
Is Amazon Unstoppable? - ericzawo
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/21/is-amazon-unstoppable
======
joefourier
I never understood this obsession with Amazon. Their online store does not
offer particularly good value apart from fast shipping for commodity items.
It’s convenient, but there’s plenty of competition: you can get many of the
same goods on AliExpress or eBay for a lot cheaper. And when you need
something more specific like audio equipment, electronics components or even a
Raspberry Pi, you’ll need to go to a specialised online store as it’s unlikely
to be available on Amazon, and if it is it won’t be Prime and will have a
massive mark-up.

Their cloud offering are the real money-maker, although I’m not personally a
fan due to their high price and non-intuitive interface.

~~~
ekianjo
> Their online store does not offer particularly good value apart from fast
> shipping for commodity items

you forgot the excellent return policy, almost no question asked. Before
Amazon that was almost unthinkable and you would wait weeks to be paid back.

They have improved e-commerce to the point that it's better than most other
previous (online) shopping experiences.

~~~
benhurmarcel
It used to be better, not anymore. I used to buy on Amazon first, but these
days on Amazon I've had too many fake products, and refurbished products sold
as new.

True, they refund easily. But I'd rather not have to return half of my
purchases.

~~~
notyourwork
Half sounds like a over dramatization of a minority issue.

~~~
kardos
Even if it was 10% used-products-sold-as-new, that's not acceptable.

~~~
ericd
I’ve ordered hundreds of items from Amazon, I’ve never gotten any that I
thought were used.

------
hos234
They do have a weakness - Search.

There are a trillion products in a trillion categories and some meaningless
small number get displayed on the first search result page. This is obviously
highly abnormal and their own search teams will tell you that.

It creates unmonitorable arms races, unnatural uniformity across myriad
cultures and thought processes, pissed sellers, frustrated customers and just
bubbling tensions of all kinds.

It's like taking all the animals and plants in the world throwing them on an
island and telling visitors they experience everything through a magic window,
but 10 at a time. Ofcourse they cant. If you know what you want to see -
great! If not its just a useless experience.

------
paulpauper
It's funny how there are two concurrent narratives:

...the media portrays Amazon as this awful company that stiffs its employees
and is destroying jobs and making the world a terrible place in the name of
lower price and convenience.

...and yet Amazon is hugely popular with consumers, and Amazon is the second-
biggest employer in the US, and there is huge demand for Amazon jobs in spite
of the media's insistence of how bad Amazon is and how bad such jobs are.

All these people looking to work at Amazon apparently didn't get the media's
memo

~~~
mschuster91
The thing is, even a shit job at Amazon is better than no job at all, which is
what Amazon (and other logistics and low wage employers) exploits.

The only thing to fix this power difference is job safety and conditions
regulation.

~~~
ohduran
Wait, so a job at Amazon is better than anything else, and you complain about
Amazon? Why not complaining about anything else?

------
ohduran
"Can Anyone Catch Nokia" \- Forbes magazine, 2007

~~~
paulpauper
there is no comparison though. this time is really different. there is nothing
that can compete and compare to amazon's distribution network and marketshare
in the same way that Apple was able to upset the smartphone market.

~~~
ohduran
Oh, but it is. Can Amazon live up to the unbounded expectations place upon it?
No. Anything short of "complete world domination" is not doing it.

There are markets where the situation is quite worse than those where Amazon
is. One is, for instance, search. You don't even search anything: you google
it.

------
throwawaysea
The overall bias of this article is apparent from the very beginning. This is
probably a good time to refer to [https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-
bias-ratings](https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings), which
lists The New Yorker as having a far-left bias.

The caption below the image next to the headline:

> Bezos, reportedly worth a hundred and fourteen billion dollars, has donated
> less than three per cent of his wealth to charity.

Why is this caption relevant to the topic that the article purports to speak
to in the title? And why is the opening paragraph just an unsubstantiated
rumor about Jeff Bezos snubbing Bill Gates in an apparent act of vanity? Why
mention something without evidence, except to influence the reader in bad
faith? And again, why is it relevant to the title?

A significant portion of this article is based on the opinion of one former
employee, Ian Freed. Other quotes are similarly anecdotal, without
representation of opposing perspectives. And the focus shifts from topic to
topic abruptly, without pausing to critically question the points that are
hastily presented. For example, Biden's comparison of Amazon's corporate taxes
to tax rates for firefighters/teachers is nonsensical. It would make more
sense to compare the personal tax rates of Amazon employees to
firefighters/teachers.

I will note the article isn't all bad. I thought the story about Birkenstock
was fair - counterfeits do threaten the value of brands. The bit about the
positive side of warehouse jobs for workers left behind in other industries
was also surprising. And I think anti-trust concerns were presented well.

But a lot of this very lengthy article seems to be an unfocused spray of
information that presents one side of the story on many different facets,
without much of a cohesive narrative.

~~~
thundergolfer
The fact that the site you linked puts The New York Times in the furthest left
category is completely invalidating. It’s actually laughable.

Anarchism, Syndicalism, Communism. Those are far-left ideologies. The New York
Times is centrist. It’s editorial section is _explicitly_ pro-capitalism.

~~~
Twixes
The US is extraordinarily skewed to the right economically, so healthcare for
all is a controversy and outlets like the NYT are considered leftist.

------
libertine
As an Amazon seller I have a growing belief that Amazon size and support
approach via AI will be their compromise.

AI can't offer good customer support, and won't offer good customer support
for the foreseeable future (at least in my eyes).

As an Amazon customer (in the EU), it still lacks a lot of choice, but prices
are good for some items. Yet anything that would require a bit of customer
support I wouldn't buy it on Amazon.

And by customer support I don't mean: "give me a refund".

A refund is the last thing I want when I buy a product - it means what I got
didn't help me at all. It wasted my time, and I still have a problem.

With this said, ecommerce wise, I think Amazon is a giant with a lot of flaws
bound to their size, that can be tackled by other players.

------
fouc
Is Google Unstoppable?

At this point Amazon is probably the less evil corporation compared to Google.

~~~
AllanHoustonSt
As far as Search as a product goes, Google is basically unstoppable IMO.
They’re just far and away ahead of everyone else in both the engineering and
theoretical side. They have the best infra for it and will keep their lead
because they also get by far the most data for search which just goes into a
positive feedback loop.

The gap between Google Search and any other Search competitor is way way way
larger than say.. AWS and any other direct competitor.

In order for Google to be challenged on the Search front, I think it’ll
require a fundamental change (in medium) in the way people prefer looking
things up on the Internet. Which is obviously an incredibly difficult
question.

~~~
fouc
DDG is quite good, rarely do I need to resort to Google.

I wasn't really talking about Search.. Google has a lot of products now and
they're all designed to further its goals of collecting information on people
and otherwise controlling the internet. Chrome, DNS, AMP, Android, etc.

~~~
codq
With a .41% market share, DuckDuckGo is no threat to Google.

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Web_search_engine#/Market_share](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Web_search_engine#/Market_share)

~~~
AllanHoustonSt
Really surprised Baidu isn't higher.

------
spodek
_Amazon.com_ means _garbage_ to me.

Mainly because I see how much garbage from them ends up in my building's
trash. And my city's trash.

The most visible is their packaging, but their ease-of-ordering leads to most
of the products people buy from them being stupid shit nobody needs or wants
beyond the moment someone's urge leads them to buy it now.

I suggest that most of us would be happier and the world cleaner if Amazon
located its warehouses next to landfills and when people bought things they
simply moved the products from the warehouse to the landfill, skipping the
steps of shipping them to the person for them to throw them out. For example,
my city, New York's, Department of Sanitation cost would drop from 1.6 billion
annually and our noise would drop with fewer trash trucks.

Of course I'm overstating, but the longer you go without using them, the less
you'll consider it overstatement. If you haven't, I recommend going without
for six months or a year.

~~~
paulpauper
umm...let us suppose that instead of amazon producing the garbage, it's split
among dozens of smaller companies. Would it matter. Economic activity will
produce waste whether it is from a single company or multiple ones. it's just
that amazon is a bigger target.

~~~
Konnstann
I think the idea is that the convenience of Amazon causes economic activity
that otherwise wouldn't happen. Personally, I've never bought any knickknacks
off of the site, but I definitely see enough marginally-useful garbage when I
am browsing to understand the parent's point.

~~~
spodek
Exactly.

Plus, at least in a city, we can buy from local places that used less
packaging and shipping in total life analysis.

------
kbos87
Amazon is only unstoppable if we let them be. The world would be a much more
interesting place for founders and employees if amazon were limited to being
1/100th its size.

~~~
jjeaff
I don't disagree. But I find it interesting that Amazon is thought of as this
juggernaut when Walmart has literally double the revenue they do.

Sure, they may be going in the right direction, but the amount of product they
are moving and their bargaining power as a buyer pales in comparison to wmt.
Especially considering that a large chunk of their revenue is from non retail
services and fees from 3rd party sellers, the products of which they may never
touch.

~~~
coldtea
> _But I find it interesting that Amazon is thought of as this juggernaut when
> Walmart has literally double the revenue they do._

It's the momentum not the revenue.

It's also the domains it affects.

~~~
Merrill
2017 to 2018 Amazon grew from $103 to $121B revenues or by $18B, while Walmart
grew from $375 to $388B or by $13B. However, Amazon's revenues include some
fast growing areas such as AWS, so the revenues they are taking away from
other retailers are probably about the same.

Amazon's impact on retail may be felt more because it sells a vast variety of
products, which makes a lot of the small boutique stores in malls no longer
viable. That space has to be converted to services or close.

[https://stores.org/stores-top-retailers-2019/](https://stores.org/stores-top-
retailers-2019/)

[https://stores.org/stores-top-retailers-2018/](https://stores.org/stores-top-
retailers-2018/)

~~~
coldtea
> _2017 to 2018 Amazon grew from $103 to $121B revenues or by $18B, while
> Walmart grew from $375 to $388B or by $13B. However, Amazon 's revenues
> include some fast growing areas such as AWS, so the revenues they are taking
> away from other retailers are probably about the same._

Momentum is more about relative growth than absolute numbers (13 vs 18). And
longer term than just 2017-2018.

E.g. like this:

[https://mgmresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Amazon-
vs...](https://mgmresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Amazon-vs-Walmart-
Revenue-Growth-1999-2018.png)

[https://cdn.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/m_LcpuimdJcrjLyGV0Ps4UI4-H8=...](https://cdn.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/m_LcpuimdJcrjLyGV0Ps4UI4-H8=/0x0:5001x2764/1200x0/filters:focal\(0x0:5001x2764\):no_upscale\(\)/cdn.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8506691/Amazon_versus_walmart_market_value_01.png)

[https://mgmresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Amazon-
vs...](https://mgmresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Amazon-vs-Walmart-
Net-Income.png)

[https://newharborllc.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/20171205...](https://newharborllc.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/20171205-Amazon-Growth.png)

------
sveme
I wonder whether there is already a law that states:

"Whenever the media implies that a hegemon will be at the number one spot
forever, it will mark the start of its decline".

~~~
boldslogan
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean#Oth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean#Other_examples)

"If a business organisation has a highly profitable quarter, despite the
underlying reasons for its performance being unchanged, it is likely to do
less well the next quarter."

so something similar...if a buisness is featured as number one...it is likely
to do less well in the future...

------
mooreds
This is a great post about a different perspective on Amazon:
[https://zackkanter.com/2019/03/13/what-is-
amazon/](https://zackkanter.com/2019/03/13/what-is-amazon/)

It also talks about the flywheels and how advertising is taking Amazon down
the wrong path.

------
cs702
I just finished reading this well-researched and well-written article, and the
best way I can summarize it is with a quote from _The Dark Knight_ :

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the
villain."[a]

\--

[a]
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_(film)](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_\(film\))

------
Merrill
Someone who recently became a new first-time mom credits Amazon's same-day
delivery, Target's same-day pickup, and a supermarket's online order / bring
to your car service with making life a lot easier.

Her sister, who had kids last decade, is jealous. I don't think consumers want
to stop Amazon.

------
jdkee
It is only unstoppable to the extent that there is no political will to
regulate or break it up.

------
m463
It will be stopped by a company that either doesn't exist or is a startup now.

IBM > Microsoft > Google > Duck Duck Go

~~~
monitorman
Duck Duck Go? Really?

~~~
m463
(tongue in cheek)

The point was that large unstoppable incumbents have always been replaced with
something nobody expected.

(that said, monsanto and debeers are still around)

~~~
isostatic
IBM is still around. So is Microsoft. So is Google.

~~~
m463
IBM was unstoppable, then Microsoft came from nowhere.

Microsoft was unstoppable, then nonexistent Google appeared.

(yeah, microsoft/google/apple have vied for "current top money vaccum")

~~~
nickv
As a reminder, Microsoft is the largest company in the world and has a 25%
larger marketcap than Google.

I find it funny that so many people think Microsoft was "stopped" by Google.
They adapted and they are stronger now than in the 90s as a business.

------
joeblow9999
good to see betteridge's law going strong

------
11235813213455
I'm more concerned about the health of Amazon Forest

