PBS ended its day at the TCA Winter Press Tour with Frontline’s Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos – and if you’ve been thinking about your own Amazon addiction, this program wil…
and if you’ve been thinking about your own Amazon addiction, this program will make you think more than twice.producer James Jacoby was blunt in his assessment of the company. “There’s a military-like precision to their operation which is awesome, but it comes at a cost to labor force and the environment,” he said. “We’re all accustomed to the convenience. The film explores some of the cost to that and the calculus of how to deliver on that convenience.
Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, has studied Amazon for years and says the central question is the power Amazon has from a democracy perspective, “It’s not just its size, Amazon has structural power. If you make anything, you have to ride Amazon’s rails. You have to use their AWS. Alexa has to be your operating system. Amazon has this godlike view of our lives and of businesses. It’s a fundamentally different kind of monopoly problem.
Mitchell says they did a survey of 1,000 independent businesses last year that had both brick and mortar businesses and e-commerce sites and 90% of them said their business is negatively affected by Amazon. She added, “Now these independent businesses have a bitter decision: if they choose to sell on Amazon, they give up a lot of their revenue and product knowledge. If they don’t sell on Amazon, what do they do? They give up the online market.
Jacoby said they had access to some Amazon executives and when questioned about these issues, the executives say that if businesses want to reach customers, they’re Amazon Prime members. Jacoby said, “They think they’re doing a huge service to small businesses.”special also examines the course of Bezos’ career from the mid-1990s to the present. “You see the cultivation of a goofy affable image from early on,” said Jacoby. “But he also has Napoleonic ambition.
Stacy Mitchell added that the relationship between Amazon and Washington, D.C. is a very close one as Amazon spends more on lobbying than any other corporation, and Bezos bought the largest mansion in D.C. Mitchell opined, “As a democracy, we should be very uneasy about it.”and keep your inbox happy.
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