Tuesday was the day we’d all been waiting for, our second, better Black Friday: Prime Day. The day Amazon puts limited amounts of random items on sale for a limited time. The day internet frenzy rivals the famed casual violence of Black Friday. It’s practically a holiday, and it’s only three years old. It's a brilliant marketing plan, and I – and you – benefited from Amazon's unprecedented success.
If only successful entrepreneurship were easy to imagine from an armchair, we’d have less expert analysts warning us about the impending dangers to democracy and even more “monopolies” like Amazon to cater to our lesser needs. Although the danger is imminent, its real-life consequences are still ambiguous for trustbusters. To paraphrase a so-called robber baron of the 19th century, “the public be damned.”
Amazon's offer to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion sounds pretty great to both parties, but it seems that isn't good enough. The proposal has a lot of people worried about Amazon becoming an indestructible monopoly, and the government is all too happy to step in and settle the issue. But this concern ignores consumers' own preferences as well as business and entrepreneurial history. This week in Words and Numbers, Antony Davies and James R.
USA Meg Mall in Seattle, WA (Source: Bynyalcin @Wikicommons)
21st Century Wire
With the announcement that Amazon.com is purchasing Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, a certain strain of the anti-business Left went into panic mode. It’s the same concern you see every time two large companies merge, amplified by the fact that Whole Foods happens to be particularly popular among people skeptical of corporate power. Of course, all these fears are terribly dramatic and overblown, falling into the classic error that confuses corporate power with government power.
In the U.S., Walmart declared an open war on Amazon by telling trucking companies that it will no longer do business with them if they continue moving goods for
Now that President Trump has demolished CNN for its biased, fairytale “Russia hacker” reporting, it appears that POTUS Trump is now setting his sights on the fake news Washington Post and its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for its coverage of him and his administration.
POTUS Trump tweeted Wednesday morning…
“The #AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!”
