> If he understood that, he might understand that Jeff Bezos got rich not by exploiting people but rather by improving people’s lives
The catch here is that it was a marginal improvement for some people, not everyone. Before e-commerce took off, there was a lovely amount of serendipity going out to pick up an album or even a new graphics card. I'd run across buskers, parades, protests, weird little shops I had no idea existed, and had great conversations with perfect strangers. Now the whole experience is so efficient that it has disappeared entirely. Something of value is being lost when tens of thousands of small business are shuttered and replaced by a single corporate entity with enormous power and leverage over their competitors.
A web page is never going to compare with the amount of information and variety I can experience in person. Their "recommendations" are simply not as good as the advice of a small business owner who used to help me pick out what I was looking for. I spend so much time researching before I buy, because I can't judge the quality of a product by looking at an image of it. Instead of the old model of trusting a local expert, I have to now become the expert for every single category of thing I buy.
(Also, Amazon's employees are definitely exploited, and that's absolutely one reason why he is wealthy. The first thing they did when they bought Whole Foods was cut pay and benefits.)
Small businesses and serendipity were largely crushed before Amazon became dominant.
Albums were bought at Best Buy, graphics cards were bought at Fry's, books were bought at Borders, tools were bought at Home Depot, groceries were bought at Kroger... (or sometimes they were almost all bought at Walmart or Target instead of any of those!)
Bezos was rich before the next-day-everything-fulfill-as-fast-as-possible push of the last decade. What did the warehouse environment look like back then? It won by doing better, but unforunately that alone isn't good enough, you have to FOREVER get more and more efficient, so the market demands exploitation at some point.
How much do you think his salary and stock grants would do for the employees if it was distributed? Less than a dollar a year. He could sell all his equity and give a one time bonus of 10k and then they would be in the same boat. He could give all of his stock to the company, and they could get $1,000 a year in profit sharing. Less than half of the profit is in retail, but maybe that's closer to $500 a year
it's very much a trade off. I too remember going to independent record stores when I was younger. every once in a while, I got into a cool conversation with someone who worked there and discovered a new band. much more often, I left empty handed because they didn't have the specific album I wanted. I didn't have particularly obscure taste; it's just not practical for a small shop to stock every single album that exists.
if you want someone to pick a reasonably good example of X for you or if you actually enjoy the experience of shopping, then yeah, amazon sucks. if you want a specific thing, amazon is pretty much the best store ever; if it's out of stock on amazon, it's probably out of stock everywhere else too.
It goes beyond that. Did everyone forget mail-order catalogs? Even up into my early teens, we would regularly receive them. One could mail-in (or phone-in) orders for a similar variety of goods as is available on Amazon (relative to the number of goods generally available in the American market). I understand that they're still common for enterprise, if for little else as marketing. Amazon's advantage over those is not so large, and the caveats involved in using it make me wonder about the net utility - especially now, as the politicians whose Amazon's success has enabled have badly damaged our postal system and drastically slowed the delivery of goods not available at a local distribution center.
The catch here is that it was a marginal improvement for some people, not everyone. Before e-commerce took off, there was a lovely amount of serendipity going out to pick up an album or even a new graphics card. I'd run across buskers, parades, protests, weird little shops I had no idea existed, and had great conversations with perfect strangers. Now the whole experience is so efficient that it has disappeared entirely. Something of value is being lost when tens of thousands of small business are shuttered and replaced by a single corporate entity with enormous power and leverage over their competitors.
A web page is never going to compare with the amount of information and variety I can experience in person. Their "recommendations" are simply not as good as the advice of a small business owner who used to help me pick out what I was looking for. I spend so much time researching before I buy, because I can't judge the quality of a product by looking at an image of it. Instead of the old model of trusting a local expert, I have to now become the expert for every single category of thing I buy.
(Also, Amazon's employees are definitely exploited, and that's absolutely one reason why he is wealthy. The first thing they did when they bought Whole Foods was cut pay and benefits.)