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Comment by berelig | Hacker News Reader

You live in a small town with small businesses that are undercut by Amazon's price and scale. Those businesses slowly die out as everyone in your region switches to ordering online (primarily from Amazon). Amazon opens a warehouse in the region to meet the demand and is now the largest employer around.

This exact transformation already happened with Wal-Mart in the 80s and 90s. Obviously no one is literally forcing workers to go to Amazon's warehouses but you can see how in essence this leaves them with no choice (i.e. forced).

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I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart around 2009 and haven't bought anything of Amazon's website since 2016 (I still bought Whole Foods and Woot for a bit, but I've cut those out too).

Newegg is a better place for parts, why use the Amazon stores for B&H and Adorama when you can .. just go to the websites for B&H and Adorama?!

I wrote this a while back. Amazon's has turned into a platform that's basically killed all the other parts sites and competition we use to have:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-death-of-the-mom-and-pop-...

Do you have any evidence that Amazon has decreased overall employment? To me it is totally plausible that with the convenience of online shopping they have increased the overall “retail pie” and have not taken away from local businesses. So I would prefer when you make claims about how small business are dying out because of Amazon you provide evidence

I should have prefixed that this is drawing heavily on what I remember reading about Walmart and their effect on rural/suburban economies when they expanded. In that sense it is conjecture on my part as I'm not drawing on any studies about Amazon in particular. I only wanted to show how large corporations that compete directly with small retail employers can get an unfair advantage against their labour force.

Your theory could obviously be valid as well.

My life was transformed with the growth of WalMart and Amazon.

The quality, variety, convenience and price of goods available to me all improved. The Mom and Pop who had been financing their lifestyle on the backs of the rural poor were forced out of business. I feel a little bad for them, but it seems wrong to elevate them over the rest of the population.

I don't think anyone here will disagree with you. They're just saying that this new system brings its own problems. Namely heightened labor monopsony. That doesn't mean we have to go back to mom and pop systems, but it probably does mean we should work on solving the new problems.

As Colin says, I don't disagree. I don't think twice about ordering an item on Amazon for $2 that a hardware store downstairs sells for $5. I understand why the store's margins need to be that high but I also need to make sound financial decisions and don't make enough to subsidize anyone else. At the end of the day I'm still contributing to Amazon's growth at the expense of a more fragmented market of small businesses.

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