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 ...
Fast Company is a techie lib mag, akin to the bloggers Rush talks about. This is fun watching libs battle lib for who hates capitalism the most.
Nothing being in trouble about them getting into their own delivery business. They make plenty of profit, they just saw a way to keep more of it. The primary reason for their own delivery is that way when UPS or FedEx have strikes it doesn’t effect them. When you’re in the guaranteed delivery business things like the UPS air maintenance strike that’s being threatened can screw you up. It’s the same reason ESPN develops so much of their own programming, those sports strikes made their lives difficult. It’s bad enough being beholden to your own labor difficulties, but other companies’ labor woes messing with your business is something to be avoided.
Remember, Amazon IS profitable, they are VERY profitable. They just don’t sit on money. If you take out the cost of their 4 acquisitions a year you’ll see they make a ton of profit.
“Seemed to work well with that AT&T company.”
Maybe we can call them the Baby Amazonians.
+1
Does anyone really think some government organization or committee of bureaucrats would be able to make things better?
They really don’t make a profit now. A few quarters ago they were taking money from CapEx to show a profit. They have never paid any dividends either.
From a far left Liberal rag.
I got a couple of Amazon USPS shipments on Sundays. I was surprised that they were not diverted to Monday delivery.
I live in a small town of about 14,000 in NW Arkansas.
I did notice that the delivery vehicles were not the regular mail truck.
I tend to agree here. Where Bezos sucks - WaPo - he will fail and it will violate his business sense to keep feeding blood into failure. However, where he is modernizing and improving retail efficiency he will gain markets for the same reason that at one time Walmart exploded. Now WalMart is dirty, old and tired...in many regions serving mostly immigrants and the poor on EBT cards. And Amazon meets the needs of those with some money to spend today by using innovation, efficiency, convenience and pricing.
It is their day and their business is run extremely well and is highly innovative. They are serving their customers, not abusing them. They will have their day until technology changes or a better plan appears.
“It was an evil system capable of horrible wrongs.”
If you look at all the heads of these tech monopolies, they’re loyal to one party and a leftist ideology.
The media, judges, lawyers loyal to one party and a leftist ideology.
That, my friends, is how America goes nazi germany. Watch sophie scholls on youtube for how that turns out for the people.
I looked at the market cap of Kroger yesterday and it was only about $19 Billion, so for a premium they could have bought Kroger for say between $25 and $35 Billion then you really would have something to talk about.
An excellent point, and one I hadn’t thought about.
Also, the public taste for entertainment is pretty low. People want free books, music, TV.
Probably because it’s a relatively cheap experiment. They’ve been sliding into the grocery business for a while, and working on the last mile. This expands them in both those markets for what, for them, isn’t much money (I know 14 billion sounds like a lot, but when your cap is close to 500 billion it really isn’t). So if the experiment fails not that big a deal, they’ve lost a higher percentage of their worth on expansions before. If it succeeds though they’ve got all these new positive corporate relationships, more customer data, and improvement to their delivery. Also WF was ripe for a take over anyway, they had successfully changed the grocery business in America (just look at the “hippy” section in every grocery store that didn’t used to exist) but their addiction to being “boutique” was pricing them out of the market. WF has vast name recognition, far in excess of their actual market penetration, so to the move SOUNDS big, while actually being small.
Please do not put communist words into my mouth. I am not suggesting that their earnings be distributed, I am suggesting that their business cannot be allowed to remain under the control of a small corporate oligarchy.
The Bell system was broken up into several regional corporations. Perhaps that is a solution.
I'm not offering specifics, I'm just noting that company such as Amazon will eventually be in the position of wielding enormous power over food and other material distribution, and I believe too much power concentrated in two few hands is a recipe for disaster.
At what point do they become to big? Who decides that? The free market should decide how big a company gets, and the company is free to do as they wish with regard to profits, etc. IMHO.
And so I take it you have never heard of "Standard Oil"?
Apart from that, some of these corporations are becoming globe spanning behemoths. They have gotten into the habit of doing what is best for themselves over what is best for the Nations from which they originate.
I'm looking forward to it. Amazon will be building a distribution center in my town over the next few years.
Over the last year in my online ordering I have noticed that several packages which were not purchased on Amazon but were purchased probably on eBay came within days in an Amazon Prime box.
Some eBay vendors apparently are using Amazon Prime to obtain their merchandise and ship. I wonder how much profit is in that practice?
Certainly Amazon Prime is making a profit but the vendors on eBay? What value does that serve eBay vendors to do so?
Also, I was rather looking forward to ordering Whole Foods dry goods via Amazon Prime and having those purchases delivered to my door. Otherwise it’s a 50-mile round-trip. I sort of like the idea.
But then again I still recognize Walmart as a leading distributor of goods during natural disasters, which was proven during Katrina. The only distribution Network that existed and was effectively able to bring dire needed supplies into the New Orleans area was Walmart.
Those supplies were not only used for the populace that was in a crisis situation, but also for the responders who had no access to any logistical resources or supply lines, and they too benefited from the quick response and expertise of the Walmart distribution Network.
Is it wrong to applauded successful capitalist ventures? Employment does not suffer from large corporations providing employment for those goods and services.
I remember 20 or 30 years ago if you lived in a small town all those wonderful mom and pop stores employed Family members or relatives and if you were not a family member or relative of a store owner you had to leave town to find work. Walmart comes along puts all the mom and pop fiefdom out of business (sadly?) I think, and employs hundreds of people who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to work in the areas that they were raised, or settled, or were downsized.
When it comes to the present “American reality” in America concerning jobs, and the general landscape, I always have to tell myself “we’re not in Kansas anymore” this is what it takes for a capitalist country to feed, clothe, and employ 230+ million residents.
There have been some responsibility issues over the course of time that have been successfully corrected concerning environmental abuses, workers rights, etcetera, but I think progress and compatibility with communities that these entities work in is much more favorable. With one glaring exception. And exception seems to be the work around that corporations have had to take or make to skirt the government Healthcare System that was put in place during the Obama Administration. Now we see creative scheduling which taxes the poor employee because their hours or so convoluted - all because of the Mandate that employers would have to pick up the tab for the health care if their worker carried over a certain amount of hours. That needs to be corrected ASAP!
We’e got one in Indianapolis.
My Prime deliveries are always two days or less.
Won’t happen. That would call for a massive investment that I don’t think they can do. As it is right now they are getting creamed by shipping costs no matter what they do. To expand to the size of a UPS or FeDEx is beyond their ability to do so.
Not yet, but that will eventually come if we keep going in this direction. More to the point, these corporations will control the government (we already have a lot of that going on) and through it, the Jack booted thugs will march to whatever need these corporations have.
Sorry, but a company expanding market share because they are able to deliver better products and services at better prices is not fascism, or whatever cute phrase you want to substitute for fascism.
You are really stuck on that "free market" theology. Well the father of this "free market" stuff was Adam Smith, and I strongly urge you to read what he had to say about monopolies and how they come to be. Read "Wealth of Nations", especially the parts about cornering markets and creating Monopolies.
You are speaking in the manner of someone that does not comprehend the threat that monopolies constitute.
And Comcast.
I take an opposite point of view. It’d be nice if we got all bureaucrats out of cyberspace, as urged by Vonage co-founder, Dan Berlinger, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=167u99Z4Tf0&feature=youtu.be
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