"The stock market isn't the economy"
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-27/stock-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/business/stock-market-eco...
https://tcf.org/content/commentary/stock-market-not-economy/
This is one of my favorite Kai Ryssdal-isms.
While this is true, it's not true to a lot of people: politicians and us regular-folk alike often equate the stock market's performance to the state of the economy (hence why this is a saying at all).
I like to think of the stock market as an insight into wealth-transfer (from the poor to the rich, obviously... it doesn't flow any other way in the US at this point). When stocks do really well, especially those of service/retail companies, the already-rich are getting richer, generally at the expense of the rest of us.
That's not true. Sam Walton and Jeff Bezos got rich by improving the lives of their customers. You might complain that the improvement came at the cost of exploiting workers. I disagree, but for the sake of argument I'll concede at the margins Amazon and Walmart could pay more. But the bulk of their wealth came from 1) them stealing it from other capitalists, keeping a portion for themselves and passing the rest onto their customers; 2) creating it ex nihilo and dreaming of something (AWS) that never existed and creating it.
It depends on how you define "improving the lives of"...
Amazon only won the game by undercutting others in the market to the point where they couldn't realistically compete. But those other market players were employing a ton of folks around the country. That's a huge part of what made Amazon's prices unrealistic for brick & mortar stores: people & infrastructure _in the communities they serve_. I fail to see how eliminating jobs & competition does anything other than consolidate wealth and (by not paying those employees) solidify the direction of transfer of wealth in the poor -> wealthy direction.
I think people really misunderstand the effect of moving commerce online. Communities need local services. Communities need goods available locally. Moving employment opportunities away from communities creates a higher barrier for entry into the job market, because now someone needs a car and/or hours-per-day to commute to get to their job.
This isn't even to mention the harm Amazon has done to its employees and contractors (folks in distribution centers & deliver-people have had a lot to say about the working conditions).