Member-only story
Wishing I Didn’t Use Amazon
But sorta having to do it these days
Amazon started off as an online bookseller. Jeff Bezos ran it out of his garage. It went public in 1997. The following year, it started to sell music and videos. In 1998, it expanded into the UK and Germany, becoming an international company. Now it’s grown to a behemoth which sells everything you could possibly imagine. This included groceries after 2017 when it bought Whole Foods. It has over 300 million active accounts globally.
While this is a great success story in many ways, mimicking such companies as Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc., it’s not all rainbows and unicorns.
It’s decimated the ranks of brick and mortar retail stores, the same way that Starbucks has decimated neighborhood coffee shops.
To be fair, some local booksellers that have a devoted fan base are still around, as are other local shops, coffee shops, etc. This is true even after COVID, which was a boon to Amazon, Ubereats and so on.
When people were afraid to leave their homes, large mega-corporations profited.
This was true even with places like Walmart and Costco, that rely on foot traffic. In many places, local ordinances seemed to come down hard on local stores while giving a pass to the big guys.
