Amazon Eats World

Grass is green, the sky is blue, and Amazon just keeps getting richer.

“Danbo Was Once Lost but He Has Now Seen The Light” by Daniel Lee.

Richer By the Minute: Amazon

For whosoever the last two years has been something of a disappointment, there is the equal and opposite reaction of Amazon.

While small and mid-sized businesses nationwide suffered through periodic shut-downs, strangling mandates and a resplendent variety of local restrictions, Amazon was already perfectly poised to take full advantage of the sudden shift in consumer buying trends from in-person shopping to a fully online experience.

There were still problems, of course; there still are. Amazon, like other online retailers, is suffering from a running crisis of returns and returned merchandise that is reduced in value by over-handling, being out-of-date or lacking original tags and packaging.

But even that headache is but a penny dropped in the vast bucket of Amazon’s billions. Over the past two years, the worlds 10 richest men doubled their wealth, Jeff Bezos very much included.

It isn’t Amazon’s fault- not exactly. The company can’t be held responsible for a global pandemic, though certain questions are worth asking. For instance, Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. The Post has been heavily advocating for extended shut-downs throughout Covid19, and continues to reserve the right to do so, while its owner stands to profit from that scenario.

Is that a problematic conflict of interest?

Amazon is responsible for other questionable business practices as well, including burying the products of its vendors deep under a search-result mountain of Amazon’s own products, exploitative labor practices at home and abroad, aggressive government lobbying to promote the interests of the company at the expense of the collective interests of society, and fighting legislation aimed at curbing forced labor worldwide.

Even those things aren’t entirely the fault of Amazon. A false bill of goods was sold to American voters under the warm and fuzzy-sounding guise of “Globalism”. Economic globalization- which is what the world actually got- does not look at all like people “sharing all the world” or “living life in peace.”