I thought you were all about Capitalism tho? Isn't Amazon an American success story? I do over 90% of my online shopping there. One of the highest rated merchants. I'm all for supporting small business, but you need to be more than just a small business, you need to compete. They need to stop crying, start competing. I think too many times small business plays on the sympathy angle. Amazon got big for a reason. Beat them at what they are weak at, if you can find a weak spot. They also help a lot of small businesses because you can sell on their site as a 3rd party.
There are no easy answers. I laughed year after year of Amazon's stock price and Zero P/E ratio. Certainly I was way off there and wrong. They reinvested everything into expansion- that was a smart thing. They do many things correctly- no argument. I like many things about Amazon, but it's about the price, convenience and the search- just like with Google. The rapid answer to find something you are looking for either to buy or learn. Excellent. But like ATT was a monopoly, they should be dealt with in some manner that does not eliminate all retail. Or maybe broken into pieces. But look what happened with that, ATT broke up into pieces (Baby Bells so to speak) and they were all re-assembled 20+ years later.
I don't have sympathy for Nordstroms or Macy's or subdivisions of their over priced stuff. I dislike Walmart too, crappy products mostly.
You sort of omitted the context of it all above the charts. I am not talking about "buy-a-job" type businesses making peanuts and few employees- like Hair and Nail Salons, Amazon won't take over that unless they buy some chain I suppose. Chain restaurants in the California city I used to live in, became more popular and out went all the older family restaurants that had much better food. Rents were too high, unless they owned the property for a generation. Lot's of turn over.
Small manufacturing businesses are not growing- at least I don't see it coming back to the 50-70's era. Under Trump, IMHO there is a small chance of some increase, but I believe it's too late. Starbucks minimum wage to pour coffee at $15 an hour? WTF? And people buy that $5 a cup coffee, I won't.
Amazon affiliate programs are a joke for most. Some few do well I am told with it.
Then this idiocy, or the Amazon to Ebay arbitrage.
https://andrewminalto.com/how-to-import-products-from-china/ These sorts of small businesses are not healthy.
I can't find an article or video about the Paintball distributors story, it occurred quite a few years ago.
Amazon basically figured out who their suppliers were, and what the best selling products were then went direct and competed to put them out of business.
https://hbr.org/2015/10/when-platforms-attack
But when Feng Zhu, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, began studying the platform model, he heard a repeated worry from Amazonโs third-party sellers: What happens if, instead of just matching buyers and sellers, the platform decides to offer competing products itself? The more Zhu talked with sellers, the more he saw that this wasnโt a hypothetical question. โ
Their view is that the platform owners essentially run the platform as a lab, letting people innovate and compete against one another, and then cherry-pick the best products for themselves and capture the value,โ he says.
Amazon will eventually copy many products and private label them. That's going to be next big more in the future. Sure the consumer wins, but at the cost of the entrepreneur and inventor.
This is what google has done. They have scraped human intelligence on directories with links, song lyrics, etc. as i have written before somewhere on this forum- all this labor which were painstakingly created by humans in the early internet, and now for 20 years collected it all and Google are now the experts- and all the data was "taken", or should I stolen and repopulated in the index at the expensive of humans. Their websites deindexed and demoted. Chewed up and spit out. It happened to me, but I am in the process of reinventing one of my sites. One major classified publication comes to mind, I asked how they have survived in print all these years against google- the simple answer- is they ban all crawlers indexing. Nothing is indexed and all is protected. The key is timing, I repopulated and plan to have everything reindexed then cut it off at the knees once the site is well known. I won't need google again. If that works, I will repeat with other sites.
