I admit it’s kind of a half-baked thought, but how long until they are the biggest contributors of corporate income, employment, and state sales taxes? It’s easy to project that Bezos essentially wants to achieve mega-monopoly status on, at the very least, almost all retail goods sales and digital entertainment. They bought Whole Foods, it’s only a matter of time before they’re making home grocery deliveries paid with EBT for below Walmart pricing. They’ve started their own package delivery service with their own jets and trucks, so I give 10 years or so before they’re handed a USPS privatization contract to deliver First Class Mail along with your normal Amazon deliveries. They are trying to get in the pharmacy business, so delivery of Medicare medications is in the near future. Discuss…
Bezos wants a monopoly—what businessman in his position doesn’t. Can’t have it though. Competition will ensue, unless he figures out how to pull enough government strings in his favor. It just takes time. I was hoping for better from Jet. eBay blows too.
As for Amazon, I’ve been buying less from them for a while, but I guess, just not buying much anyway.
As wtfk said, any business wants a monopoly but it won’t happen. Also, none of these companies want to be part of the government. They want to lobby the government to get what they want, but they don’t want that public if they can help it.
It’s a million times easier to lobby for laws and offshore for taxes than it is being part of the massively slow moving, red tape cutting, billion and one oversite comity having government.
Yeah, the regulatory capture thing.
As far as I can tell this is the purpose of corporate status. Give some companies power and breadth that they could never achieve on the free market, let them write regulations that harm the competition, then collect obedience. I don’t see anything unique to Amazon.
I probably do 80% of my shopping at Walmart and Amazon. Not proud of it, but it is what it is.
Walmart, Costco, Amazon, eBay for me, and Amazon and eBay aren’t accruing any favor of late. Target, occasionally. Hardly ever buy anywhere else, come to think of it—other grocery stores, I guess.