I know, I know, you can argue he doesn't (business case) *owe* them this. But it is absurd to pretend he couldn't afford it.
Amazon's moat is *convenience*, and *product selection* not price.
On various other discussion boards, one can find people complaining that Amazon vastly overcharges for some items. This might be to glitches in their algorithms, or it might be a feature of certain "revenue optimization" algorithms: i.e. to maximize overall profit, tighten the price down on items with high elasticity, and charge through the nose for specific hard-to-find products. Case in point, I was looking for a shelf for my refrigerator recently, and I found it on other sites at prices between $95 - $110. Amazon wanted ~$240.
The other element is there are rumors that certain govt. agencies are helping funding Amazon behind the scenes for intelligence purposes -- matching buying patterns of certain items if you catch my drift.
And to your point of Amazon and how long it can last, two other points.
One is that they are facing severe competition from Wally World. Bricks and Mortar, but with the footprint of stores all over the country, and their emphasis on price and logistics for their own purposes, a number of people are saying they've found WalMart delivers more reliably than Amazon; and often has better prices.
And let's not forget postage from China being subsidized by the US Postal Service, which President Trump has spoken of putting a halt to.
Another example, in a different vein, might be Sears Holding Company. People wondered why Sears, with its catalog and ordering system, didn't head off Amazon at the pass years ago, just by putting their catalog online.
Eddie Lampert has been bleeding the company dry for years and years, selling off key brand names like Craftsman. I still haven't figured out what he gets out of it.
I agree, salesman or clerk at Sears, doesn't sound great for trying to support a family; but not everyone has a college degree or Master's. And people forget that back in the 1960s, it wasn't unheard of to have a husband as primary breadwinner, and supporting a family on one income. Due to a gazillion factors, that's now very difficult to do.
That being said, corporate raiders who suck all the life out of a company, for their own short term profit, are execrable.
There's a difference between redeploying the assets of a failing company (e.g. Maytag getting gobbled up by Whirlpool).
But forcing wholesale changes, to take advantage of arbitrage, while forcing others to bear the (unacknowledged) externalities, is both traitorous and (should be) criminal.
(*) Re-reading the article now, I see it only covers 1900 workers, which is far fewer than the commentaries on it let me to think. So he *is* doing it, but not enough for Amazon to be a dispositive example. (1900 is so small he could trivially afford it; but by the same token, 1900 is not enough that entire states are devastated by it.)
I suspect that decision never even crossed his desk. The Whole Foods division is likely being run as a separate division from Amazon and has its own Human Resources department who made that decision. Now, Whole Foods exists in many places where even part time employees are required to be paid a $15 per hour minimum wage, so something has to be cut to be able to afford them. Bye-bye other benefits. The cost of employment has to be worth the employee. This is a grocery business, a traditionally low markup business. There isn’t too much room for other costs from other retail items with larger markups to absorb increases in employee costs.
As for price gouging. I’ve seen that too. But not all items sold on Amazon are sold by Amazon. Quite a few of the products sold on Amazon are sold by what’s called Amazon partners, third party sellers, who offer them and set the prices. . . even ones that compete with products that Amazon itself sells from its own inventory. I’ve seen prices where Amazon is selling something for $10 that a couple of pages later you might see the exact same thing sold by a third party selling for $50. How that person thinks they are going to ever sell it, I have no clue, but there it sits on Amazon at that non-competitive price.
The US Post Office is giving huge preferential discounted shipping rates to Amazon that are not available to smaller companies as well. . . and they are doing the delivery to door services for Amazon shipping that’s done be FedEx as well.
Sears management, along with K-Mart, thought that Internet marketing was a niche, or only useful as a ordering system for in-store pick-up. They missed the online retailing boat completely for stupid reasons, even though Sears had a mail order system that could have scaled to meet it. Sears and K-Mart did not upgrade their product lines even in-store while others did, and became looked on as fuddy-duddy, non-happening stores, again missing the boat.
I recall vividly when Sears switched their inventory and point of sales to a computer controlled system. It was a disaster, a demonstration of how not to do it. Ringing up each item took at least two to three minutes, and each transaction with multiple items could take as long as fifteen minutes as the clerk had to input numerous inventory numbers for each items by hand into the registers. It was tedious. Customers stopped going to Sears.
Mitt Romney was a specialist in company deconstruction. . . but that really does not bother me. Capitalism means the opportunity to succeed and also to fail. Something will come to replace failures. While there are still buggywhip makers in business, there are no major businesses making buggywhips around. There’s a good reason for that. Businesses have to either change with the times or fall away with the times. We cannot subsidize them because their workers will suffer if they fail. There is no such thing as a business that is too big to fail. If I put my mind to it, I can think of probably a dozen major businesses industries that are no longer with us in the past twenty years. Gone completely. Not even vestiges left.
The first one that comes to mind is the store front home video rental business. Another is the VHS and BETA tape rentals that were part of that. Photo developing kiosks. CRT TV tube manufacturing. Music CD brick and mortar chain stores. I am sure we can come up with more. . .
As for Amazon and the government, I read somewhere that the government has more fingers in Amazon’s pie than even Google. I wouldn’t be surprised given the amount of passes Amazon seems to get on regulations.