Sometimes I think that Amazon seeks to have the same relationship with the Sherman Antitrust Act as a matador does with the bull.
Amazon’s first physical bookstore in New York, located in the high-end shopping center at Columbus Circle, was quietly bustling when I visited on a recent muggy spring day around lunchtime. …The biggest thing you’ll notice when you walk into an Amazon Bookstore (there are six others around the country, and Amazon plans on opening another six) is that all of the books are displayed with their covers facing the customer, as opposed to the traditional spine-out presentation on the bookshelves of most bookstores. It has a certain charm, but it also feels like you’ve wandered into a bookstore that’s suddenly run very low on inventory and is trying to take up space.
(Via Stephen Green) That bookstore has only about 4,000 titles in it; but it also has Amazon Prime hardwired into the sales process (the books all have two price tags). That kind of instant discount when you’re making an impulse buy is a powerful tool for making the sale, particularly if you’re putting down actual cash for a change. It is also, of course, the first step in whatever multi-stage plan Amazon has for taking over another section of the US retail economy.
Not that I particularly mind, of course. Amazon’s domination of the book market has made it easier and cheaper for me to find books, and Prime’s free shipping pays for itself*. But the company is one hostile administration away from a ferocious brawl in the courts. And before you say that Amazon is untouchable: shoot, so was Ma Bell.
Moe Lane
*And I’m an Amazon affiliate myself, of course.
As I understand it, Amazon is more of a bazaar than a vendor, and they have competition from ebay and etsy and probably others. So I don’t see where an anti-trust action would have any legal basis… not that that would necessarily stop a hostile administration from using SATA as a blunt instrument, mind. It seems to me that it would be like going after New York because they have such a huge edge in theater productions over every place else.
It always blew my mind that Sears never made a serious run at being the dominant e-tailer.
They still had the institutional knowledge to eat anybody else’s lunch with respect to mail-order, they had the warehouse and shipping infrastructure already in place, they had the supply chains in place, and they had long-established relationships with their suppliers and the shipping companies…
Putting their catalogue online would have been evolutionary, not revolutionary.
While I agree in theory, what Sears lost was mostly .. the same thing any organization loses when the bean-counters take over .. the ability to justify spending money to go after potential not everyone can see.
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In Sears’ case, building the Sears tower (no, not Willis .. Willis didn’t *build* the thing ..) changed the corporate culture .. and they lost the ability to see and adapt to e-catalogs.
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I agree, it’s sad .. especially because they would have done *so much better* than Amazon .. because of the legacy infrastructure. Don’t like your new Sears catalog whatsis? Return or exchange it *at your local Sears store* ..
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Mew