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Can you expand a bit on your suggestion that Amazon is approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status? Are you speaking specifically about AWS?

• KirinDave 9y ago
  AWS is definitely a worry, as increasingly it's the fabric american business is woven from. Shutting that down or raising its prices suddenly would severely disrupt US business. But secondary effects of lost sales from vendors would almost certainly upend the vendor table and make goods very difficult to get ahold of. Amazon as a delivery service (and its smile boxes, ads for its own products on said boxes, and specialized delivery frameworks) is as much of an American institution as the post office now, and growing as it takes over its own delivery and logistics.
  • Kocrachon 9y ago
    Amazon accounts for 43% of online sales currently. But accounts for less than 5% of retail sales overall. Until they start hitting a bigger chunk of total sales, I would not consider them too big to fall. Walmart is too big to fall, as it litterally controls a bunch of local economies. If Amazon closed tomorrow, there would be a shitty time in Seattle, but people would just go to Ebay, Walmart, Etsy, and Alibaba. If WalMart closed tomorrow, a good chunk of the southern states would run into a state of emergency because the unemployment rate would skyrocket, and there would be no companies to pick up the slack locally, so local economies all across the US would crash. Many towns would lack groceries or supplies because WalMart is all they have after WalMart ran everyone else out of business. How many businesses has Amazon shut down across the entire US?
• deleted 9y ago
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