Monday, 2 December 2013

Don't You Just Love Amazon?


Apologies for the off topic post!

I no longer buy things from Amazon; I have never bought much but over time I have come to really dislike everything that they stand for – basically maximising profit regardless of the effect on individuals, companies or countries.

The booksellers’ started it. They are the ones who not only let the embryo Amazon get a foot in the door, but they didn’t realize that this was the thin end of the wedge which was actually very thick. They must have thought that having a contract with a small new on-line company would just help them sell more books, and didn’t seem to appreciate either the potential scale of Amazon’s ambitions or the effect of the contracts that they signed. It obviously never occurred to them that Amazon would be able to use the generous discount which the retailers gave to undercut them to the extent that Amazon would then achieve a huge market share. This then allowed Amazon to control the market to the extent that the retailers would then not be able to do without Amazon! Very clever stuff from Amazon, and you have to hand it to them that as a business plan it succeeded fantastically well.

From selling books successfully, someone at Amazon realized that the same infrastructure could be used to sell anything non-perishable. (In fact, of course, they try to pretend that you actually can buy absolutely anything; you must have noticed that silly thing that appears on a Google search for, say, “Barack Obama” which says “Buy Barack Obama at Amazon”?) That decision, plus a good amount of investment, has made Amazon into the leading on-line retailer and a real force to be reckoned with. As the holder of an MBA, I cannot help but admire their success; I bet that there are now case studies which teach these new ethics to the current MBA students all across then country.

However, there are several separate reasons for my aversion: firstly, their business model seems intent on driving everyone else out of business. They started with bookshops and are now aiming at many other high street shops. Such market dominance has probably often been the aim of many companies, but I doubt that many, if any, have succeeded to the same extent. Frankly you have to wonder where it will end – do they want to control the whole world? Shades of the Inner Party in Oceania out of Orwell’s “1984”?

Secondly, as is well known, Amazon doesn’t pay much (if any) UK corporation tax. They do this legally as it is the avoidance of tax by legal means as opposed to illegally evading tax, and I'm amazed that this is still possible as international conglomerates have been around for ages.  However, I really hope that before long there will be some provision for forcing Amazon and other companies such as Starbucks and Google to pay tax on profit earned as a result of UK operations. The only benefit that this country derives from such companies is that they provide employment for people in this country, but that brings me on to my third point:

The employment practices of Amazon are nothing better than third-world sweat-shop exploitation. The recent Panorama programme (see this link to the BBC iPlayer) reveals the methods behind their efficient and prompt despatch of your item ordered so easily on your PC. In it, the undercover reporter reveals how he spent every shift picking your orders from the shelves in a vast warehouse, with a computer telling him how many seconds he has for each one before he is judged to be going too slowly.  The pressure is relentless and experts are produced to pronounce how harmful this is to one’s health. Is this really the type of employment that this country deserves?

 I cannot now bring myself to order anything at all from Amazon.

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