Wal-Mart is an old retailer with a lot of physical stores and a well-established business model.

Amazon is a young software company with the world’s biggest Internet store, the world’s biggest computer apparatus, and a bunch of other things I probably don’t even know about.

But it’s the software thing that’s the important bit. Software is intelligence, intelligence is efficiency, and Amazon is software first. In any “old” industry it wants to enter, it becomes, by default, the smartest competitor therein. It will start out with better logistics than the incumbent industry experts with decades of experience.

It’s like Amazon has a 20-point IQ advantage in anything it wants to do. Or more.

A scary competitor. Scarier than anything from the Robber Baron era.

If everyone else sucks so much that they can't provide a better service, then why is it a bad thing for them to fail?

The best thing for consumers is to have quality products for low prices.

people who work for the wages amazon pays in fulfillment centers cannot afford to live in amazon's own home town, which has now become a massive homeless camp.

all of this "inefficiency" in the market, when eliminated, is not going to become money in consumers pockets. its going to become money in Amazons pockets, especially as Amazon becomes a bigger and bigger monopoly.

most people do not own any kind of stock, so the benefit to the stock market will not help them.

it also obliterates the tax base of every single town in the united states, rendering basic services like education and road maintenance completely un-funded -> this is essentially a lowering in the general standard of living for the entire country, for the theoretical fulfillment of a 19th century economics model where supposedly the pinnacle of human life is buying cheap products.

Walmart was the company that first did the destruction of cities because it wiped out the downtown core of little towns with their big box on the corner. Now amazon is doing is again to broad swatches of countries.