There are two happy people in this story and one unhappy one. But the fact that there is an unhappy one doesn’t seem like nearly enough to me to decide it shouldn’t have played out like it did.
Does it seem like enough to you? If not, what other common element would this story have to have to decide it shouldn’t have happened?
But, the second, more negative thing is that a lot of the inefficiencies removed by these companies were in the form of livelihoods for many people, or adherence to various regulations and laws that was a lot easier to omit with IT in the middle. Examples would be the Mom-and-Pop retail stores going out of business or Uber breaking taxi regulations.
Like you said, Bezos didn't set out to bankrupt Mom&Pop, it was just an unfortunate side-effect of using IT. The thing that I think pg is missing is that projects where this happens are exploitative to a degree, and is why they get rightfully criticized.
As an example: we killed tons of movie rental businesses by switching to Netflix. Life is much better now for everyone who isn't a movie rental store owner, which is almost everyone.
Small business doesn't mean good business and big business doesn't mean bad business. What matters to me is the net effect, and in most cases with Amazon, the net effect is very positive.
The same is true for Google, Uber, and Facebook and most big tech successes. The ratio of bad:good is just worse for some of them than for others, making it harder to judge.
They provide dignified employment (as opposed to invisible work in a warehouse), they encourage entrepreneurship, they increase the tax base of a locality (by ensuring money stays within a local economy), and they contribute to local culture, community and character.
Amazon killing small businesses has sucked even more of the life force out of small towns, and that’s sad because said towns were already shellacked by the death of manufacturing.
It’s hard to argue with Amazon’s excellent customer experience, but the externalities involved are nontrivial and IMO outweigh the benefits.
I would also claim that keeping taxes in the local economy, while a very worthy goal, does not require the presence of small business. Big business can be made to support local community and culture. Just because the Walmart headquarters are outside of my small town, doesn't mean they don't have to pay a percentage of their earnings from the local warehouse to that community.
Also, minor grammar nit, you may have meant to use "shell-shocked" instead of "shellacked", but shell-shocked wouldn't fit the context you're going for either.
The small businesses you say were exploitative is because they were the only shot in town. i.e in a monopolistic position.
multiple small businesses result in a robust economy. if one goes bust there's plenty to keep providing a similar service. MSB's enable other auxiliary business look at Japan | German's economy for an example - mutliple suppliers etc. more employment. Guess the jobs the masses work at amazon - drivers, warehouse workers.
What amazon, provides could've been easily provided by a standardized api connecting different small merchants. some industries already do this - a flower shop needs roses, it can easily contact another flower shop to get roses to it's customers. everyone wins.
netflix yeah was a net positive. it's content so end of day, it was going to be aggregated in Ben Thompson's terms.
Uber is good for me as a consumer. But is it good for the driver, for the environment. if the US had robust public transportation, Uber wouldn't be necessary.
Amazon is substantially worse on most (if not all) of those metrics.
In the case of small bookstores, they think it is enough to toss books on the shelf and wait for people to come browsing. Well, I can now browse from bed.
Then they need to do something that cannot be scaled. Being a general bookseller can easily be scaled.
This is a little glib. There's nothing most of these small business can do.
EDIT: forgot to add, I suspect there are many things small bookstores could do in terms of building a local community (in-person and online) of people who love books, improving discovery options for new books from that community, that kind of thing. So maybe they should be doing that i.e. “do things that don’t scale” to try and delight their users more than amazon does, in a way where their lack of scale is an advantage?
Even big businesses facing Amazon have done very little to compete.
As book store owner, I really think it's an irrational decision to invest heavily in fighting Amazon. You're chances of success are pretty slim.
As for big businesses ? Well, there's Walmart, Target.
In the end, the e-commerce industry is a place where most of the market share would be controlled by a few large companies. That was clear from the beginning.
This again, is glib.
To suggest that you somehow know all these vendors have 'not tried anything'.
How about lobbying government to subsidize their business like the US Government subsidizes delivery? Or the VAT tax breaks that Amazon gets? Or the fact that Amazon is dumping merchandise on the US by selling for negative margins, paid for by profits out of AWS?
A local bookstore has 6 staff. They have no power.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-amazon-history-fa...
I've come to the conclusion that to be a CEO you have to wear these blinders and have faith that overall your company is a positive good for the world. That means that when you have a low performing employee you have to fire him even though you know that it may cause terrible consequences for him and his family.