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Khan calls this “the antitrust paradox.” As one merchant observed, “You can’t really be a high-volume seller online without being on Amazon, but sellers are very aware of the fact that Amazon is also their primary competitor.” Undercut by Amazon, which gave its own Pillow Pets featured placement on the site, the merchant’s sales plummeted. Sales were booming-until the merchant noticed that Amazon had begun offering the exact same product on its own, right before the holidays. Writing in the Yale Law Journal in January, policy analyst Lina Khan recounts the case of an independent merchant who used Amazon to sell Pillow Pets, a line of pillows modeled on NFL mascots. Then there’s the way Amazon exploits the conflicts of interest inherent in its business model. If robots are going to take all our jobs, Amazon wants to make sure it owns all the robots. In 2012, Amazon bought a robotics company that automates warehouse labor, and then blocked its competitors from using the technology. A corporate giant like Amazon is able to use its economic advantage to eliminate jobs, drive down wages, dictate favorable terms to its suppliers, and even set the price the postal service is permitted to charge for the privilege of delivering its packages. When Walmart first began to take over the retail industry, for example, Americans embraced its “everyday low prices.” Mom-and-pop stores on Main Street may have been going out of business, but the savings at the new Walmart were just too good to resist.īut the lower prices offered by monopolies come at a steep cost. Monopoly can sometimes seem like a good thing. Economic power, in fact, is more concentrated than ever: According to a study published earlier this year, half of all publicly traded companies have disappeared over the past four decades. Most communities have one cable company to choose from, one provider of electricity, one gas company. Google and Facebook control nearly 75 percent of the $73 billion market in digital advertising. The chemical giant Monsanto is able to dictate when and how farmers plant its seeds. A private equity firm in Brazil controls roughly half of the U.S. CVS and Walgreens have a virtual lock on the drugstore and pharmacy business.
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Eighty percent of seats on airplanes are sold by just four airlines. Monopoly-the ultimate enemy of free-market competition-now pervades every corner of American life: every transaction we make, every product we consume, every news story we read, every piece of data we download. government has permitted corporate giants to take over an ever-increasing share of the economy. Such is the power of the “everything store” and its “one-click ordering.”Īmazon did not come to dominate the way we shop because of its technology. In June, Amazon announced its largest-ever acquisition, paying $13.4 billion to buy the Whole Foods grocery chain. All of which is rapidly being lost to a single company. One of every eleven jobs is tied to shopping centers, which generate $151 billion in sales taxes each year. This year alone, three retail stalwarts-Walmart, JCPenney, and Rite Aid-plan to shutter or sell off nearly 1,200 stores, and nearly 90,000 Americans have been thrown out of work since October. Amazon’s stock has risen by 300 percent since 2012, and Wall Street analysts have compiled a “Death by Amazon” index to track the retail companies most likely to be killed off by the online giant. The rise of Amazon, and its overwhelming market dominance, has accelerated the collapse of traditional retail outlets.
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And more than voted for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton last November. That’s more Americans than go to church every month. Today, nearly half of the nation’s households are enrolled in Prime. The sale has become a secular holiday, akin in its economic wallop and social ubiquity to Super Bowl Sunday or the Fourth of July. Prime Day is now an annual event last year it marked the largest sales day in Amazon’s history. The company received almost 400 orders per second-all on a single, ordinary day in the middle of summer. The event was astonishingly successful: Amazon made 34 million Prime sales that day, nearly 20 percent more than it had on Black Friday, the traditional post-Thanksgiving buying bonanza.
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Over the next 24 hours, starting at midnight, the company offered special discounts every ten minutes to the 44 million users of Amazon Prime, its members-only benefit program. On July 15, 2015, Amazon marked the twentieth anniversary of its founding with a “global shopping event” called Prime Day.