The Cost of Free Shipping. Группа авторов
warehouse workers, delivery drivers, ghost writers, and other high-tech workers, in order to extract valuable information about their work flow that is used to further exploit, discipline, and control workers, increase labor efficiency, and inform the development of workplace automation and other business investments.33
Amazon’s surveillance technologies pose serious privacy and civil liberty threats in the context of the company’s operations and relationships to governments and municipal police. Along with providing cloud data storage for the U.S. Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, Amazon has pioneered and sold new surveillance technologies. Amazon’s 2018 acquisition of the Ring home surveillance system has also fueled the rapid penetration of the state-corporate nexus of surveillance of everyday life.34 In addition to Ring, police departments in several U.S. states are already using Amazon Rekognition, a new face-recognition computer system and database, and the system has been offered to the U.S. Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Civil rights organizations have raised concerns about the use of this new surveillance technology, which tends to misidentify people of color more commonly than white people, and which could be used to better identify protesters. Likewise, hundreds of anonymous Amazon employees sent a letter to Jeff Bezos, declaring that “We refuse to build the platform that powers ICE, and we refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights.”35 Moreover, contrary to Amazon’s pseudo-liberal image, the corporation has given massive sums of money to right-wing politicians in its attempt to garner influence and buy elections.36
AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX AND MULTIFACETED CORPORATION
Amazon is far more than simply a major online retailer. Indeed, “no other tech company does as many unrelated things, on such a scale, as Amazon,” Duhigg reported in The New Yorker in 2019.37 Overall, in 2018, Amazon “collected” US$122 billion directly from online retail sales, and another US$42 billion by “helping other firms sell and ship their own goods.”38 In addition, during that same year, Amazon earned US$26 billion from its Web-services (AWS) division39 that sells cloud computing services—i.e., storage space, bandwidth for website hosting, and processing power—to individuals, and companies such as Netflix and Instagram,40 and Amazon itself.41 Although AWS supplies 10 percent of Amazon’s revenues, the company’s operating income, or the funds remaining after expenses are accounted for, “dwarfs any other sector,” pulling in US$606 million more than Amazon made in North American sales in 2016.42 Moreover, Amazon took in US$14 billion in Amazon Prime and other subscription services, “hundreds of millions of dollars from selling the Echo,” US$17 billion from sales at more traditional (off-line) brick-and-mortar stores, including Whole Foods, and the fully automated Amazon Go stores, along with US$10 billion in advertising sales and other activities.43 Analysts reported in 2019 that banks and credit unions were bracing for the coming Amazon “invasion” of banking.44 At that time, Amazon was already funding small-business loans, reducing fees for merchants who use Amazon Pay,45 and seeking to compete with prepaid wireless providers.46
Business analysts diverge over the reasons for Amazon’s rapid growth, with some pointing to its use of a business school strategy known as the “flywheel,” “loosely defined as a sort of self-reinforcing loop. Where possible, projects [are] to be structured to bolster other initiatives underway at the company.”47 More critical analyses, including our own, highlight the role of neoliberal policies and politics, such as the weak enforcement of antitrust laws, corporate welfare, and weak labor laws in the United States and other countries, which have facilitated the rise of Amazon’s monopoly power and its exploitative labor and business practices.48
AMAZON’S GROWING MONOPOLY POWER AND CORPORATE DOMINANCE
LaVecchia and Mitchell also rightly point to the growing monopoly power the corporation has gained through dominating “the underlying infrastructure—the online shopping platform, the shipping system, the cloud computing backbone—that competing firms depend on to transact business.”49 The rapid growth in Amazon’s online shopping platform, and the company’s use of this platform to both sell its own goods and those of other sellers, helps to illustrate their concerns.
As of 2020, there were over 150 million Amazon Prime members, making it the world’s second largest paid subscription program. Indeed, about 60 percent of American households are Amazon Prime members. Among the affluent, the numbers are even higher. A staggering 82 percent of households making more than US$112,000 per year are Amazon Prime members.50 Prime members pay an annual subscription fee in order to utilize Amazon’s platform and receive perks such as free, expedited shipping on millions of items purchased through Amazon. Amazon Prime membership is also growing rapidly among U.S. households earning less than US$50,000 annually,51 partly due to fee discounts of 50 percent or more for college students and very low-income households.52 To further reach the college student market, the “Amazon Campus” program created countless brick-and-mortar Amazon pick-up locations on university and college campuses throughout the United States, further exacerbating the privatization of public higher education. Although the company has lost money in the short term by offering its customers various perks and discounts, it helped the company to gain customer loyalty and market dominance. Amazon claimed nearly one of every two dollars in U.S. consumer purchases online.53
In this context, many sellers perceive few options other than to use Amazon.com to sell their goods. Amazon’s exploitative practices extend to third-party sellers who are charged a commission on their sales (usually 15 percent) made through Amazon.com as well as rising fees for using Amazon’s fulfillment, advertising, and other services.54 It also requires third-party sellers using Amazon’s platform to share information about their transactions, which the corporation uses to compete against them on popular items. The company has a long history of “predatory pricing,” or selling products below market cost in order to crush, outcompete, and sometimes even acquire other companies, such as Diaper.com and Zappos.55
Amazon uses transaction and consumer information from its online shopping platform to decide which products should be given the “buy box”—the eye-catching and convenient one-click “buy now” or “add to cart” buttons—that show up during online shopping searches. Amazon claims its mysterious algorithm that selects a default seller for the buy box is a neutral formula designed to maximize customer satisfaction. Yet, evidence suggests that Amazon gives itself a perfect score on measures of customer experience, giving it an unfair advantage over other sellers whose measures are affected by negative online customer reviews. The company also gives its Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) warehouse and shipping service a perfect score for measures related to fulfilling orders, which both encourages sellers to use their delivery service and reduces accountability for problems with FBA’s deliveries.56 Other research finds that “about three-quarters of the time, Amazon placed its own products and those of companies that pay for its services in that position even when there were substantially cheaper offers available from others.”57 Likewise, Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, only chooses Amazon items when asked to purchase something. No wonder a 2016 survey of independent retailers in the U.S. identified competition from internet retailers such as Amazon as the number one threat to their business,58 and critics are linking the growth of Amazon to a decline in small businesses.59
AMAZON’S GLOBAL LOGISTICS EMPIRE AND ITS IMPACT ON WORKERS, COMMUNITIES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Along with becoming the world’s largest e-commerce company, Amazon has quickly become one of the largest logistics companies in the world.60 Prior to Amazon, brick-and-mortar retail corporations such as Walmart dominated the global logistics industry. Amazon is currently disrupting the model that Walmart perfected. Much as Amazon handles its own warehousing, distribution, and fulfillment services, the company today increasingly manages delivery as well.
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