The more Amazon grows, though, the more potentially dangerous it becomes for customers, suppliers, competitors, and workers alike. It has been: Amazon’s stock price has multiplied five times over in the past five years, and it saw $1.9 billion in profits in the last three months of 2017 alone. After it went public in 1997, Wall Street largely accepted losses and razor-thin profits quarter after quarter with the expectation that Amazon would ultimately be a good bet. It owns Whole Foods and just bought the online pharmacy Pillpack, and it’s building out its streaming content platform.įor years, the company - which Bezos founded in 1994 - has had an ethos of prioritizing growth over profits. More than 100 million people have signed up for its Amazon Prime service, and it is an increasingly central part of many consumers’ lives.Īnd the company is ambitious. This could be one reason that while Amazon may be a fierce competitor, it’s a competitor people love - it consistently ranks as one of the most liked brands in the United States.
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That, plus the long leash from Wall Street, allowed it to slash retail prices. Its cloud services solution, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has represented the bulk of its profits for years.
The more market power Amazon gets, the more of a threat it posesĪmazon’s retail business still isn’t the real moneymaker. “If Jeff Bezos wants to tax all of our economy, are we okay with that?”Īn Amazon spokesperson declined to speak on the record for this story. “Amazon’s dominance poses a question of how comfortable we are with more and more of our commerce going through a single company,” Lina Khan, director of legal policy at the Open Markets Institute think tank and the author of a widely read paper criticizing Amazon, told me in an interview. There’s a prospective future in which Amazon has throttled its competitors to establish total market dominance - and then charge whatever it wants. Still, many experts say there’s cause for concern about Amazon in retail and beyond. Right now, that translates to low prices and convenient services that keep consumers happy - including during its annual discount-fest.Īmazon’s sheer size has put the company on the radar for antitrust concerns in Washington and on Wall Street for quite some time: The Seattle-based company is expected to be responsible for about 49 percent of all US e-commerce sales in 2018, though it’s still just 5 percent of all retail sales.īecause US antitrust law is currently interpreted to hinge largely on whether a company’s practices harm consumers, regulators have generally steered clear of getting in Amazon’s way as it grows, as they have other tech companies.
Amazon’s Prime Day, the e-commerce giant’s annual shopping holiday, draws millions of shoppers to its platform in hopes of scoring discounts.īut the reason Prime Day is such a big deal - Amazon sells so many different products to so many people that it can basically invent its own midsummer version of Black Friday, and everyone will go along with it - is the reason some experts worry about the company’s impact on the economy in the long term.Īmazon has its tentacles in various industries - retail, cloud services, grocery, content, ebooks, home assistants, and, most recently, pharmacy - and has financial leeway that allows it to take risks where its competitors cannot.