Some years ago, I did a post about Amazon. I called it (Sc)Amazon, because Amazon makes a lot of mischief, including ripping off its own Prime members. And it's still at it.
Here's part of what Wikipedia says in its description of Amazon: "The company started as an online marketplace for books, but expanded to sell electronics, software, video games, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry...Amazon is known for its disruption of well-established industries through technical innovation and mass scale. It is the world's largest online marketplace, AI assistant provider, live-streaming and cloud computing platform, as measured by revenue and market capitalization. Amazon is the largest internet company by revenue in the world. It is the second largest employer in the United States and one of the world's most valuable companies."
What's the problem, right? Among other things, Wikipedia adds this: "The company has been criticized for various practices including technological surveillance overreach, a hypercompetitive and demanding work culture, tax avoidance, and for being anti-competitive."
And then, there's Wikipedia's "Controversies" section, which includes topics like "Environmental impact," "Selling counterfeit, unsafe, and discarded items," "Income taxes...Amazon paid no federal income taxes in the US in 2017 and 2018, and actually received tax refunds worth millions of dollars, despite recording several billion dollars in profits each year," "Opposition to trade unions," "Working conditions" (an extensive expose), and frankly many more areas of controversy.
And of course, there's the fact that Amazon, which works hard to pay little or literally no tax in this country (do you pay little or literally no income tax? could this country get more revenue support for the things it does, or should do, from you, or from Amazon?), is a massive money-making machine, and its CEO is the richest person IN...THE...WORLD! And not only do they make money sort of like an agio or commission on each sale, but they charge you a shipping fee. Unless you're a Prime member, in which case they charge you a yearly membership, which keeps going up. The last I heard, it's now about $120 a year. And they need this for what? To engorge one of the richest companies on earth, and further overstuff someone who is already the richest person on earth?
So, now, Amazon is expanding its attempt to dominate and destroy. (Oh, that's not nice. I should say "disrupt." It's much more PC and au courant.) It's entered the prescription medication business. I haven't read enough about how it plans to go about being the biggest pharmaceutical provider there is (that's their scope of ambition), but my homepage this morning, before the stock market opened, already said Walgreens was leading the losers with an 11% loss in stock value. That's just at the idea, before Amazon actually does anything.
You're thinking yeah, but I get what I want from Amazon, delivered promptly, and the prices seem pretty good. True. And let's forget for the moment that even at that, Amazon is ripping you off. (The same general principle is true about any large and highly successful company.) But try to look downstream, or downwind, of where you are, which is at your front door, taking in the package you just received from Amazon. Amazon (again, just to take them as an example) charges you less than someone else might, because they pay less for whatever it is. Whether it's Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Publix, or anyone, they get pricing, because they...negotiate...with producers. (They beat them up, and they beat them down.) If you're a Whole Foods shopper (I'm not), and if, as Amazon advertised when they bought Whole Foods, pricing there has dropped, someone is at the end of that line. Maybe it's the "illegal immigrant" migrant agriculture worker of whom, if you're of a certain persuasion, you might not approve. Would you like to try to live on what they make, for really long and hard days of work? Which quickly works its way around to indentured servitude? This system doesn't happen without someone being taken advantage of. According to the "Controversies" section of Wikipedia, it's a lot of someones who get taken advantage of. And if you rely on anything from the public sector (that was just a rhetorical "if;" we all rely on the public sector), then you're among the people getting taken advantage of, apart from your shipping fee, or your Prime membership dues.
So now, at the cost of jobs at Walgreens, CVS, Publix, Navarro (CVS), Target, Walmart, and whoever else, Amazon is about to make you another offer it will seem hard to refuse. Think it over.
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