The Break up drumbeat on AMZN heats up even before AMZN Prime clothing is announced today....
AMZN goes into AMZN prime retail clothing even before the shock and awe subsides of them moving into Whole Foods and retail food. (AMZN is engaging in the WWII equivalent of the saturation bombing of Dresden in early 1945...
even before AMZN gets into AMZN Prime retail clothing... the drumbeats begin... time to break up AMZN..
fastcompany.com
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06.19.17 POV
It’s Time To Break Up Amazon
With its mega-acquisition of Whole Foods, the retail behemoth moves to suck the value out of yet another market, writes Douglas Rushkoff.
BY DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF4 MINUTE READ
This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.
“Amazon just bought Whole Foods,” my friend texted me seconds after the announcement of the proposed acquisition. “It’s over. The world.”
This unease is widespread, and has raised new calls for breaking up Jeff Bezos’s impending monopoly by force. Surely the company, which now generates 30% of all online and offline retail sales growth in the United States, and already controls 40% of internet cloud services, has reached too far. The 3% hike in Amazon’s share price since the announcement—which would alone more than pay for the acquisition—may attest less to the deal’s appropriateness than to investors’ growing fear that missing out on Amazon means missing out on the future of the economy.
Whatever you may think of Jeff Bezos, and whether or not antitrust regulations can justifiably be applied to a company whose expansion doesn’t raise but actually lowers costs for end consumers, may be beside the point. Many of us get that something is amiss, but are ourselves so deeply enmeshed in the logic of last century’s version of free-market industrial capitalism that we can’t quite bring ourselves to call this out for the threat it poses to our markets, our economy, and even our planet.
The reason why monopolies were broken up in an industrial economy was that they tended to gain control over the platforms through which their products were distributed. The biggest oil company ends up controlling shipping and refineries, the biggest airline controls too many gates, and the biggest phone company controls the wires.
But in a digital economy, the platform is the business. Netflix content sells its platform. Apple’s devices sell its supposed “ecosystem.” Amazon’s book business, like Uber’s cab business, was just an easy foothold—the low-hanging fruit of an existing but inefficient marketplace—through which to establish a platform monopoly. From that beachhead, the company then pivots to other verticals.
The problem is, when an existing market is merely a means to another end, the company doesn’t consider the long-term effects of its actions. Amazon treated the book industry the same way companies like Walmart once treated the territories into which they expanded: Use a war chest of capital to undercut prices, put competitors out of business, become the sole employer in the community, turn employees into part-time shift workers, lobby for deregulation, and effectively extract all the value from a given region before closing up shop and moving to the next one.
This model of doing business—one that even a proto-fascist like Henry Ford would have considered obscene—has not served corporations well. As the data now reveals, corporate profits have been steadily decreasing relative to corporate size over the past 75 years. That’s right: Corporations are great at extracting all the value from a marketplace, but really bad at deploying the money they accumulate in the process. They take all the poker chips off the table, leaving nothing for the other players to exchange between themselves. And by sucking their customers and suppliers dry, such companies end up destroying the marketplaces on which they depend for revenue. It’s a form of financial obesity, where the only thing left for the company to do is acquire a new marketplace, extract all its value, and move on.
great 1 minute video on Bezos go to url to view video
fastcompany.com
Related Video: Everything You Need To Know About Jeff Bezos In A MinuteIn the real world, such extraction took years, even decades to run through its cycle. In a digital economy, “network effects”—which is when a product or service’s value increases the more people who use it or work to create it —accelerate the cycle so that an entire taxi industry can be turned into an “internet of things” in a matter of months.
2015 focus on the brutality of his work empire---- good video
It’s not that internet founders are somehow more evil or rapacious than their forebears. It’s simply that when companies are platforms, survivability and scalability amount to the same thing. Just as winner-takes-all network effects lead to just one Taylor Swift and millions of penniless artists, these same dynamics promote the establishment of platform monopolies like Amazon.
The problem is less that these single platforms emerge than the fact that their business plans are taken from the obsolete play books of the industrial age, where extraction was the only game in town. While internet servers and financial capital can scale up almost infinitely, the real world cannot. Humans only have so much time and attention in a given day, and the topsoil only has so many nutrients in a given acre. As the merchants of abstracted digital products, like ebooks and streaming media, apply their same business models to the markets and environment on which real people depend for sustenance, power-law dynamics become a lot more dangerous.
Not that Whole Foods was ever a sustainable business in itself. Healthy food and sustainable agriculture are simply incompatible with year-round organic summer produce in all 50 states. However catchy the slogan, capitalism really has no room to be conscious. Of the three factors of production—land, labor, and capital—the “consciousness” part of the equation has always been provided by the places and the people.
Which means that if we’re actually going to confront the devastating potential of an Amazon monopoly, we have to come to grips with more than the way one company has seized control of multiple verticals. We must look instead at how we’ve employed our digital platforms solely in the service of an extractive industrial-age model of growth, and decide whether we’re capable of upgrading to a genuinely digital and distributed form of capitalism. This would mean adopting circular, even revenue-based models that sustain our marketplaces—instead of simply colonizing them.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Amazon controls 30% of online and offline retail sales, when in fact that figure refers to the percentage of on- and offline retail sales growth the company generated last year.
fastcompany.com
'BOT OF THE QUEUE Will Amazon replace Whole Foods workers with ROBOTS? Online retail giant feared to be planning jobs cuts at shop chain
Tech firm bought trendy food store brand for £11 billion but is expected to make some big changes
thesun.co.uk
Amazon Prime Wardrobe lets you try on and return clothes free
Posted 2 hours ago by Josh Constine ( @joshconstine)
Amazon’s latest perk for Prime members could make us more stylish by letting us buy everything that catches our eye and return what doesn’t fit. Today Amazon revealed Amazon Prime Wardrobe, which is currently in beta, but you can sign up to be notified when it launches
First you pick at least 3 items and up to 15 from over a million Amazon Fashion options including clothes, shoes, and accessories for kids and adults to fill up your Prime Wardrobe box with no upfront cost. Brands available include Calvin Klein, Levi’s, Adidas, Theory, Timex, Lacoste, and more.
Once the Amazon Prime Wardrobe box arrives, you can try on the clothes for up to seven days. Then you either schedule a free pick-up or drop the resealable box with its pre-paid shipping label at a nearby UPS to return whatever you don’t want. Keep three or four items from the box and get 10% off everything, or keep five or more for 20% off. You only pay after for what you keep, with no charge up front. Amazon Prime Wardrobe is free for Prime members with no extra fees.
fees.
Amazon emailed us a scant statement, noting “today Amazon Fashion announced Prime Wardrobe, a new way to shop for fashion at Amazon, where you can try things before you buy them.”
By taking the hassle and regret out of returns for clothing, the same way Zappos did before it bought it, Amazon could make people much more comfortable pulling the trigger on an online apparel purchase. Pick well and you get a bonus discount. But pick poorly and the most it costs you is a trip to UPS. The move could be quite lucrative for Amazon, as apparel’s share of all digital spend has grown for the past three years straight from 15.4% in 2013 to 17% in 2016, according to comScore.
Amazon Prime Wardrobe is similar to Stitch Fix and some other fashion delivery services where you get shipped a box of clothing you don’t choose. That’s more targeted at people who don’t like shopping, especially men. But Wardrobe lets you pick and choose what you want rather than delivering a random grab bag. Perhaps if Wardrobe tests well, Amazon would consider acquiring Stitch Fix, TrunkClub, or another boxed fashion delivery service to instantly boost its scale.
 The speed and simplicity of Prime Wardrobe could be its biggest selling points. If you want the clothes for a special occasion, you can be confident Amazon will get you them in time, and you won’t have to fiddle with getting a box and shipping label if you want to send something back. That friction can often cause people to keep items that don’t want, or dissuade people from buying clothes online in the first place.
Amazon eliminating these troubles could remove one of the last big selling points for brick-and-mortar retailers. And since you can return misbuys, Prime Wardrobe could make it more comfortable purchasing through voice commands to Amazon Alexa.
Prime Wardrobe aligns well with the Amazon Echo Look that takes full-length photos of you to review your day’s clothing choices and uses the Amazon StyleCheck app feature to have AI score your fashion decisions. Prime Wardrobe could also mesh with the Amazon Fashion vertical that features upscale clothing.
A decade ago, Jeff Bezos said “In order to be a $200 billion company we’ve got to learn how to sell clothes and food.” While it’s far surpassed that mark already, nailing the clothing ecommerce experience could further expand Amazon’s empire. Plus, now it has all those Whole Foods stores where it could sell clothing too.
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Jim Cramer, actually had a good comment this morning saying.... need a dress for the prom...... get it from Prime.... wear it and send it back.
He said Nordstrom's has always been very good about taking back clothes no questions asked, even if they had been worn...... Thus the controlling brothers who own are seeking to liquidate the businesss.
techcrunch.com
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