It is becoming harder and harder to have a locally owned business and as a consumer, to buy local. Amazon is now the default for many shoppers and is rubbing out any competition be it local or national. An article in The Nation details the many ways the Amazon stacks the deck against entrepreneurs. And, as progressively minded citizens know, local dollars tend to stay local and help the local economy much more than money spent in big box stores, and certainly in online stores. Amazon affiliates with smaller entrepreneurs but, as this article details, at increasingly unfavorable terms. Now we need to support alternatives even if they are a bit more inconvenient or expensive. For instance, Alibris.com is an online bookseller affiliated with small businesses all over and they have great service, support the little guy. Is it possible to get along without Amazon? Let's find out!
Please read this article here. https://www.thenation.com/article/amazon-doesnt-just-want-to-dominate-the-market-it-wants-to-become-the-market/
Here's an excerpt:
Instead, it’s that Bezos has designed his company for a far more radical goal than merely dominating markets; he’s built Amazon to replace them. His vision is for Amazon to become the underlying infrastructure that commerce runs on. Already, Amazon’s website is the dominant platform for online retail sales, attracting half of all online US shopping traffic and hosting thousands of third-party sellers. Its Amazon Web Services division provides 34 percent of the world’s cloud-computing capacity, handling the data of a long list of entities, from Netflix to Nordstrom, Comcast to Condé Nast to the CIA. Now, in a challenge to UPS and FedEx, Amazon is building out a vast shipping and delivery operation with the aim of handling both its own packages and those of other companies.