Amazon has radically transformed small businesses in both the U.S. and China

There are a mix of ways to profitability operate with Amazon both legitimately or via various kinds of fraud. However, suggesting that transition is often as reasonable as telling a barber to open a veterinary clinic, it’s just a completely different kind of business.

Based on my experience most of those small businesses are reselling uncertified whitelabel shovelware (especially electronics) from Ali Express. That's a bit like praising cancer for rejuvenating the body by reducing the mean age of all cells.

Of course you could also say it created a lot of businesses via "self-employed" last mile delivery drivers but I think we're all adult enough to acknowledge that the gig economy is a scam to skirt labor laws, not an actual net positive for those working within it.

Pretending small businesses could have kept up with Amazon by "doing the same" is absurd. Small businesses lack the infrastructure to offer one day (or even same day) deliveries and free returns with full refunds. We've reached a point where buyers take these things for granted to the point of balking at shipping costs for goods privately sold on eBay classifieds because they have no idea what delivery companies like UPS or DHL charge.

Even as a marketplace, Amazon cannibalizes its sellers via its "Amazon basics" brand which copies products if they get popular enough and often undercuts their pricing while also benefiting from the Amazon branding.

> Whereas Amazon was an equalizer allowing anyone to compete in a global marketplace, those that opted not to, got their lunch stolen.

Saying "allowed anyone" makes it sound like it was optional, yet that "those that opted not to" died off demonstrates that it wasn't. It's nearly impossible to start a small local retail shop but it's also nearly impossible to be a small retail seller on Amazon. There's a reason white label shovelware dropshipping is so ubiquituous: by creating your own brand to resell white label products you make it harder to compare you to your competitors selling the same garbage and you no longer have to directly compete on price. This is effectively the only kind of business on Amazon marketplace that doesn't directly suffer the race to the bottom.

> This is free markets and capitalism operating as intended.

Yes, that's the problem. Free markets accelerate monopolization by forcing local small businesses to compete globally with international megacorps on those megacorps' terms.

The benefits of small local businesses are externalities to capitalism so they get sanded off eventually. Free global markets just rapidly speed up that process.

I do think that fixing a lot of the "quibbles" people have concerning Walmart and Amazon would help make things more competitive and help give smaller stores a better chance though.

I see those actions as setting up barriers but they do prevent people who can't meet that barrier out. My thinking of gatekeeping is more absolute, as in "there is no way for you to enter here" and thus "breaking the gate" would have legal and/or diplomatic consequences.

So for me there are two concepts, trade barriers and gatekeeping. Tariffs come under the heading of trade barriers as well in my view.

H&M, Zara, and Uniqlo are luxury?

> Am not well versed in oil, but from a cursory look at Shell it has a US entity traded in the US market, partly producing US gas to US customers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_USA

It's literally the US subsidiary of Shell? It's still owned and controlled by the foreign company. This is how international business works once companies reach a scale where they employee large numbers of workers in a foreign country. See Ford of Europe, ExxonMobil Europe, Apple Japan etc - these aren't European/Japanese companies, they're just branches of American ones

Do you mean this seriously? Corporations come and go all the time, and if they make a catastrophic decision, usually the worst possible outcome is bankruptcy, not war.

Yes, there is a tiny amount of "too big to fail" corporations whose characteristics are closer to a state than to a private organization, but compared to the government, any single corporation has negligible influence on your life.

Modern governments have enormous powers.

For example: a clothing store accepts free returns for couple days after purchase in physical store, or doesn't try to obstruct in any way the EU-wide 14-day return policy for goods bought online? That store eventually gets flooded with returns, as some scoundrels figure they can attract their preferred kind of mates by buying expensive clothes before a party and hiding the tags (instead of removing them), and then return those clothes back to the store the very next day, to get full refund.

This is a real thing that was happening where I live, and led to clothes being much more annoying to unpack, as well as some silly rules on shoe returns, which occasionally cause pretty absurd situations (those running shoes were quickly labeled as "walking shoes, not suitable for running"; we can't accept the return because you admitted to running in them).

That use case, along with hedging your risk by buying 10 different items on-line, fully intending to return at least 8 of them, is common enough that there are businesses targeting people doing this directly (e.g. "clothing as a service" companies).

EDIT: FWIW, I do understand the desire and pleasure of figuring out a loophole in a set of rules and milking it for all its worth. But in shopping and e-commerce, following those rules to the letter selfishly almost always involves generating tremendous waste for the vendor, the society and the environment, and because of those externalities I don't think highly of such behavior.

if everybody abused return policies that way, the policies would simply be changed to disallow it for everybody. flexible policies only work because there's a trust that they won't be abused, and they'll only last as long as most people don't abuse them. the people who return everything they buy are just trying to squeeze the most out of the system before they ruin it for the rest of us, and banning them is a much better solution than disallowing returns.