Of course not. To consumers, Amazon provides an excellent service.
(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.
> To consumers, Amazon provides an excellent service.
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.
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.
you missed something, apart from giving intentionally misleading and old figures, and yet within that you're still able to identify Amazon's market share as a percentage of all retail as an industry? ok.
Because your comment was so wrong it's hard to know where to start, it seemed like trolling. Here you go:
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%.
Being a known quantity is an advantage, to be sure. But there are downsides to size, too; that's part of why every restaurant isn't a chain.
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.
McMaster-Carr provides a better service than Amazon does for what they do. It’s not the cheapest, but the experience is insanely good, and they’re even faster than Amazon. 3000 employees vs over 1 million.
That's exactly the point I bring up in discussions with friends. Amazon provides almost everything in one store - so I don't have to buy at half a dozen shops - combined with great customer service. I can even buy used books from many sellers via Amazon. That doesn't mean that I don't want to support regular shops but as a customer Amazon is just the most convenient option.
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.
I would nominally agree with this logic, but surely the exact same applies when voting? Should people not bother voting because they are just one in a sea of many?
In the United States I would say it depends where you live. I'm a Democrat in a forever-red state. My vote for President will never matter as long as the Electoral College is there.
I still vote for state-wide and local matters and that is where my vote really does count.
I'd argue that modern megacorporations have become sufficiently adept at morphing around state interventions, that coordinated grassroots movements might be the only means of mitigating their influence.
Customers (like competitors) are the victims of monopolies, not the perpetrator. The only perpetrator is the monopolistic company itself, and the only solution is government action.
I wasn’t saying they do or don’t have one... just that they didn’t get as big as they are today without the actual consumers. My wording could’ve been better.
That's absolutely true. It's just also a very narrow lense to look at the situation. I've worked retail and it honestly sucks for everyone involved. The customers can't make informed choices or even get an unbiased direction from sales people. It's a market designed to work with as little information or agency as possible.
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.
Why does it need a special tax? Just use regular ass taxes, raise them if they're not high enough.
> 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?
Unironically, I legitimately expect Amazon would provide better social services than the government. Having dealt with a lifetime of various governmental entities, I struggle to think of a time I was actually satisfied and impressed with how they handled whatever, unlike Amazon, who continuously impresses me and quickly fixes mistakes.
> if you dont create such monopoly someone else definitely will
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.
> It's not actually controversial that without government intervention people acting in their own narrow self interest will destroy functional 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.
> Even in places and times of extreme lawlessness, generally society continues to function without everyone being murdered.
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?
I would recommend studying up on some history. The current generally prevailing peace is not the default state of human nature. Indeed the good thing we have going right now is a very notable exception to the normal order of things: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/03/pinker-explai... (and there's no guarantee it will continue indefinitely).
Amazon's dominance and small business' decline this year is mostly the blame of the government. An earlier quarantine would have both been shorter and more effective. Large corporations were the only ones able to survive to storm, and you want the government to break those too?
