10 ms·

I'll go ahead and say it: Amazon is frighteningly large. Any time I visit a UPS store, the lines are out the door and most of the people are there to make amazo

by lprd 4y ago

I'll go ahead and say it: Amazon is frighteningly large. Any time I visit a UPS store, the lines are out the door and most of the people are there to make amazon returns. I see amazon delivery trucks throughout my town - its incredible what Bezos has achieved but I fear its just gone too far. I'm only 32 and I've seen so many companies shutting down; partly due to consumer shifts, but also by amazon pushing them out of the market. The pandemic also caused a few big players to get thrown under, but it seems that amazon only grew bigger. The future looks strange.

theklub 4y ago
Sadly our government doesn't protect us, I think there should have been an antitrust case a long time ago.
babelfish 4y ago
Why is this scarier than Target or Walmart, each of which have a higher market share than Amazon?
- BbzzbB 4y ago
  For what it's worth, neither Target nor Walmart have a wholly unrelated cash cow (AWS) to subsidize ventures into new markets at huge losses until market dominance is established.
  - toma_caliente 4y ago
    This is the big one here. Amazon has a completely unrelated market dominate business that lets them enter new markets at a loss until they crush everyone currently in that market. Amazon is honestly the first company that needs to be broken up. Split up AWS and Amazon market and this becomes a whole new ballgame.
    - mijowi 4y ago
      First company that needs to be broken up?? What about all the other monopolies that were busted?
      - coconut08 4y ago
        I think they mean at this current point in time amazon is the company that needs to be broken up first, as in take priority over companies like facebook and apple not that this is the first company in history that has required intervention.
      - toma_caliente 4y ago
        I mean of the current tech monopolies(Amazon, Google, etc), Amazon should take priority as the first company among them that needs antitrust lawsuits filed against them and broken up.
    - akdor1154 4y ago
      It's very interesting.. i understand they have a strict approach of keeping teams entirely separate and with interaction between teams no different to interaction outside the org (API-always, bill-by-usage, ...) This has made AWS a very good provider overall, but it probably also makes them very able to cope with being forcibly separated. I wonder if that is a vulnerability or a planned strategy for this possibility?
  - Jgrubb 4y ago
    Amazon didn't have that cash cow for the first 15 years or so they existed.
- lprd 4y ago
  Its scarier because there is no competition for amazon. The closest company that comes to mind is Alibaba/Aliexpress, but even they haven't had an affect on the US market to the extent that amazon has. The stores you mentioned are physical department stores, which have been competing in their own space for many, many years. Amazon originally disrupted the book market...now look at the amount of markets it dominates.
  - sleepdreamy 4y ago
    Correct. AWS is god-tier and many non-technical users have any clue how Amazon actually works. They don't make money off your stupid ass delivers Nancy. Amazon has a monopoly with AWS and that is what people should really fear. Not Amazon, but the power of AWS
    - spaced-out 4y ago
      AWS has 33% of the cloud market share, I wouldn't exactly call that a monopoly. https://www.channele2e.com/news/cloud-market-share-amazon-aws-microsoft-azure-google/ https://www.channele2e.com/news/cloud-market-share-amazon-aw...
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        That's because they're also counting all the server on a rack rental companies as cloud market share. If you look at just the cloud the way AWS does it - running code through their service in various datacenters as a service, it's above 50%.
      - sleepdreamy 4y ago
        Source: I work in Critical Incident Response/IT Remediation AWS is absolutely a monopoly just like Microsoft has a monopoly on Corporate/Enterprise OS's tied to Domains. From a solely cloud based provider - not the Equipment renters or Volume based licensing. AWS is a monster - Their market share is well over 33% regardless of how many articles you google to link me. I am balls deep buddy. It is well over 33% (At least in the US)
- humaniania 4y ago
  Target and Walmart didn't create their own (bottom of the barrel, low quality, abusive, toxic) shipping contractor network to attack the strong labor unions of USPS, UPS, and to a lesser degree FedEx. Amazon is cheaper because of the people they screw over along the way. I boycott Amazon.
collaborative 4y ago
We will never know the number of small businesses that had to shut down because unlike Amazon, they couldn't nor wouldn't indebt themselves to grow indefinitely (aka survive) The amount of talent and efficiency in the economy that Amazon has crushed..
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  This implies competitors couldn't just go work for Amazon. I'd say "crushed" is more than a bit of an exaggeration.
- iamsomewalrus 4y ago
  i think this is too pessimistic. via FBA they've also enabled thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of small businesses and a cottage industry of others that have formed around them.
- onphonenow 4y ago
  The "efficiency" that amazon has "crushed". Is this serious? They offered at home COVID PCR tests. The normal timeline was you'd take it and drop it off at 5PM at your UPS store. By 10AM-11AM (Pacific) the next day they had results. Along the way you had full tracking. In transit, at lab etc. Registering the thing was a photo of the barcode. We had major medical providers getting paid major money that would take a WEEK (!!) to get results back. I saw on my insurance they were charging something like $289 per test because the person that picked them up was a "medical professional". So despite millions / billions, I was getting better service from my $39 amazon test. This test included 2 day delivery (free) to me, it included priority overnight delivery back to amazon + lab work + web tools etc. They must have (smartly) located the lab near UPS worldship. Same with shipping and logistics. The USPS, with a guaranteed nationwide monopoly on certain services struggles to get me stuff on time. Fedex is even worse for some reason. Amazon is an absolute machine where I am. We have same day, next day and two day delivery that is HIGHLY reliable and efficient. We can drop stuff off back at Kohls etc without even packing it. We can pickup from Amazon lockers, or have them deliver inside our house if we want. When folks talk about how inefficient amazon is I want to know what they are comparing them to. Fedex? Some walmart warehouse?
dan_quixote 4y ago
Consider that some of Amazon's more recent ventures into automation (namely PrimeAir) are driven by the long-standing knowledge that they would exhaust the labor pool in many markets. They knew their growth and labor practices would hurtle us toward dystopia years ago.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
decebalus1 4y ago
> The future looks strange. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45885120-the-warehouse https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45885120-the-warehouse
marricks 4y ago
"Bezos achieved" it's never one person that changes the world, it's the conditions being ripe for it along with some bloke having enough seed money and brutal determination to make it happen. - Internet was just starting to be a thing in the 90's so right time to capitalize on a new easier way to sell things - Bezos got hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from his parents to start his book empire. It's not like he was a rags to riches story, they never are. - Amazon warehouse workers suffer nearly 2x the numbers of bodily injuries[1] and it's almost like the company expects (and wants) to burn through these workers bodies because they have a ridiculously high turnover rate[2] If he didn't do it someone else would have and for all we know they could have broken less bodies along the way. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/01/study-amazon-workers-injured-at-higher-rates-than-rival-companies.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/01/study-amazon-workers-injured... [2] https://labor411.org/411-blog/warehouse-worker-turnover-rate-is-100-in-counties-that-have-amazon-warehouses/ https://labor411.org/411-blog/warehouse-worker-turnover-rate...
- tester756 4y ago
  >It's not like he was a rags to riches story, they virtually never are. >Bezos got hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from his parents still, going from e.g 600k (300k in 94) to trillion dollar company is impressive as hell how many startups do receive way, way more than that and fail?
  - marricks 4y ago
    I didn't say it wasn't impressive but it's as impressive as... watching someone win the Squid Games by backstabbing everyone else? I don't think it deserves any applause or proves anything.
  - nwienert 4y ago
    We don’t really know how impressive it is, a lot of founders made it huge in that golden time period even for terrible ideas that died shortly after, and network effects always crown one or two as massively disproportionate winners in each area. If you acknowledge that timing, connections, background and network effects dominate the equation (if Bezos was 2 years late, is there any doubt there’d be a “different” one?), you realize there’s something gross about how wealth is distributed.
rossdavidh 4y ago
"I'm only 32 and I've seen so many companies shutting down..." I'm mostly in agreement with your position, but I just have to add a 54-year old's perspective, which is that WalMart was doing this before Amazon did. If Amazon hadn't popped up, WalMart would have kept doing it, except without making their website market available to small independent companies. Again, not saying Amazon isn't worryingly large and ruthless, just that this problem started well before them, and if WalMart had become Amazon instead, things would not have been better.
credit_guy 4y ago
And you haven't seen anything yet. Today I shopped at Amazon Go. That's the store where you go, pick items from the shelf, and leave, and Amazon directly charges your account. You don't need to scan anything, Amazon has some type of computer-vision-based system that figures out what you took, what you put back, and charges you appropriately. I have no doubt that one day Amazon will roll this system to Whole Foods. The day this will happen is the day the Apocalypse starts for all brick-and-mortar retailers in the US.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Amazon has already rolled out the go tech at a few Whole Foods in d.c. funnily enough my parents don’t like to shop there, they claim to like the small talk with the cashier.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    The future is for introverted engineers.
anonu 4y ago
Its not clear that AMZN is bad just because its big. The value they provide is tremendous. Surely a UPS van to your house and others is better for the environment than individuals going to a brick-and-mortar store. AMZN is still only 5% of all retail sales in US. They should be disrupted - but not for just being big.
tastyfreeze 4y ago
Sears and Roebuck dominated mail order for nearly 100 years. Now, they hardly exist. Large corporations come and go. Unless Amazon starts contract police or military service there is very little to worry about.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I did a 2 month "don't buy from Amazon" which forced me to look around a bit, but there are lots of alternatives. Amazon is amazingly convenient, but it's coming at a price which is higher prices and 1 vendor issues. You can't really say it's a marketplace with all the SEO and buying positions going on either. I still get stuff from Amazon occasionally, but I found there are plenty of alternatives out there if you can wait an extra day or two.

by lprd 4y ago

theklub 4y ago

Sadly our government doesn't protect us, I think there should have been an antitrust case a long time ago.

babelfish 4y ago

Why is this scarier than Target or Walmart, each of which have a higher market share than Amazon?

BbzzbB 4y ago
For what it's worth, neither Target nor Walmart have a wholly unrelated cash cow (AWS) to subsidize ventures into new markets at huge losses until market dominance is established.
- toma_caliente 4y ago
  This is the big one here. Amazon has a completely unrelated market dominate business that lets them enter new markets at a loss until they crush everyone currently in that market. Amazon is honestly the first company that needs to be broken up. Split up AWS and Amazon market and this becomes a whole new ballgame.
  - mijowi 4y ago
    First company that needs to be broken up?? What about all the other monopolies that were busted?
    - coconut08 4y ago
      I think they mean at this current point in time amazon is the company that needs to be broken up first, as in take priority over companies like facebook and apple not that this is the first company in history that has required intervention.
    - toma_caliente 4y ago
      I mean of the current tech monopolies(Amazon, Google, etc), Amazon should take priority as the first company among them that needs antitrust lawsuits filed against them and broken up.
  - akdor1154 4y ago
    It's very interesting.. i understand they have a strict approach of keeping teams entirely separate and with interaction between teams no different to interaction outside the org (API-always, bill-by-usage, ...) This has made AWS a very good provider overall, but it probably also makes them very able to cope with being forcibly separated. I wonder if that is a vulnerability or a planned strategy for this possibility?
- Jgrubb 4y ago
  Amazon didn't have that cash cow for the first 15 years or so they existed.
lprd 4y ago
Its scarier because there is no competition for amazon. The closest company that comes to mind is Alibaba/Aliexpress, but even they haven't had an affect on the US market to the extent that amazon has. The stores you mentioned are physical department stores, which have been competing in their own space for many, many years. Amazon originally disrupted the book market...now look at the amount of markets it dominates.
- sleepdreamy 4y ago
  Correct. AWS is god-tier and many non-technical users have any clue how Amazon actually works. They don't make money off your stupid ass delivers Nancy. Amazon has a monopoly with AWS and that is what people should really fear. Not Amazon, but the power of AWS
  - spaced-out 4y ago
    AWS has 33% of the cloud market share, I wouldn't exactly call that a monopoly. https://www.channele2e.com/news/cloud-market-share-amazon-aws-microsoft-azure-google/ https://www.channele2e.com/news/cloud-market-share-amazon-aw...
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      That's because they're also counting all the server on a rack rental companies as cloud market share. If you look at just the cloud the way AWS does it - running code through their service in various datacenters as a service, it's above 50%.
    - sleepdreamy 4y ago
      Source: I work in Critical Incident Response/IT Remediation AWS is absolutely a monopoly just like Microsoft has a monopoly on Corporate/Enterprise OS's tied to Domains. From a solely cloud based provider - not the Equipment renters or Volume based licensing. AWS is a monster - Their market share is well over 33% regardless of how many articles you google to link me. I am balls deep buddy. It is well over 33% (At least in the US)
humaniania 4y ago
Target and Walmart didn't create their own (bottom of the barrel, low quality, abusive, toxic) shipping contractor network to attack the strong labor unions of USPS, UPS, and to a lesser degree FedEx. Amazon is cheaper because of the people they screw over along the way. I boycott Amazon.

collaborative 4y ago

We will never know the number of small businesses that had to shut down because unlike Amazon, they couldn't nor wouldn't indebt themselves to grow indefinitely (aka survive) The amount of talent and efficiency in the economy that Amazon has crushed..

shadowgovt 4y ago
This implies competitors couldn't just go work for Amazon. I'd say "crushed" is more than a bit of an exaggeration.
iamsomewalrus 4y ago
i think this is too pessimistic. via FBA they've also enabled thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of small businesses and a cottage industry of others that have formed around them.
onphonenow 4y ago
The "efficiency" that amazon has "crushed". Is this serious? They offered at home COVID PCR tests. The normal timeline was you'd take it and drop it off at 5PM at your UPS store. By 10AM-11AM (Pacific) the next day they had results. Along the way you had full tracking. In transit, at lab etc. Registering the thing was a photo of the barcode. We had major medical providers getting paid major money that would take a WEEK (!!) to get results back. I saw on my insurance they were charging something like $289 per test because the person that picked them up was a "medical professional". So despite millions / billions, I was getting better service from my $39 amazon test. This test included 2 day delivery (free) to me, it included priority overnight delivery back to amazon + lab work + web tools etc. They must have (smartly) located the lab near UPS worldship. Same with shipping and logistics. The USPS, with a guaranteed nationwide monopoly on certain services struggles to get me stuff on time. Fedex is even worse for some reason. Amazon is an absolute machine where I am. We have same day, next day and two day delivery that is HIGHLY reliable and efficient. We can drop stuff off back at Kohls etc without even packing it. We can pickup from Amazon lockers, or have them deliver inside our house if we want. When folks talk about how inefficient amazon is I want to know what they are comparing them to. Fedex? Some walmart warehouse?

dan_quixote 4y ago

Consider that some of Amazon's more recent ventures into automation (namely PrimeAir) are driven by the long-standing knowledge that they would exhaust the labor pool in many markets. They knew their growth and labor practices would hurtle us toward dystopia years ago.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

decebalus1 4y ago

> The future looks strange. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45885120-the-warehouse https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45885120-the-warehouse

marricks 4y ago

"Bezos achieved" it's never one person that changes the world, it's the conditions being ripe for it along with some bloke having enough seed money and brutal determination to make it happen. - Internet was just starting to be a thing in the 90's so right time to capitalize on a new easier way to sell things - Bezos got hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from his parents to start his book empire. It's not like he was a rags to riches story, they never are. - Amazon warehouse workers suffer nearly 2x the numbers of bodily injuries[1] and it's almost like the company expects (and wants) to burn through these workers bodies because they have a ridiculously high turnover rate[2] If he didn't do it someone else would have and for all we know they could have broken less bodies along the way. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/01/study-amazon-workers-injured-at-higher-rates-than-rival-companies.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/01/study-amazon-workers-injured... [2] https://labor411.org/411-blog/warehouse-worker-turnover-rate-is-100-in-counties-that-have-amazon-warehouses/ https://labor411.org/411-blog/warehouse-worker-turnover-rate...

tester756 4y ago
>It's not like he was a rags to riches story, they virtually never are. >Bezos got hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from his parents still, going from e.g 600k (300k in 94) to trillion dollar company is impressive as hell how many startups do receive way, way more than that and fail?
- marricks 4y ago
  I didn't say it wasn't impressive but it's as impressive as... watching someone win the Squid Games by backstabbing everyone else? I don't think it deserves any applause or proves anything.
- nwienert 4y ago
  We don’t really know how impressive it is, a lot of founders made it huge in that golden time period even for terrible ideas that died shortly after, and network effects always crown one or two as massively disproportionate winners in each area. If you acknowledge that timing, connections, background and network effects dominate the equation (if Bezos was 2 years late, is there any doubt there’d be a “different” one?), you realize there’s something gross about how wealth is distributed.

rossdavidh 4y ago

"I'm only 32 and I've seen so many companies shutting down..." I'm mostly in agreement with your position, but I just have to add a 54-year old's perspective, which is that WalMart was doing this before Amazon did. If Amazon hadn't popped up, WalMart would have kept doing it, except without making their website market available to small independent companies. Again, not saying Amazon isn't worryingly large and ruthless, just that this problem started well before them, and if WalMart had become Amazon instead, things would not have been better.

credit_guy 4y ago

And you haven't seen anything yet. Today I shopped at Amazon Go. That's the store where you go, pick items from the shelf, and leave, and Amazon directly charges your account. You don't need to scan anything, Amazon has some type of computer-vision-based system that figures out what you took, what you put back, and charges you appropriately. I have no doubt that one day Amazon will roll this system to Whole Foods. The day this will happen is the day the Apocalypse starts for all brick-and-mortar retailers in the US.

colinmhayes 4y ago
Amazon has already rolled out the go tech at a few Whole Foods in d.c. funnily enough my parents don’t like to shop there, they claim to like the small talk with the cashier.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  The future is for introverted engineers.

anonu 4y ago

Its not clear that AMZN is bad just because its big. The value they provide is tremendous. Surely a UPS van to your house and others is better for the environment than individuals going to a brick-and-mortar store. AMZN is still only 5% of all retail sales in US. They should be disrupted - but not for just being big.

tastyfreeze 4y ago

Sears and Roebuck dominated mail order for nearly 100 years. Now, they hardly exist. Large corporations come and go. Unless Amazon starts contract police or military service there is very little to worry about.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

stjohnswarts 4y ago

I did a 2 month "don't buy from Amazon" which forced me to look around a bit, but there are lots of alternatives. Amazon is amazingly convenient, but it's coming at a price which is higher prices and 1 vendor issues. You can't really say it's a marketplace with all the SEO and buying positions going on either. I still get stuff from Amazon occasionally, but I found there are plenty of alternatives out there if you can wait an extra day or two.