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win market share and expands into adjacent industries.
From books it leapt to e-commerce, then opened its
cloud and logistics arms to third-party retailers, making
them vast new businesses in their own right. Customers
are kept loyal by perks such as Prime, a subscription
service, and Alexa, a voice-assistant. By this account,
the new digital surge confirms Amazon’s inexorable rise.
That is the view on Wall Street, where Amazon’s shares
reached an all-time high on June 17th.
Yet from his ranch in west Texas, Mr Bezos has 5th paragraph
to wrestle with those tricky problems. Start with the
fraying social contract. Some common criticisms of
Amazon are simply misguided. Unlike, say, Google in
search, it is not a monopoly. Last year Amazon had a
40% share of American e-commerce and 6% of all retail
sales. There is little evidence that it kills jobs. Studies
of the “Amazon effect” suggest that new warehouse and
delivery jobs offset the decline in shop assistants, and
the firm’s minimum hourly wage of $15 in America is
above the median for the retail trade.
But Amazon’s strategy does imply huge creative 6th paragraph
disruption in the jobs market even as the economy reels.
In addition, viral outbreaks at its warehouses have reig-
nited fears about working conditions: 13 American state
attorneys-general have voiced concern. And Amazon’s
role as a digital jack-of-all-trades creates conflicts of in-
terest. Does its platform, for example, treat third-party
sellers on equal terms with its own products? Congress
and the EU are investigating this. And how comfortable
should other firms be about giving their sensitive data
to AWS given that it is part of a larger conglomerate
which competes with them?

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