the program because you might say, "Oh, I may not be watching as much video as I once did, but I'm still ordering a lot, or I'm still listening to Amazon Music or Twitch Prime, one of the newer services and the like." And it became just kind of unstoppable for many years, sucked tens of millions of people in. And once you're in Prime, a lot of people have stopped price-comparing elsewhere.

Lauren Goode: So Walmart had its early online "experiments," you call them that in the book, but really Walmart was still emphasizing in-store sales, while Amazon became the online “everything store” due in large part to something like Prime. Then Walmart bought Jet.com. How did that really bring these ecommerce wars to a new level? And do you consider the Jet.com buy ultimately successful for Walmart?

Jason Del Rey: Oh, my favorite question. So I have my TV answer, but I will not give it because it is not nuanced.

Lauren Goode: No, give us the real, candid, raw podcast answer on this show.

Jason Del Rey: So let me back up a second. Doug McMillon is the current CEO of Walmart, lifetime Walmart exec, but seen as a bridge between the old guard and the new guard. He takes over in 2014, ecommerce growth there is decelerating, Amazon's eating up more market share, and he and his executive team are kind of like, "This is an existential threat." And they had to convince people internally that Amazon was an existential threat. And they tried to figure out what their plan is to make up more ground faster online, to transform the company not in 10 years, but to try to transform it in a couple of years. And so they look around and they think, "Well, we need new leadership in digital, and who can we acquire?" So they find this company Jet.com, which was trying a new thing, which was that they weren't going to beat Walmart or Amazon on shipping speed. They were going to create new ways for shoppers to save money online. One of the things they tried is if you ordered more products in a single order, they would give you more savings. This was of course the opposite of Amazon Prime, which has trained us to buy one-off products at a time. You need that—I don't know what. My house is dry in the winter, so we order a lot of humidifier filters. You need that one filter? Let's buy it. So anyway, Jet.com's trying a lot of wacky things to give savings to customers, and it's kind of not working, but they're getting a lot of attention and they're growing really fast but losing just a enormous amount of money. Their CEO Marc Lore gets an introduction to Doug McMillon at Walmart, and Walmart's kind of desperate, and they see this entrepreneur who previously started Diapers.com and they say, "He can move really fast. He knows about ecommerce. We're going to take a big swing and pay $3 billion to acquire this company and really to acquire Marc Lore and his executive team." And so that begins the stage of Walmart's reinvention, where they are heavily investing in ecommerce and trying to transform their business essentially overnight.

Lauren Goode: And did it work?

Jason Del Rey: Did it work? That was the tough question that I was going to give you my nuanced answer to. OK, here we go. So the not-sexy answer is it depends on what your definition of working or success is. So what they did that was successful, they did transform the image of Walmart in hiring circles—specifically technology, ecommerce hiring circles—to one that was finally paying attention and in some ways catching up in ecommerce and could maybe, just maybe, acquire and hire good talent. So they changed the narrative of Walmart and were just pumping out new tests, new initiatives at a really high rate that did increase the digital metabolism of the company. I think they also just shook up the thinking inside Bentonville, Arkansas. There were a lot of things that the leadership of Walmart grew not to like about the way the Jet.com folks ran their business, but they did force them to think differently, to become more urgent in digital matters. And so those were all positives. The negatives, there was an acquisition strategy of some startups at Walmart that really, the short answer is it basically failed. They acquired a menswear digital-native brand called Bonobos, just sold that off recently. They paid over $300 million for it, they sold it for a fraction. They bought a couple of other startups that were a little more distressed, they sold those off as well. They thought they might be able to acquire a bunch of these brands, acquire younger, hipper customers along the way, and keep those customers from spending more money on Amazon if they can only buy these brands on Walmart. That plan never really made it past inning two before it was shut down. And so if you look at the one-off decisions, the grade I'd give those folks is a lot harsher, but transformation of the narrative and the metabolism, which I think count, were successful, I'd say.

Michael Calore: Speaking of transforming narratives, you wrote in your book that you've been working on a proposal for this book for a while, but it wasn't exactly urgent for you. And then the Covid-19 pandemic happened and everything changed for you. So what elements of Amazon versus Walmart were really exacerbated by the pandemic?

Jason Del Rey: Yeah, that's a great point. So as we all know, ecommerce for at least the first, I don't know, half of the pandemic became a necessity, a lifeline for a lot of people. And so a couple of things happened. One is I think, I found this really interesting, for the first month or two, Amazon Prime, the key perk of it was nonexistent. There was no such thing, and for some very good reasons, as two-day delivery. Stuff was showing one-month delivery times. And I thought it was interesting that Amazon never thought about refunding some of the Prime membership, but what that created for Walmart was a real opportunity if they could use their stores as pickup hubs and delivery centers. And some of their executives told me like, "We were moving at an OK pace, and then that happened and we had no choice. We would either turn on all of our stores as mini warehouses, or essentially just cede our customer base to whoever else was serving customers better, whether Amazon or Instacart or Target." And so when you think of the things that have helped Walmart's transformation over the last few years, the pandemic was one because they had no choice. And so that created a dynamic between the two companies. I think the other thing is grocery delivery became even more important, and they were really competing head-to-head there. There was some data at the time that Walmart maybe controlled 40 percent of online grocery in the country, counting pickup as well, at the beginning of the pandemic. And then a year in, Instacart had stolen some ground from them, as did Amazon as well. So those were a couple of the dynamics. And then one last one, which maybe isn't top of mind, but they were competing for warehouse workers. I mean, it was really hard to get enough staffing. And so in markets where they both have big facilities, there was a lot of competition there, which in some places drove up wages, even if for a short period of time.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, there's probably an entirely separate podcast or book to do about just the economy of workers in Amazon factories and Amazon drivers that we can't get to here on this show. You write a little bit in the book about how most of the negative press was directed at Walmart for a long time because it was this notorious small-business killer. But now, as Amazon has increasingly relied on performance data, the human beings working there have started to be treated like cogs, and we've seen a really interesting move toward unionization. But we have to take a break here, and when we come back, we're going to talk even more about the very weird future of shopping.

[Break]

Lauren Goode:So a funny thing happened after the pandemic-induced race to go online and buy as much toilet paper or hand sanitizer or home office equipment as humanly possible. We actually started to return to brick-and-mortar shopping in 2021 and 2022. For Amazon, this bolstered the belief that physical retail isn't going anywhere. For Walmart, this has led to a lot of strategizing around how to stay relevant for the next two decades. Jason, what is the Walmart 2040 plan?

Jason Del Rey: So the Walmart 2040 plan, as I understood in my reporting, was something that they asked a couple of their executives on the ecommerce side, and Marc Lore was one of them before he ... Spoiler alert, he's no longer at Walmart. But before he left the company, they asked for him to come up with a plan. His admission was basically this, "I don't think we're going to beat Amazon on price. I don't think we're going to beat Amazon on convenience, as they, at the time at least, were expanding warehouses still and promising not only two-day shipping on Prime, but one-day, and in some areas as we see now, overnight delivery. And I don't think we're going to beat them on selection, so we have to figure out another way." And the 2040 idea was something that's been called conversational commerce, or really the idea that we're going to personalize the shopping experience for you, Lauren. And how we're going to do that is through maybe humans at first, but technology that are going to know what brands you like or what products you like or what's most popular in your region. And you're going to give us a request like, "I need an amazing celebration gift for my close friend, Jason, who is a 41-year-old author with his first book coming out," and it's going to spit out some great ideas to you. Kind of sounds like what we've been talking about the last few months with generative AI and how it might affect shopping. But essentially you would text a request and you'd get some really smart ideas. And no longer would you have to sort through Walmart.com or Amazon.com and what's become a pretty awful shopping experience on some parts of their site. We would be pushing the best curated item based on your background and your interest to you. That was the idea, and it was written in a memo, handed over to leadership, and then Marc Lore left and it was out of his hands. I asked Doug McMillon, the CEO of Walmart, I asked him about that idea and he basically said, "This idea will be part of Walmart's future. And I wanted to hold onto the technology we already have and the ideas. And it hasn't come to fruit yet. Customers don't really see it in action, but it will." And so that's the Walmart 2040 plan as I understood it. Will it still be the plan one year from now? Your bet is as good as mine, but that's what I relay in the book.

Michael Calore: So if you look at Amazon's brick-and-mortar efforts, there's a lot of really forward-thinking technology in place to make shopping more effortless, like its stores have the Just Walk Out technology, which basically operates without a cashier. If you go to a Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, you can have your palm read. It uses your palm to identify you when you check out. How much of these technologies really matter for Amazon's future—or is there an argument to be made that the company should instead just be spending all of this time and energy fixing the deteriorating user experience of its website?

Jason Del Rey: Well, so I went into a Whole Foods yesterday in Manhattan while I was going around promoting my book, and I asked the cashier, I did not swipe my palm, but I was curious and New York is its own animal, but I was curious, "Is anyone using this?" She was like, "Oh, all the time. Super popular." Which maybe I shouldn't be surprised by, but I just ... Lauren, will you give your—

Lauren Goode: No, I haven't used it either.

Jason Del Rey: OK.

Lauren Goode: I see it every time I'm at Whole Foods, and I haven't yet set it up. I'm sure it's one of those things that it's just a barrier to setup, and once I do it I would start using it because I use tap to pay and I scan my iris when I go to the airport. And at some point it's all happening, but I haven't done it yet.

Jason Del Rey: So apparently, at least in the Hudson Yards Whole Foods in New York City, very popular.

Lauren Goode: Oh, fancy.

Jason Del Rey: But this is how I'm thinking about it. I spoke to an Amazon executive who's a big champion of the company, left a few years ago, and we were talking about the Just Walk Out technology. And just as someone who writes about technology I was excited about it, seemed really new, and this person was just very, very skeptical that long term it's enough of a differentiator for people to shop there consistently if the other parts of the shopping experience there are not great. So are the sandwiches good? These were started out in these convenience stores, where you would pop in for lunch. Are the sandwiches very good? Is the selection pretty good? And I was kind of like, "Oh, it's an afterthought. You're just in and out." But I've thought about that more and more as they've paused a lot of these experimental stores recently, paused the expansions. So Amazon Go is the one you were talking about. They have Amazon Fresh grocery stores. They've also paused the expansion of those. And it's made me think more and more that these technology innovations, while they might attract a certain small subset of the population no matter what the rest of the experience there is like—the pricing, the actual quality of the food—that retail is really hard, and customers, when they're going in the store, their goal is to get stuff they want either at the price they want or the quality they want. And if it's all mediocre, but you have some cool technology, I just think they've realized that's not enough. And so I think they'll stay committed to physical retail. I think if nothing else, they need it for a return option for customers and also pickup option as shipping gets more expensive. I think Whole Foods will stay as part of the family as well, but they have a long way to go. And I think they actually entered the space with a certain amount of arrogance and have run into reality that there's a reason why Walmart's been at this however many, 60 years. Excellence in physical retail doesn't happen overnight.

Lauren Goode: Jason, we're talking about biometric shopping, which leads me to wonder why health care is such a big part of the future of both of these businesses, and what does it mean when American big-box retailers play such a huge role in our health and our health care?

Jason Del Rey: So I think each company is entering the space for some similar reasons and some different ones. I'll start with Walmart. They already have a long history in the pharmacy space. It's a big part of their business, and it's one of the top three largest pharmacies in the country. So I think they feel like there's some expertise, they know the market. And I think what both companies are looking at though, is an industry that often shows disregard or even disdain for the customer. And both companies see themselves as customer-obsessed or customer-centric and think they can do better. Walmart thinks they can bring more accessibility to health care, meaning in areas of the country where good health care is just not readily available, they think they can play a role in that. And Amazon, Amazon forever, they see a market that has some margin, is complicated, and has incumbents who are not treating customers great, and they think they might be smart enough to get at it. And they also have experimented way back, Jeff Bezos and Amazon once owned a large stake in Drugstore.com, which was a Web 1.0 online pharmacy that didn't work. But Bezos and team have had an interest in this space for a long time.

Lauren Goode: What would you say is the strangest or most surprising thing you've learned from writing this book about how people shop?

Jason Del Rey: One thing I learned, which was surprising to me, so we shop online and then do pickup at Walmart, and I showed up one day, a weekday afternoon, all 15 dedicated pickup spots were full. And I asked the employee, when my order was finally ready, which took a little while, "What's up with all these spots being full? You guys are this busy?" And she said, "Oh, they are almost all delivery drivers." So I imagine that the pickup business was mostly end customers, but they really are increasing their delivery business, and they bring out the orders just like they're bringing it to a customer's car, but it's going to either an Uber driver or they have their own delivery network.

Lauren Goode: So has writing this book changed the way you shop at all?

Jason Del Rey: I've covered these companies for a decade, so I have known the pros and cons of how they operate and how the convenience that we seek from them impacts employees and partners and the like. So I've struggled with all that for a while and tried to spread out my shopping. I'd say I didn't really know how good Walmart's online pickup business could be as a shopper. And the other thing is they are now doing this thing at Walmart, which they could have been doing decades ago, which is they will reroute an online order to a store. You order it online. You think it's coming in two days, they realize it's in the store a mile away and it'll show up on your porch that day. And maybe I would've expected that from Amazon, but from Walmart, it seemed like, I know it's not magic, there are people doing this work, but kind of seemed like magic. So if they can execute that at scale it could be really formidable in racing Amazon for our convenience. But that was something that was surprising that I learned just reporting out and testing.

Lauren Goode: Well, I hope Andy Jassy is listening to this podcast and hears that. It sounds like he's on the cusp of losing Jason Del Rey as a customer to Walmart. My goodness. And remember—

Jason Del Rey: Top of his list.

Lauren Goode: ... you are the boss, Jason. You're the one with the wallet, where you spend your money matters. All right, let's take another break and then we'll come back with our recommendations.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: Jason Del Rey, our guest of honor, what is your recommendation this week?

Jason Del Rey: My recommendation is season 2 of the show The Bear. I like to think of myself as a short king, and one of the hottest short kings in Hollywood is the main actor of The Bear. That is not a good sell at all. Really fun show, dramatic. My wife and I love season 1. I wanted to dress up as the main actor for Halloween, and my wife said, "But you don't have biceps," and so I didn't. But I'm—

Lauren Goode: You can get those on Amazon.

Jason Del Rey: I can get them, right. Bezos did too. I am very much looking forward to season 2, wherever you find that show, which I don't even know anymore because—

Lauren Goode: FX?

Jason Del Rey: ... our TV viewing life is a mess.

Lauren Goode: Is it FX and Hulu maybe?

Michael Calore: Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. OK.

Jason Del Rey: OK.

Michael Calore: That sounds right.

Jason Del Rey: OK.

Lauren Goode: That's a good recommendation, Jason. I love it.

Jason Del Rey: Thanks, Lauren.

Lauren Goode: Mike, what's your recommendation?

Michael Calore: Well, on a more somber note, this week marks a year since the US Supreme Court passed the Dobbs decision, which effectively overturned Roe vs Wade and ended guaranteed access to abortions for Americans. So to mark the one year since this decision, WIRED has a series of stories called Life After Roe, and it's excellent. It's really good. It's running all across WIRED all week. You can find it on the homepage of WIRED.com. You can also just follow the show notes. But we've teamed up writers from the business desk, from the culture desk, from the science desk, of course, to tell these stories about what the changes have been over the last year. For example, lack of training for OB-GYNs in states that now have illegal abortion, the uncertain future of abortion pills and their access around the country. There's a story about what's going on in Europe with abortion there, a couple of really good stories about digital platforms, one about how Google is profiting from the anti-choice clinics, the crisis pregnancy centers. They give them free ads and then they also make money off of those ads. And then there's also big problems on TikTok with stifling information about how to find abortions. So it's a fantastic run of stories. I think there are six in total, and you should read them all on WIRED.com.

Lauren Goode: I've read three of them so far, and they are in fact fantastic stories, and we have more coming, right?

Michael Calore: Yes, yes.

Lauren Goode: Yes.

Michael Calore: So they're rolling out over the week. So when you're listening to this show, if you hop right on the website now, I think you'll be able to read four or five of them, but by the end of this week, you'll be able to read all of them.

Lauren Goode: I very much appreciate that recommendation. And yeah, the team here has done a really fantastic job.

Michael Calore: Yes, for sure. What's your recommendation, Lauren?

Lauren Goode: On a lighter note, my recommendation is something of a life hack. So whenever I travel to see family, I typically want to bring little gifts, useful things, not just a gift for the sake of a gift, but maybe a local coffee here that I wanted to share with them, or a jar of honey, or maybe some cool soaps or something like that, things that I think people will actually use. But right before you travel is a really, really bad time to determine that you want to do this. So my best life hack is that as you are out and about in the world throughout the year, on a normal regular Saturday running errands, and you see something, particularly if it's on sale, but if you see something that you think at some point you might want to gift to someone, just get it. Get it at that moment. Don't put it off. Buy the thing, buy the small thing. And then keep a section of your linens closet or a shelf in your room or something where you just keep these items. And build them up over time so that when you get to the point where you're trying to pack your bags and you're going somewhere and you're thinking, "Oh, I'd like to bring a little housewarming gift to these friends," you have the things, you have them ready to go. I admit that I wanted to be that lady. When I was younger I was like, "When I grow up, I'm going to have a shelf that's just filled with really nice little gifts so I always have something on hand." And I'm working my way toward that.

Michael Calore: This is the physical wish list. This is the online shopping wish list made physical.

Lauren Goode: It is, but do it IRL and do it at your local stores, and obviously not perishables. But find things that are cool and special and meaningful in some way. Don't just go on Amazon and say, "Oh, I have to order something because it needs to arrive in two days so I can take it somewhere."

Michael Calore: Right, right. OK.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. So that's my shopping hack.

Michael Calore: That's pretty good.

Lauren Goode: Yeah.

Michael Calore: That's much better than just drop-shipping something to somebody.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, you don't even need an AI to do it, just do it yourself. All right, Jason, it is such a delight having you back on the show. You need to come back. You need to write another book so you can join us on the Gadget Lab again in the near future. Maybe the next one will be about Target or something.

Jason Del Rey: There's a good book in Target, not for me, but for another smart person.

Lauren Goode: Jason's like, "I'm never doing this again."

Jason Del Rey: My wife will not be my wife, my kids will leave me, but I will have another Gadget Lab interview on my calendar.

Lauren Goode: It's all worth it.

Jason Del Rey: Can't win them all.

Lauren Goode: So great seeing you. Thank you for the time.

Jason Del Rey: Thank you, guys.

Lauren Goode: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter and Mastodon and Bluesky and all the places. Just check the show notes. Our producer is Boone Ashworth, who has been shopping on Amazon and Walmart while we've been taping this show. Goodbye for now. We'll be back next week.

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