Posted on 06/20/2017 3:38:34 PM PDT by MrExplorer70
“Amazon just bought Whole Foods,” my friend texted me seconds after the announcement of the proposed acquisition. “It’s over. The world.”
This unease is widespread, and has raised new calls for breaking up Jeff Bezos’s impending monopoly by force. Surely the company, which now generates 30% of all online and offline retail sales growth in the United States, and already controls 40% of internet cloud services, has reached too far. The 3% hike in Amazon’s share price since the announcement—which would alone more than pay for the acquisition—may attest less to the deal’s appropriateness than to investors’ growing fear that missing out on Amazon means missing out on the future of the economy.
Whatever you may think of Jeff Bezos, and whether or not antitrust regulations can justifiably be applied to a company whose expansion doesn’t raise but actually lowers costs for end consumers, may be beside the point. Many of us get that something is amiss, but are ourselves so deeply enmeshed in the logic of last century’s version of free-market industrial capitalism that we can’t quite bring ourselves to call this out for the threat it poses to our markets, our economy, and even our planet.
(Excerpt) Read more at fastcompany.com ...
He drove a lot of businesses out by selling things at a loss.
If that’s legal, that’s his prerogative. Is it legal?
I could have done that for a few months with my bowling alley vending machines to kill the competition but then the competition would have LITERALLY killed me :)
So a less than one third share is now a Monopoly?
Just to get Bezos I say yay! I don’t really mean it but he’s a maroon and deserves it!
Actually, only loss leaders were sold at a loss. Individual items not sold cheap as advertising were sold at a profit.
What Amazon did do was continue to spend more on expanding the company infrastructure than the company brought in, and they did that for well over a decade. So the company operated at a loss, but items were not generally being sold at a loss.
There’s nothing that Amazon sells that you can’t get thru an overwhelming number of other options. It’s not a monopoly.
Too big to fail...
All he did was capitalize on the natural human habit of laziness.
Anything he sells can be found for probably 10% cheaper if you look for it.
Its time for the CIA NOT to give Amazon a 600 million cloud contract or whatever scam government welfare check they got. The problem with rich people and rich companies is that they some how always end up getting involved with the government and thus stealing my tax dollars. Now I understand people here will say “Well thats why we should limit the scope of the government”. This is a good idea in theory but seeing as politicians are just puppets bought and paid for by the Super Rich its hardly a feasible idea.
Being a "monopoly" is a loosely used and little-understood idea. In a reasonably open market, any player, no matter how dominant, can be up-ended by competitors--unless his market position is guaranteed by the guns of the State. As in the down-home fascist advantage of AT&T in the old days.
The only question is: Is Amazon--like the banksters--protected from competition by our Federal government?
Is it time to break up Amazon?
-x-x-x-x-x-
Stupid dumb-ass question. Don;t like it? Build a better one......
I stand corrected. Thank you :)
Are loss leaders the things that get you to shop in the hopes that the person will buy other things?
Like a 2 dollar whopper sale and a 3 dollar coke :)
Break up liberals monopoly of the MSM. Why do liberals get to run CBS, NBC, and ABC?
“Are loss leaders the things that get you to shop in the hopes that the person will buy other things?”
Yes. Check the front page of your local Grocery Store ad each week. Those are the ‘Loss Leaders’ that get you into the store, hoping you’ll buy other stuff you don’t need at full price. They’re pretty much the same items each week throughout the year. By shopping them and planning meals around the Loss Leaders (while resisting all the other ‘stuff’ in the store) you CAN save a lot of money!
20 years of Retail under my belt. Sadly. But I know all the Retailing Tricks, that’s for sure!
P.S. When looking at a shelf in the grocery store, shop HIGH or LOW. The brands in the middle pay a premium for shelf space! and the stuff on an End Cap? Not always a ‘bargain,’ we just make it look that way. ;)
All I needed to know about Jeff Bezos and amazon: “In July 2012, Bezos and his wife personally donated $2.5 million to support a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington, which successfully passed.”
His genius was bribing enough Congresspeople not to impose sales taxes on stuff he sold online for almost a decade.
Do that long enough and the brick and mortar types can’t compete.
Knocked them out of the box.
Sorry. I love all things Amazon. wait. Nope. Still love it.
If Bezos were a conservative the democrats would be screaming bloody hell! 1% and Occupy and all that crap.
Ditto that! Been with Amazon many years now. Where I live, Walmart is 40 miles one way, Grocery store is 20 and hardware store is 22 miles, the UPS truck comes to my door without fail as does Fedex and nobody can come even close to variety of items available on Amazon. The Prime membership is valuable not only for free two day shipping but many other things also.
In my opinion, mom and pop stores were doomed from the beginning of the internet.
Signed up today just to re-write the headline of the article, did you?
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