Amazon Is Now Officially the Evil Empire

Amazon.com started as an online book retailer 23 years ago. They were great: I started buying stuff from them in 1995. They branched out to CDs and DVDs pretty quickly, and then started selling absolutely everything. 

They became a front-end to thousands of other smaller retailers, helping them get into the online marketplace. They developed the Kindle and started selling e-books in a big way, practically creating the market from scratch.

They started selling online video, mostly reruns of TV episodes and some movies, about the same time Netflix began to offer their streaming service. Like Netflix, they've started producing a their own content, offering series like The Man in the High Castle and The Tick.

Jeff Bezos, the founder, has used his billions to acquire the Washington Post and even started his own rocket launch company, Blue Horizon (his rockets look like flying dildos). And just the other day Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market.

Sadly, Amazon has used its market clout to become a monopoly. It started innocently enough with the Amazon Prime service, which locks you into Amazon's ecosystem by offering free shipping and special deals.

Now small online retailers are being screwed by Amazon. To have online street cred you have to be listed on Amazon, and Amazon always lists their version of your product before your website. That means Amazon is always taking a thick percentage from your sales, a sort of online mafia protection racket.

People think that Amazon offers the best price. They don't. Using the terabytes of data they collect on you and everyone else, their algorithms offer you the highest price they think you'll pay, and hide lower prices from you.

For some time Amazon has been looking into expanding into the brick and mortar world from the online world to better compete with Walmart and Target, having already crushed OfficeMax, K-Mart, Sears and other retailers. They have been building warehouses around the country to decrease shipping time and costs. The acquisition of Whole Foods is another big step in that direction.

Amazon even has a plan to tighten their grip on people who will be shopping in their brick and mortar stores. As reported in the Washington Post, ironically enough:

Amazon was awarded a patent May 30 that could help it choke off a common issue faced by many physical stores: Customers’ use of smartphones to compare prices even as they walk around a shop. The phenomenon, often known as mobile “window shopping,” has contributed to a worrisome decline for traditional retailers.

[Amazon's in-store wi-fi network may] block access to the competitor’s site, preventing customers from viewing comparable products from rivals. It might redirect the customer to Amazon’s own site or to other, Amazon-approved sites. It might notify an Amazon salesperson to approach the customer. 

Yes, now that Amazon is in the real world, they want to stop other companies from doing to Amazon what Amazon did to them.

Well, you say, why should Amazon let customers use their network to access competitors' web sites? Why can't customers just use their cell phone network? For one thing, cell reception is frequently terrible in big steel buildings, which is why stores provide wi-fi. Active cell phone jamming is [currently] illegal, but Amazon could easily turn their stores into giant Faraday cages with a little bit of chicken wire embedded in the concrete to passively block cell reception.

Or Amazon could cut deals with cell phone providers to block or slow customers' access to certain web sites on cell towers near Amazon stores. That would be perfectly allowable now that the Trump administration has dumped net neutrality.

Amazon is also providing Internet service through Frontier Communications. Are they going to use their patent to block access to their competitors through that service as well?

I like the Washington Post. I like Blue Origin. I want to like Amazon. What I don't like is that Bezos is creating a monopoly and using that power to destroy other companies, taking money out of local communities and sending it all to Seattle.

Walmart started this trend, destroying local businesses and replacing them with giant superstores that eliminated millions of small retail jobs, especially in rural America (Walmart has completely wiped out local retail in rural Minnesota). Now Amazon is going to do Walmart one better, replacing employees with warehouse robots, self-driving long-haul trucks, delivery drones and completely automatic checkout.

You'll know the end is nigh when Jeff Bezos announces that he's going to use his New Glenn rockets to launch his Amazon Death Star.