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This just in; Amazon uses drones with toaster ovens to deliver hot cinnabon to your door!

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
This just in; Amazon uses drones with toaster ovens to deliver hot cinnabon to your door!

My body is ready for this gloriously utopian future.

I would meet my heart attack induced end with a smile on my face.

Voss wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

Voss wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I do not have a problem with online beating retail, that is the nature of technological advance. What I have a problem with is Amazon being allowed to monopolize.
.

They don't really even vaguely qualify as a monopoly, though. I can get anything I'd buy off of amazon somewhere else. Not necessarily as quickly and I'd probably have to hit a couple shops before I found some of it (and going to other online retailers would be faster than driving an hour and hoping), but i can do it.

There are even some things (like hobby stuff) where Amazon is a pretty poor option. But there are other places to buy books or music or clothes or whatever (personally I don't buy food and properly sized clothing/footwear online at all), which pretty much negates any 'monopoly' status. They're probably cheaper or more convient, and likely the place I'll look first due to reliability, but not a monopoly.

If one company owns all the grocery stores that is a monopoly, even if I could buy those groceries direct from the farms.

If that were the case, that would be correct. Since one company doesn't own all the grocery stores, in reality, it is not even vaguely correct.

But weird and incorrect metaphors aside...
Does Amazon own b&n? No. So books and music can be had elsewhere (along with various other avenues for books)
Does amazon own iTunes? No, so no monopoly on music and movies. Plus, again, other chains and stores, even still
Clothes, no, there are still a lot of those around.
Various other things, some of which overlap with the above categories: Walmart, kohls, target, etc.


So... What actual monopoly are you referring to?

The monopoly over small towns. If your only choice for retail is 'Amazon', it's a monopoly on those items in that place.

Amazon's not there yet, though. Wal-Mart holds the current small-town monopoly, where your options are your local Wal-Mart, or drive thirty miles down the road to the next town and THEIR Wal-Mart.

That still isn't a monopoly. All those other businesses I mentioned also provide online options- if Amazon can get packages to you, so can they. 'Your only choice' isn't a real-world scenario outside of bizarre circumstances, like someone living on an island by themselves.

And realistically speaking, even fairly economically ruined small towns still have local businesses. My family's home town (a small craphole town) certainly qualifies. All the major job providers are gone, half of main street is empty, but there are still stores that aren't Walmart or major chains.

I bet it's not a vibrant, thriving retail high street environment, though.

 Vulcan wrote:
The monopoly over small towns. If your only choice for retail is 'Amazon', it's a monopoly on those items in that place.

Amazon's not there yet, though. Wal-Mart holds the current small-town monopoly, where your options are your local Wal-Mart, or drive thirty miles down the road to the next town and THEIR Wal-Mart.

"There are some areas where wealth and population density can only support one store and there isn't enough sales volume for anyone else" is hardly a monopoly. And TBH the existence of Amazon (and online retail in general) opens up the options considerably. Yeah, your package still arrives in an Amazon box, but you have access to a vast range of brands through Amazon instead of the limited stock a rural Wal-Mart has.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I bet it's not a vibrant, thriving retail high street environment, though.

No, but the poverty causing that state is not relevant to the subject of this thread.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
This just in; Amazon uses drones with toaster ovens to deliver hot cinnabon to your door!

My body is ready for this gloriously utopian future.

I would meet my heart attack induced end with a smile on my face.

I would love for Cinnabons on demand.

 Skinnereal wrote:
How much of Amazon's fortune is made by selling stuff these days?
Amazon seems to do:
Server hosting, used for antivirus updates, cloud servers, website hosting, etc. Probably number-crunching services and database hosting too, but I haven't looked into that.
TV, through Firesticks and such. Amazon Prime does a lot of original programmes.
Push-button ordering, which they just phased out. The convenience of ordering loo-roll by pressing a button must tell them more than just which account ordered it, but also when it was done and where from.

So, Amazon is far bigger than just a website selling goods. All of it feeds into their data stores. They can sell that to advertisers and marketers too, for even more money.

https://gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-block-amazon-from-my-life-it-was-impossible-1830565336

It's harder to get away from Amazon than you think. Likewise Google and Facebook.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
https://gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-block-amazon-from-my-life-it-was-impossible-1830565336

It's harder to get away from Amazon than you think. Likewise Google and Facebook.

I knew I'd seen it listed somewhere recently. Ta

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:
How much of Amazon's fortune is made by selling stuff these days?
Amazon seems to do:
Server hosting, used for antivirus updates, cloud servers, website hosting, etc. Probably number-crunching services and database hosting too, but I haven't looked into that.
TV, through Firesticks and such. Amazon Prime does a lot of original programmes.
Push-button ordering, which they just phased out. The convenience of ordering loo-roll by pressing a button must tell them more than just which account ordered it, but also when it was done and where from.

So, Amazon is far bigger than just a website selling goods. All of it feeds into their data stores. They can sell that to advertisers and marketers too, for even more money.

https://gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-block-amazon-from-my-life-it-was-impossible-1830565336

It's harder to get away from Amazon than you think. Likewise Google and Facebook.

A journalist wrote:Having to run to a physical store rather than opening my Amazon app every time the house runs out of paper towels is annoying,

Well, if you're so geographically deprived, or physically lazy, that you can't manage to buy some paper towels from a supermarket before they run out, you're going to have to continue to rely on Amazon.

Amusingly, Facebook has been down throughout the world for about 12 hours as I write.

Yeah, the convenience of things like amazon can definitely make people lazy.

The internet and all these new smart devices have made it possible for companies like this to install themselves squarely into the lives of the general public, to the degree that soon people will not know what to do without them. its a scary thought.

Amazon does have positives though. I own a kindle and buy ebooks for it occasionally, and sometimes I will buy from the site, but I just see it as another option. its nice to get deliveries as quickly as they send them. Like everything in life I try to use it in moderation.

I'm certainly not going to let it worm its way into my life with an app harvesting my data, or smart devices like echo dot/alexas recording my conversations.

Of course, Amazon is hitting many of the main retail motivators:

1. Save money
2. Convenience
3. Save Time

They also have enough cache right now to provide Status. Their main weakness is providing Security as a motivator.

Once you add the low cost model of not supporting Brick and mortar (and the employees that go with them) it makes trying to compete against them almost impossible. The more they shift into the food market, the more challenging competition will become for local eateries.

I look forward to the day when basic services can also be provided via facetime like programs or sending "local partners" out through Amazon for things like Plumbing, Doctors, Mechanics, Accounting, Legal services, Mental Health, etc.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:
How much of Amazon's fortune is made by selling stuff these days?
Amazon seems to do:
Server hosting, used for antivirus updates, cloud servers, website hosting, etc. Probably number-crunching services and database hosting too, but I haven't looked into that.
TV, through Firesticks and such. Amazon Prime does a lot of original programmes.
Push-button ordering, which they just phased out. The convenience of ordering loo-roll by pressing a button must tell them more than just which account ordered it, but also when it was done and where from.

So, Amazon is far bigger than just a website selling goods. All of it feeds into their data stores. They can sell that to advertisers and marketers too, for even more money.

https://gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-block-amazon-from-my-life-it-was-impossible-1830565336

It's harder to get away from Amazon than you think. Likewise Google and Facebook.

Reading that made me simultaneously feel like an elite hacker and total luddite.

I would never rely on Amazon for things like paper towels, I dont have Alexa devices scattered about to respond to voice commands to play music and TV, I basically never use mobile apps if I have any choice in the matter and have never used one to shop on Amazon. I use Slack but extremely sparingly. All those sites mentioned that are reliant on AWS I use rarely or not at all. I dont send bajillions of links to people. My life is not *that* integrated into the E-World. I'm not exactly Whole Foods target demographic either.

But on the other hand, basically by living a half mile from a grocery store and a block from a convenience store, and more importantly, knowing how to use Bittorrent, I feel like that pressing weight of growing Amazonian monopoly just isn't there. I use Amazon for stuff I'd have to order online or make an out of the way trip for either way, but integrating Amazon into my life at the level described in the article is wayyyyy beyond me.

Facebook I could drop on a dime, it's pretty much just an event organizer for me at this point. Google is another matter however, that's the one that really concerns me personally.

This site has great analysis of the many things amazon does.
https://stratechery.com/company/amazon/

He also gets into the other "aggregators" such as Google/Facebook/Netflix.

Hmm what I use from Amazon?

We have an Echo, an Echo Dot, two Kindles, two Amazon Prime Chase credit cards, Amazon Prime Video on our TV, and two Prime accounts.

Out of that list only kindle account for phone/PC qualifies. Not much use for it though as amazon.com doesn't sell that much books I would be buying and the amazon.co.jp that does doesnt' sell to me. For non-japanese books bookdepository.co.uk is my go to place.

Biggest use of amazon for me is japanese books that I can't find elsewhere. Though some I can find on yesasia.com but their web site sucks for japanese books(stupid romanisation for names) and they don't sell all. Don't know much other stores that would sell those to europe. Direct stores in Japan would require using reshipper which adds to prices.

AWS sounds like unavoidable but...well somebody's always going to be unavoidable in that area. That level of blocking is just silly anyway. You'll just end up blocking entire internet.

Well, yes. That was the point. to demonstrate exactly what FAAMG are into. In the case of Amazon, it’s not just groceries and ebooks. Vaktathi says he doesn’t visit many websites reliant on AWS? I bet he’s wrong and doesn’t know it.

Using Amazon for basic groceries? Why not? If I was housebound and Amazonwill deliver a pint of milk and some j-cloths in a couple of hours, then sure. Sure, that might come back and bite me later when the corner shop goes out of business, but people don’t think like that.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Well, yes. That was the point. to demonstrate exactly what FAAMG are into. In the case of Amazon, it’s not just groceries and ebooks. Vaktathi says he doesn’t visit many websites reliant on AWS? I bet he’s wrong and doesn’t know it.

I'm sure there are sites I visit that use AWS, but of those mentioned by the article (AirBNB, Twitch, Fed Gov resources, phone apps), they're not the type of thing I personally engage with particularly often (hence my luddite comment) and my employer doesn't run our web presence on Amazon's backbone either the way the author's did (it is however reliant on Google to a degree that changing that relationship would be almost impossible). I actually would be pretty thrilled if my last Fed docs were handled by Amazon instead of the unstable rube-goldberg frankenstein setup that they have to take down and reserve for internal use once a week and that can't be used for half the forms one may need of that particular agency

 Vaktathi wrote:
I'm sure there are sites I visit that use AWS, but of those mentioned by the article (AirBNB, Twitch, Fed Gov resources, phone apps), they're not the type of thing I personally engage with

If you install uMatrix on Firefox/Chrome you'll be able to see all the other services the sites you are visiting rely on. AWS tends to appear regularly on all kinds of sites.

Amazon is one of the best services ( companies ) in history.

My life has improved immeasurably because of Amazon.

I love it, and use it as much as I can.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:
How much of Amazon's fortune is made by selling stuff these days?
Amazon seems to do:
Server hosting, used for antivirus updates, cloud servers, website hosting, etc. Probably number-crunching services and database hosting too, but I haven't looked into that.
TV, through Firesticks and such. Amazon Prime does a lot of original programmes.
Push-button ordering, which they just phased out. The convenience of ordering loo-roll by pressing a button must tell them more than just which account ordered it, but also when it was done and where from.

So, Amazon is far bigger than just a website selling goods. All of it feeds into their data stores. They can sell that to advertisers and marketers too, for even more money.

https://gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-block-amazon-from-my-life-it-was-impossible-1830565336

It's harder to get away from Amazon than you think. Likewise Google and Facebook.

The websites (23 mil IP addresses) are somewhat concerning, but the rest is nonsense. This woman and her family have a problem that has nothing to do with Amazon. If someone is telling you when your daughter is pooping and you can't actually talk to someone when their partner dies, you're socially dysfunctional on a level that's unimaginable to me.

Yeah I didn't understand why she couldn't use the text function on her phone to text her husband.

Of course she could; that's not the point (although the particular app she uses is enrypted, unlike SMS). The point was that the service she was using isn't publically branded as an Amazon service, but is reliant on them.

The point is that rather than being just an online store and a TV channel, Amazon is basically running the Internet.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Of course she could; that's not the point (although the particular app she uses is enrypted, unlike SMS). The point was that the service she was using isn't publically branded as an Amazon service, but is reliant on them.

The point is that rather than being just an online store and a TV channel, Amazon is basically running the Internet.

People act like this is a new thing, but I wonder if anyone who does think that has ever tried shopping ethically before.

It's *not possible* to consume ethically. Every brand is owned by someone who's owned by someone who has a monster on their board of directors, or is owned in turn by a horrifying megacorp that buys politicians and suppresses negative information about their shady practices. Your organic produce might be saving the bees, but it's also killing fish. Literally everybody, even eco-friendly options, is dependent on the fossil fuel industry to one degree or another. All the big corporations use "image management" and PR agencies that also work for dictators and murderous regimes. All the big corporations cut corners and lie about it. As we've seen recently, even watching a movie can see you financially supporting a rapist by accident. Have a look into the way governments contract out to the private sector some time - they're not giving those school building contracts to your local brickies, or hiring some small-time security firm to look after an event, a tiny handful of "service provider" megacorps who can supposedly do everything from construction to elderly care to mental health clinics get the work. This isn't conspiracy mongering, it's just how capitalism works.

The only difference between how things were and how things are is that a combination of social media and people's general techno-fear mindset has made the domination of a handful of companies seem obvious to folk. Which is good, absolutely, people should be aware of this stuff, but just getting a bit wiggy over the tech companies and ignoring the wider issue isn't going to solve anything, and sometimes it seems that people are less outraged or fearful of "big tech" than they are angry that they can't continue to wallow in their previous blissfully ignorant complacency.

When people talk about consuming ethically, they don't mean they only want to buy things from companies which don't have anyone dodgy on the board or major shareholder.

They mean they want to buy stuff that isn't wrapped in layers of unnecessary planet-killing plastic, or food which has been produced with higher standards of animal welfare.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
When people talk about consuming ethically, they don't mean they only want to buy things from companies which don't have anyone dodgy on the board or major shareholder.

They mean they want to buy stuff that isn't wrapped in layers of unnecessary planet-killing plastic, or food which has been produced with higher standards of animal welfare.

I think that varies a LOT by the consumer.

For example, activist ethical investors are very interested in the board members. However, folks in the stores are more interested in the things you note.

I shop ethically.

I shop for products and services that make my life better.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
When people talk about consuming ethically, they don't mean they only want to buy things from companies which don't have anyone dodgy on the board or major shareholder.

They mean they want to buy stuff that isn't wrapped in layers of unnecessary planet-killing plastic, or food which has been produced with higher standards of animal welfare.

Then evidently we've been speaking to different people, because corporate ethics has always been part of what people I've talked to who advocate "ethical consumerism" go on about.

Regardless, my point stands - "ethical" products often merely shift the unethical part a step or two up the supply chain, or reduce one kind of pollution or cruelty at the cost of increasing a different one, but evidently a lot of people are satisfied with "out of sight, out of mind".

I think one of the biggest issues with ethical products is that the modern supply chain for most things is so convoluted, so broken up, with so many steps between manufacture of components, shipping of components, assembly, assembly of assembly components shipping of assembled components etc etc that it's almost impossible for a lot of companies to fully account for where everything that goes into their products comes from.

I once saw an entire presentation solely based on the difficulty of sourcing computer parts.

When a company becomes so big people have effectively no choice about using it, it's time to break it up.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
When a company becomes so big people have effectively no choice about using it, it's time to break it up.

Alternatively, when a company is providing such good and cheap service that its competition keeps failing it's not time to break it up.