A surprising number of people hate Amazon. I say “surprising” because I don’t understand their animus. Sure, they send us a huge amount of what amounts to spam, have an unfriendly attitude towards organized labor—at least as concerns their own labor force—and have effectively cornered the ebook market. But consider: if you’re a customer is their advertising a price you’re willing to pay to have reasonably-priced, needed staples delivered to you door in this time of COVID-19? If you’re an employee, are you happy to have a job to go to, even if—despite Amazon’s precautions—there might be some risk involved? Before you dismiss that question, ask a restaurant worker what they think. My life during the last few months would have been considerably more complicated without them.
Many people are advocating for the DOJ to take antitrust action against Amazon. Byrne Hobart has an interesting article that considers the case for this in his newsletter, The Diff. Such things are not really in Irreal’s purview but I think the article will be interesting to many Irreal readers. Hobart begins with a long section on how Amazon works and makes its money. It’s a lot more complicated than you probably thought. Then he discusses antitrust and why, according to current antitrust standards, Amazon is not a viable target. But, he argues, even though Amazon is completely innocent on paper they nevertheless feel as if they’re violating antitrust laws. The TL;DR is that for Justice to make their case they would have to press a novel interpretation of antitrust and that it’s by no means sure that they’d prevail. Still, Hobart believes that there’s a good chance that the courts might accept the novel antitrust standards and that Amazon might be found guilty of them.
There are two things about this article that I found particularly interesting and that make it worth reading. First is the explanation of how Amazon works. It’s really fascinating and probably not at all what you thought. The section on antitrust mostly discusses predatory pricing and that it’s a lot more difficult to get away with than you think. It’s really interesting even if you don’t care about economics or antitrust theory. Definitely worth a read.