Amazon Is Crushing Main Street and Threatening the Vitality of Our Communities [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/amazon-crushing-main-street-and-threatening-vitality-our




It's that time of year—Thanksgiving holiday will be here soon, and we'll gorge ourselves on good food. And then we'll get to celebrate black Friday (the frenzy-filled shopping Friday right after Thanksgiving, which has actually encroached on Thanksgiving in recent years) and cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving when retail marketers encourage us to shop online). And, if we're shopping online, odds are good that we'll shop on Amazon.com. Maybe we should rethink that.

Even by the anything-goes ethical code of the corporate jungle, Amazon.com's CEO, Jeff Bezos, is considered a ruthless predator by businesses that deal with him. He has the monopoly power to stalk, weaken and even kill off retail competitors -- from giants as Barnes & Noble and Walmart, to hundreds of small Main Street shops.

If you think "predator" is too harsh a term, consider the metaphor that Bezos chose when explaining how to approach small book publishers to make them cough up ever-deeper discounts: stalk them "the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle."

Amazon's zip-zip, direct-to-customer Internet business structure ripped right through the segmented system of publishers, wholesalers, distributors, bookstores and big-box retailers -- and quickly became a monopolistic powerhouse. Today, this one corporation sells a stunning 40 percent of all new books, up from 12 percent five years ago.