It probably won't be long before Amazon decides to crush the U.S. Postal Service altogether. There is talk of the Trump administration privatizing the USPS, but I don’t think that should be our biggest fear—people could be mobilized to defend that institution. But what if Jeff Bezos decides to destroy it? Amazon, which now has a giant, highly efficient shipping apparatus, could open brick-and-mortar shipping stores by post offices around the country and start offering person to person shipping. The USPS, which is creaky and inefficient, will be further financially damaged by Amazon undercutting it on prices and speed. There’s a law against private carriers using federal mailboxes, but the Trump administration wants to change that, and even if they don’t, I’m sure “Amazon boxes” would start popping up next to people’s ordinary mailboxes. What use will there be for a postal service anymore? With Amazon’s giant fleet of vehicles and network of warehouses, why couldn’t it run the mail? (This not some far-off dystopian idea; it has already been suggested that Amazon displace public libraries.)
Amazon is ruthless and they will never stop expanding into more and more areas of life. They went from the “world’s biggest bookstore” to the “everything store” to the “everything business.” That means they dominate cloud computing (40% of all of it occurs on Amazon Web Services), they own grocery stores and a movie studio, and they are trying to “slowly take over all shipping and logistics direct from manufacturers in China and India.” They are the second-largest employer in the United States; more people work for Amazon than live in the entire U.S. state of Vermont.
So expect to see more and more Amazon in your life. They’ll probably do healthcare soon enough. Amazon clinics. They’ll build private roads to save Prime members from traffic. They’ll enter the rideshare business—why not? Will Amazon’s delivery drones be weaponized and sold to the military? I don’t see why not—the military is certainly buying. Amazon has such colossal power that it can dominate almost anyone it chooses to take on. They win, in part because the services they offer to customers are usually cheap and high-quality, in part because they do not care about making money, they care about building power.
Do not think by “cheap and high-quality” I mean that Amazon is good. The company’s “customer first” policy is also an “employees last” policy. (Actually, employees don’t last, they die on the warehouse floor after being reprimanded for failing to ship packages efficiently enough.) Amazon is incredible from the buyer’s perspective—anything I want, delivered overnight! But that’s only possible because there are thousands of people rushing around trying to make sure everyone gets their stuff on time and terrified of being automatically fired if they can’t meet their quotas.
Jeff Bezos and Amazon are smart. They know how to keep public opinion from turning against them. They make sure their customers are well taken care of, and that everyone is a customer, so that everyone has had some kind of positive experience with Amazon. When they are shamed over their pitiful wages, they raise them just enough to keep people from complaining, and then present themselves as a leader on wages. As a result, though we lefties despise them, they are one of the most popular companies in America.
That means that they will continue to slowly wrap their tentacles around everything. It is already becoming impossible to “boycott” Amazon—half the websites you visit use Amazon Web Services, the more they grow, the more futile it becomes to try to use “consumer choice” to stay away from Amazon. But that does not mean we should resign ourself to the “Bezos future.” You might not worry about Amazon displacing the postal service. After all, it would be more efficient. The postal service is bureaucratic. It hasn’t innovated.
But what Amazon is slowly building is a terrifying feudalistic “private government.” There is no democracy in Amazon: workers obey orders, and if they do not obey orders, they are terminated. Now, imagine if termination also meant the company would take away your access to Amazon’s services forever. The more dominant Amazon becomes, the more power it wields over individuals. The typical libertarian response to the tyranny of the Amazon workplace is: “if workers don’t like it they can quit” (which is like saying that if people don’t like living under dictatorships they should emigrate). But what if they make it harder and harder to quit? If Amazon is paying for your school (because we don’t have free public college), then you’ll feel much more intense pressure to not to drop below your package fulfillment quota. Oh, sure, we have some workplace safety regulations that should theoretically keep them from working you to death. But they’ll just ignore those, and nobody will do anything, because Amazon can easily buy its way out of any problem. (If you try suing them, good luck taking on their giant team of lawyers; plus you’ve already signed away your right to a day in court).
It is important to consider how all of this will continue to unfold, because we are slowly handing more and more control to a single company and a single man, and they are less and less accountable to anyone.
Amazon is ruthless and they will never stop expanding into more and more areas of life. They went from the “world’s biggest bookstore” to the “everything store” to the “everything business.” That means they dominate cloud computing (40% of all of it occurs on Amazon Web Services), they own grocery stores and a movie studio, and they are trying to “slowly take over all shipping and logistics direct from manufacturers in China and India.” They are the second-largest employer in the United States; more people work for Amazon than live in the entire U.S. state of Vermont. So expect to see more and more Amazon in your life. They’ll probably do healthcare soon enough. Amazon clinics. They’ll build private roads to save Prime members from traffic. They’ll enter the rideshare business—why not? Will Amazon’s delivery drones be weaponized and sold to the military? I don’t see why not—the military is certainly buying. Amazon has such colossal power that it can dominate almost anyone it chooses to take on. They win, in part because the services they offer to customers are usually cheap and high-quality, in part because they do not care about making money, they care about building power.
Do not think by “cheap and high-quality” I mean that Amazon is good. The company’s “customer first” policy is also an “employees last” policy. (Actually, employees don’t last, they die on the warehouse floor after being reprimanded for failing to ship packages efficiently enough.) Amazon is incredible from the buyer’s perspective—anything I want, delivered overnight! But that’s only possible because there are thousands of people rushing around trying to make sure everyone gets their stuff on time and terrified of being automatically fired if they can’t meet their quotas.
Jeff Bezos and Amazon are smart. They know how to keep public opinion from turning against them. They make sure their customers are well taken care of, and that everyone is a customer, so that everyone has had some kind of positive experience with Amazon. When they are shamed over their pitiful wages, they raise them just enough to keep people from complaining, and then present themselves as a leader on wages. As a result, though we lefties despise them, they are one of the most popular companies in America.
That means that they will continue to slowly wrap their tentacles around everything. It is already becoming impossible to “boycott” Amazon—half the websites you visit use Amazon Web Services, the more they grow, the more futile it becomes to try to use “consumer choice” to stay away from Amazon. But that does not mean we should resign ourself to the “Bezos future.” You might not worry about Amazon displacing the postal service. After all, it would be more efficient. The postal service is bureaucratic. It hasn’t innovated.
But what Amazon is slowly building is a terrifying feudalistic “private government.” There is no democracy in Amazon: workers obey orders, and if they do not obey orders, they are terminated. Now, imagine if termination also meant the company would take away your access to Amazon’s services forever. The more dominant Amazon becomes, the more power it wields over individuals. The typical libertarian response to the tyranny of the Amazon workplace is: “if workers don’t like it they can quit” (which is like saying that if people don’t like living under dictatorships they should emigrate). But what if they make it harder and harder to quit? If Amazon is paying for your school (because we don’t have free public college), then you’ll feel much more intense pressure to not to drop below your package fulfillment quota. Oh, sure, we have some workplace safety regulations that should theoretically keep them from working you to death. But they’ll just ignore those, and nobody will do anything, because Amazon can easily buy its way out of any problem. (If you try suing them, good luck taking on their giant team of lawyers; plus you’ve already signed away your right to a day in court).
It is important to consider how all of this will continue to unfold, because we are slowly handing more and more control to a single company and a single man, and they are less and less accountable to anyone.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
