The main thing to watch out for is monopolies. If customers always have enough choice then the customer and workforce satisfaction will get sorted out eventually, as those organizations will be selected for and companies won’t be able to exist without doing that right. It works really well, and is actually a strength of our free markets. Governments and committees stepping in and trying to fix the system tends to make it worse because the people who fall through the cracks have no recourse, and they also inadvertently create monopolies by making the system more complicated and expensive for new entrants. For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been, and the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing. Amazon is getting there. But even so, reading through these comments, there’s plenty of discussion of how Amazon is so much better than the previous experience of many people. Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better. It has raised the standard to a new level, which we will happily now complain about until someone else figures out how to do it better.
Yeah, there's nothing inherently bad about monopolies. The problem only arises when monopolies are forced into people by the government. Instead, people choose Amazon on their own.
Amazon is the best of what capitalism can offer. They have basically crushed competition by focusing on providing better value, not building a monopoly through lobbying or a legal moat.
Given that, I wish us economic policy was focused on allowing more Amazon’s to exist in more industries, and a social policy that focused on helping the folks that are acutely negatively impacted by competition.
Except Amazon is a monopoly, that all but obliterated all major competitors. They need a much bigger workforce, can afford to keep their wages comfortably higher, while extorting whatever conditions for it.
Why is that a bad thing? The point of capitalism is that a company will grow if it can grow. We let Amazon do it why not this? Anyways it's better that Amazon has competition minimally, right?
Surely at some point the market will just regulate itself and amazon will have to improve working conditions to keep operations running... Right? Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?
The bit of this that I think is easy to overlook is that if this is the status quo indefinitely I assume this is a very long term problem.
Amazon is a baby, it's a new-ish company in the grand scheme of things. It's a huge, huge baby, it has accumulated power incredibly quickly. Where is it gonna be in 200 years? Will the federal government still be more powerful?
No one is saying nationalize Amazon tomorrow. But we haven't even managed to give our citizens good internet service yet, we're way behind here, and we do not appear to be catching up.
I don't understand the people in this thread defending Amazon. They're just an impersonal corporate conglomerate that doesn't give a *&$! about you. Capitalism is about competition and the more competition the better.
It's a pity you got downvoted (due to an immediate first reply -- happens more and more), but my first reaction was exactly the same as yours. Amazon got richer during COVID19. Bezos got way richer. To be honest, I am not actually convinced that monopolies are by definition bad, but Amazon strikes me evermore as a bad instantiation of it.
Horror story: imagine the Amazon Pharmacy being flooded with Chinese sellers. This is also why I don’t like to shop on Amazon anymore. You can find the same sellers on AliExpress – cheaper and from the same source, if that’s what you want (and sometimes, it is what you want). (Even if you'd want to offer as a counterpoint their other ventures in e.g. cloud, one could offer a rebuttal again in the way how they're treating their engineers.) I was a huge Amazon customer in the past, but I implicitly feel less and less inclined to buy there. The only benefit for me is the very forthcoming customer support (if you chat with a rep and honestly complain about a bad product, they’ll go all the way -- in fact it's only lately I've seen other local web shops finally approach this central point).
It’s always the same with them: “look, here’s this new innovative thing where we streamlined the product and ignored the possible ways to game it.” Great on the former, why didn’t you care about the latter.
Also: what I find funny is that everyone defending Amazon today as a shining example of capitalism, often the same types being against that “horrible” communism, might find it interesting to ponder the question how Amazon is organized and how much revenue they’re generating. It’s a planned economy. Not by a state, but by a company. With one head at the top.
I think one of few good outcomes of monopolistic tech companies, like Amazon, is the degree to which they expose the lie that is American free market Capitalist ideology. There’s never been anything other than highly-subsidized State Capitalism and it’s outcome is massive, private command economies in the form of corporate dictatorships. These dictatorships then seek to assume the power of the state so as to achieve a monopoly on subsidization, while at the same starving the ability of the state to subsidize others and provide a challenge to their control.
I feel there's an argument to be made for Amazon having a near-monopoly on online sales and distribution in many countries, even outside America.
They've simply nailed it and scaled it. In New Zealand a company called TradeMe got there first and successfully fended off Amazon, but that's a minority case.
There are pros (e.g. consumers love it) and cons (e.g. human toll when optimising efficiency without robots) to having Amazon dominate in whatever country, but you can't deny, they get the job done. There isn't really another company competing with them at that level, is there? And that's why I think it's an effective monopoly.
To abuse this wide-reaching power, in making your own stuff rise to the top of world sales, is absolutely a concern and we should honestly be grateful that there are laws and funded agencies giving a shit about this.
Maybe I’m alone in this, but I feel like if you’re going to break up a company with antitrust regulation you should at least be able to point to a way they’re abusing their power or are making a worse experience for customers. The article goes as far as to admit that Amazon is currently not doing anything wrong.
Should we really seek to regulate away hard-earned (and valuable!) advantages because they make it possible to abuse the position? Surely we should wait until they’re actually abusing it?
As an aside, I can’t think of any advantage Amazon has that wouldn’t open up opportunities for a competitor should they start to abuse them. That’s the goal of capitalism, in a sense; you have to be great or people just go elsewhere. Seems odd to fight against that.
You might find a problem with that arrangement when you need to buy something that Amazon doesn't or won't carry, and there's nobody else in town (because they can't survive on such products alone). Or as a manufacturer who makes a new and better product compared to something that they have, but who can't find a sales channel for it. Or as someone who is unhappy with some of Amazon's practices - say, how they treat their employees.
And competition doesn't just show up out of thin air - you need a healthy free market for companies to get to the point where they can challenge the market leader. If you allow the monopolist to dominate the market, they will never get there, and there won't be anything for consumers to easily choose from.
In general, concentration of power is dangerous. Few people dispute this with governments - it's not like we wait for them to become authoritarian, we write constitutions that have arrangements that deliberately cripple their ability to do so (separation of powers etc). Why should it be any different for large corporations, when we know from history that monopoly abuse is the most likely outcome?
I'm curious where you feel Amazon has a monopoly? Google and Microsoft offer compelling alternatives for cloud infrastructure and the retail market has tons and tons of competitors. I have a lot of concerns about the power corporations like Amazon, but I'm not sure I see where the monopoly exists.
Amazon is like 5-10% of the US retail market. Most companies are anti-competitive, it's when they are anti competitive and a big chunk of the market that it's a problem. Am I missing something?
> consumers get fantastic deals and cheaper products and more reliable service than ever before.
This hasn't been true for many years IME, and will almost certainly get worse over time. Companies like Amazon don't fight tooth and nail to monopolize industries because they want to be nice to people, they do it because it results in power they can use to increase profits over the long term. Less competition means that they can ratchet up prices for customers and squeeze sellers/suppliers more. There are only a handful of general stories online these days, largely due to Amazon's actions.
That's nice, but the reality is that Amazon has almost 90% control of e-commerce.
They have huge monopoly power, and laws exist to protect consumers from that.
Is it the ideal way to build a society? No,
But the government should still step in when it happens.
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