Right, but the point is how many jobs does Amazon create delivering all those goods to you compared to say a Sears or Walmart?

The modern day middlemen are doing a better job with way less people. Hence the Retail Apocalypse...

But if you read the article it describes a lot of businesses which are profitable and could plod along, except they're saddled with tons of debt from leveraged buyouts.

That struck me as bogus.

In other words, they're saying the businesses aren't profitable enough to service debt loads that were thought to be sustainable debt loads a few years ago.

That still points to lower than expected retail profit. Interest rates have been unusually low for more than a decade, so it's not like a credit spike changed the assumptions.

It calls out some of this debt being from 2007, and some cursory checking on my part suggests things were picking up again to a notable degree more recently. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uslbo/cheap-financing-fuel...

Anyway, at best it contributes to a negative feedback loop.

>thought to be sustainable debt loads a few years ago.

No, the debt was never sustainable. Essentially the banks allowed loans which were gigantic ponzi schemes.

Retail: "Our growth will continue forever!"

Banks: Hmm, we got bit pretty hard on these home loans and need somewhere else to make money, "Forever growth is like infinite money, I like money!", "Here is 10 billion dollars, just remember to pay us back in 2017".

Google used to provide rare value: large scale of organization of information. They also philanthropically raised standards f the web: way better mail service, map service.

They raised the standards, but you're delusional if you think they did it philanthropically. They did it because they thought they could get more info to sell ads.

Oh yeah, I missed an edit I never meant to say it was out of pure altruism. But it was a new kind of move at the time.