I’d rather have thousands of small businesses continue to exist instead of Amazon hiring 400k people. Apparently that’s an uncommon position these days.
(This is the point where everyone always kramers in with their personal beefs with Amazon)
Like many others, I use Amazon because it's extremely useful, overall it's simply a better experience than shopping at other places. I have nothing against small businesses, but when I shop, I don't treat businesses like charities. If small businesses want my money, they have to actually present a better service. If they can't do that, it doesn't overly bother me that they go away.
I'd rather say, like Starbucks, Amazon provides a consistent and adequate service.
Small businesses might provide a better service or worse service, but consumers can't easily know which in advance - so large conglomerates present less risk and less cognitive load. Amazon is the obvious choice, more than it is the best choice.
Presenting a better service is not enough, for a small business to survive against a monopolist. It's one of the monopoly advantages that Amazon has.
walmart is bigger than amazon.
amazon’s share of retail in the US is around just 5%.
maybe i missed something...
it’s not all retail. it’s retail minus auto sales, travel etc etc basically anything that amazon doesn’t sell.
they have 5% of that pie.
offer a rebuttal if you can instead of attacking the commentator personally next time you leave a reply on this website.
i was actually curios as to why you considered it a monopoly when in fact the numbers are against you.
1. Monopoly (in law and in practice) is not just defined by what percentage of the pie they have; it's also about what power they have and what non-competitive behaviours they can and do engage in.
Claiming that Amazon is not a monopoly based on the technicality that they don't have 100% of all retail is an irrelevant claim.
2. It's possible to estimate Amazon's "addressable retail" in 2019 as a whole number percentage - that is already huge. There are few companies with that percentage in much smaller sectors.
3. You put it in competition with Bricks and Mortar stores in order to get to this figure, which makes your figure artificially low.
4. I understood your figures were from a 2019 estimate, although they were unsourced. Amazon revenue has been growing exponentially. There's now a pandemic on. Year-on-year sales have increased something like 50%.
I've consciously tried using Google Shopping to get around Amazon (an company with obnoxious employees IMO), but the experience is so much worse - no unified shipping, issues with returns, lack of trust... It's just not sustainable.
And as restaurants show, you can win off of a better service/product compared to a big company.
But do these small businesses people champion offer a superior service? Because mostly people just seem to urge you to buy from them for moral/ethical reasons, not because they're better.
Example: a local book chain sells me a book for 10% more money and takes 4 weeks to order it - Amazon sells it cheaper and it's delivered 2 days later.
It feels better and yet its the exact same company.
I still vote for state-wide and local matters and that is where my vote really does count.
People have a limited appetite for friction when they shop too. An ideal store with a better return policy and selection seems to look a lot like Amazon. I'm not saying that it's good for us to invest all of our shopping into one business. It's just what unregulated capitalism breeds over time.
So not a monopoly.
Edit:
Walgreens.com, Costco.com, Honest.com
All 5 of those popped up on Google/DuckDuck before anything from Amazon.
Companies like Amazon are of national interest and cannot be easily regulated by governments.
My proposal is to have a "social responsibility tax". That does not have to be necessarily be a financial thing.
Companies like amazon should provide adequate housing and other perks where they can utilize economies of scale.
> Companies like amazon should provide adequate housing and other perks where they can utilize economies of scale.
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Why twist Amazon's arm into providing random social benefits, when you can just, y'know, have the government do it? Because that kind of thing is their job?
Imagine if you were like, "hmm, we don't seem to have enough public parks and libraries...I know! We'll force huge private corporations to provide them! I can't wait to go to Jeff Bezos Park, sponsored by Prime Video!" Would that really be an improvement over the local government doing it?
The problem is lack of accountability, corruption, nepotism and lack of vision (shortterm thinking).
It's easier for Amazon to find a way how to construct more efficiently housing that's adequate even for lower classes.
The government just need to set a quality standard for that housing.
Companies (except worker-owned cooperatives) are hierarchical and completely undemocratic, by design.
They are also focused exclusively on maximizing profit, not providing social services.
Replace democratic institutions with billionaire-owned companies and we just reinvented feudalism.
Indeed, unless the government stops them.
If you don't murder your neighbors and seize all their assets someone will do that as well, unless the government stops it.
Your point is less salient than it appears at first glance. It's not actually controversial that without government intervention people acting in their own narrow self interest will destroy society.
Are you not being overly pessimistic of human nature? Even in places and times of extreme lawlessness, generally society continues to function without everyone being murdered. Or perhaps you were being hyperbolic?
granted I'd personally rather not be living in such a time or place.
Typically in a generally lawless environment the prevailing means of social organization is what you call a mafia or warlord state, where small scale tribal sized areas become semi-stable anchored around a strongman type figure who maintains a monopoly on the use of violence.
In those situations survival exists at the discretion of the local warlord, who informally settles disputes and extracts whatever reasources they see fit, distributing the spoils to the militia members that keep them able to maintain their monopoly on violence.
This is easily recognizable as the default state for most of human history, and the state that society returns to when ungoverned. Examples include Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, various narco-states, and so on.
While functional, one very noticeable attribute is that it's not a pleasant way to live for everyone except those who win all the resources. Sound familiar?
Remind me, how many people are declining to wear masks and ignoring stay-at-home directives during this pandemic?
It's in Amazon's best interest to shutter all locals aside from what they own (Whole Foods, Amazon Grocery, etc). Their ultimate goal is automating everything they can to remove the human element and maximize revenue. You can see other businesses like Starbucks taking over as well in different fields. In my opinion it's a matter of time until Amazon starts their own attempt at local cafes.
We had presidential candidates in the US like Andrew Yang that recognize this effort and want to get ahead of it with UBI but I'm sure you know how that turned out. If the government isn't going to support local businesses in dire times, who will? And who wants to live in a boring world where there are no local shops?
In a way if you are relying on the "community" to help your business stay alive, then your business is clearly not creating enough value and shouldn't exist.
how do you factor jobloss and destruction of your community into this 'value'?
I say that as someone who runs a business focused around increasing customer engagement with local businesses in small towns, but honestly it would take a monumental effort to save so many of these "general store" type of businesses that a small number of people paying the "local" tax on commodity goods isn't going to cut it.
Local mom-and-pop stores need to be looking for ways to differentiate from their mega-competitors. It's possible, and many stores are doing it successfully. But hardware stores? Selling bolts? Their only customers are people who don't use Amazon (older/rural) or people who need that bolt right now and are willing to pay 2-3x retail price for it. Especially in a pandemic where Amazon/Walmart are allowed to be open with few restrictions, but mom-and-pop has to close.
Successful small business going forward has to offer something Amazon/Walmart can't copy. Authenticity, experiences, memories. Escape rooms were a huge success story, creating axe throwing and fowling and other group activities, and often those places opened their businesses in the empty stores of businesses that couldn't compete with Amazon/Walmart and went out of business. Live music is another place Amazon can't compete with. A beautiful river-front promenade with park benches and an ice cream shop and a coffee stand and a vendor selling popcorn from a cart with some people getting ready to launch their kayaks while others are fly fishing, Amazon and Walmart and big box stores and strip malls can't compete with that. That's downtown, small, local. That's high profit margin.
Rather than clinging to the past where shopping local meant paying high prices on commodity items, we should be looking forward to a future where shopping local means "I can't get this anywhere else". That takes innovation. Grocery and bolts aren't innovation, they're commodities.
What happens if your country of residence enacts laws and/or regulations that make business unprofitable for Amazon (or the like)?
Better yet, what if enough people are put out of work such that there isn't enough demand for the economy of scale required for Amazon to remain profitable?
I assume you are technical, perusing this site, thus isn't a monolith, a single point of failure a significant risk?
Your perspective appears to be of wealth and privilege. What about those that can't afford a Prime subscription?
At the margin, that facsimile is a superiorly-adapted species and evolution then takes its course. You have to modify the environment in order to make the unmodified you more competitive than the doppelgänger.
if that is an accurate assumption, what is the solution? perhaps a paradigm shift in retail tech that enables any manufacturer to engage in direct to consumer at far reduced complexity? micro/regional manufacturing?
I think NDizzle's point is that most peoples' rationale goes economically as you did, and that maybe we should reconsider that.
For a while, you may notice Amazon has slightly better prices on things. One day you may need some advice on a project, so you go to the local hardware store. Except the store was eventually run out of business by not being able to leverage the same economies of scale as an e-giant.
I think of it less as investing in your local hardware, and more of investing in your community
Of course they can be had cheaper, and in a wider variety, from some huge warehouse further away. But then you can't get the job done this afternoon. The change from 1950s mail order is that the payment is easier, the shipping is (sometimes) faster, and that you might get the Chinese knock-off.
Amazon eliminates all that friction. I can one click buy something and know when it will arrive, what the shipping will be, and the rules on returning it.
That's not to say Amazon is a saint by any means.
Currently Amazon has better ways to use their money to grow.
When that's over, a lot of the 3rd party sellers will be at risk.
I've worked with a lot of Amazon merchants where they would put up a item with a decent margin and good sales only to be reliably be cut out from that exact item by Amazon offering it themselves after 1-2 months. The core of their business on Amazon was to continuously hustle and identify new products that would fill that niche, as that made up for the biggest chunk of their profit.
So there are many 3rd party merchants at risk _now_ on Amazon.
Apart from that there are also numerous brands from Amazon themselves already. Most obviously "Amazon Basics" and "Amazon Essentials", but also many with a non-obvious name[0].
That sounds like a very risky business. How do they manage/lower that risk ?
The merchants where it was more stable had generally less of those products, and had a bigger existing offline business. Through their offline business they had bigger volume on those products and could cut a better deal with the supplier than Amazon, and through that offer them at a lower price[0]. I would guess though that that's also only a very temporary position they can hold, as Amazon should be able to beat them in warehouse logistics and demand forecasting.
[0]: As a silver-lining Amazon is pretty fair that if you underbid them even if they have the item in stock themselves, you will still make the sale "by default".
Should we have saved the 9,024 Blockbuster stores?
With amazon getting into the pharmacy business, I wonder what impact it will have on pharmacy chains which themselves put small independent pharmacy stores out of business.
Is this recent though? US made Walmart the behemoth it is. Also, chains like Target, Best Buy etc are also not your friendly small neighborhood stores.
Overall at the scale of the city it seems to me ( I don't have any numbers for that ) that consuming on Amazon is not a great deal long term.
Scientifically, it's simply evolutionary survival of the fittest. It's adaptation. By your argument, every sudden game-changing evolutionary leap was a pathology, which is obviously false.
Plus, there is absolutely nothing "out of control" about Amazon either. Amazon's a private enterprise competing in the marketplace like any other. It's just doing a better job at it.
Indeed.
> By your argument, every sudden game-changing evolutionary leap was a pathology, which is obviously false.
The definition of pathology is always context-driven. Worth noting that a massive bacterial infection is a fantastic success from the perspective of the bacteria.