Posted on 06/20/2017 6:59:59 AM PDT by Callahan
“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 ...
>> Media companies should not be part of a conglomerate.
And nobody, I mean nobody, mentions this. Disney, Comcast, Time Warner (AT&T), and Viacom are largely/ultimately responsible for the malevolent MSM. It’s their properties. And yet, nobody gives a damn.
Exactly.
And people forget that Walmart was the undisputed technology and supply/delivery chain leader in the 1990s. Nobody thought that an upstart like Amazon could catch up and surpass the mighty Walmart.
EVERY monopoly has been aided, abetted or CREATED by government interference. Less government means more competition.
You aren't looking at this thing properly. When a corporation gets too big, they become the ones who are in charge of the "Jack booted thugs."
I urge you to examine the economic model that was Nazi Germany. It featured a system based on this sort of crony capitalism between huge corporations and Government.
Lots of room to improve service beyond 24x7. I mean that, right now, I have to sometimes wait 48 hours for my good to be delivered! That is so unacceptable. I want it NOW!
I'm no lawyer, but it seems that this inconvenient point would undermine any antitrust action against Amazon.
It's also worth noting that we heard the same nonsense when Wal-Mart was allegedly taking over the world, too.
SAME DAY delivery?
I was shopping for art supplies with my daughter and found the same sketchbook on Amazon for $10 cheaper. I have Prime, so I ordered it right from the retail store in which we were shopping. A few hours later, ON A SUNDAY, while we were having lunch, I got a pop-up message that my order was delivered.
“BS!” I shouted. But, when I got home, there it was.
I disagree. Anytime a corporation corners a market, the "how" of it is irrelevant. What matters is the result of letting one Corporation own an entire market with no effective competition.
Power must be distributed. We can never let any single entity hold so much power, regardless of how they came to hold so much power.
Amazon is a different story. A lot of things I would normally get from Amazon Prime can be had less expensively by ordering and having it delivered for free to a local Ace or Walmart. I intend to do that more often. But, that fact it that Amazon is VERY convenient and once you have that Prime membership it is so easy to click click click.
All monopolies lower costs for consumers at first. That's how they eliminate competition and become monopolies. Once they are established and all significant competition is gone, watch what happens then.
And there you go.
Further proof that it is GOVERNMENT that creates and enforces monopolies. It is in the nature of a competitor to seek an advantage, even if it means lobbying for special government favors. They owe me nothing.
The government, however, is an entity that owes me every allegiance. When things like “regulatory capture” create and enforce monopolies, we have a problem.
> How much more than 7 days a week can you expand? <
Maybe Amazon is operating under the old French Revolutionary Calendar. That calendar had 10 days a week.
I would say this is especially true with food distribution.
Worse is the fact that they control the vast majority of the news that Americans use to make their decisions in elections. They have used this power to put human garbage into office (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) and they have seriously damaged the nation as a consequence of their election meddling through their fake news services.
We need to be breaking up a lot of monopolies.
Probably a stupid idea but also largely impossible: no one is congress would ever vote against their corporate masters
As soon as I saw that Amazon was starting to expand its operation to include its own delivery vehicles I knew the company was in trouble. If a country with such huge volumes of freight can't even make money with FedEx and UPS competing for its business, what makes it think it can do that "last-mile" delivery process any more efficiently than those giants in the shipping business?
For some, their natural state of existence is as vassals to an aristocracy.
Make no mistake about it, what we are seeing in this nation and around the world is a resurgence of the Aristocracy system, with the Billionaires becoming defacto "Lords."
re: online ordering
Heard on the radio news this morning that UPS (IIRC) is going to start adding a surcharge to shipping around Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Christmas.
I would expect other carriers to either follow that or ramp up their PR as being against it.
Walmart is trying hard to get into the online ordering. They already have pick-up service at many of their stores.
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