Amazon.com
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About
Amazon.com is one of a handful of dominant players in the online services business sector, which is itself increasingly a dominant part of everyday life.
Amazon, one of the first major online retail stores, was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos as an online bookstore but soon began expanding and acquiring its competitors; by the early 21st century it had become the go-to source for just about everything.
In 2015 Amazon surpassed Walmart to become the largest US retail company (by market capitalization).
In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods.
Issues
In short, Amazon has been a notoriously bad corporate citizen. A very brief summary of its transgressions would include:
- monopolistic/anticompetitive policies
- worker abuse
- abuses of intellectual property law
- funding political campaigns against the common interest
Related
Links
Reference
Related
- 2019/10/20 [L..T] Amazon is shipping expired food, from baby formula to old beef jerky, scaring consumers and putting big brands at risk “...items are arriving spoiled and well past their sell-by date, Amazon customers say. Interviews with brands, consumers, third-party sellers and consultants all point to loopholes in Amazon’s technology and logistics system that allow for expired items to proliferate with little to no accountability.”
- 2014/05/07 [L..T] Huge coalition led by Amazon, Microsoft, and others take a stand against FCC on net neutrality "A sizable coalition of technology companies has today taken a stand in favor of net neutrality in the form of a letter to the Federal Communications Commission. The group, led by giants including Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, and Yahoo, challenges a proposal the FCC is considering that threatens net neutrality."
- 2014/05/07 [L..T] US Patent Office Grants 'Photography Against A White Background' Patent To Amazon "Udi Tirosh at DIY Photography has uncovered a recently granted patent for the previously-unheard of process of photographing things/people against a white backdrop... to of all companies, Amazon."
- 2014/02/23 [L..T] Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers You might find your Prime membership morally indefensible after reading these stories about worker mistreatment.
- 2014/02/17 [L..T] Cheap Words Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?
- 2014/01/13 [L..T] Amazon Has Jedi Mind-Tricked You Into Forgetting It's Pretty Much Walmart Amazon.com is the best-loved company in America, despite being very similar to one of the least-loved companies in America: Walmart.
- 2014/01/03 [L..T] How I learned to stop worrying and love Amazon The online retailer has reshaped bookselling since it entered the trade in 1995. But Amazon's aggressive and "anti-competitive" tactics, especially for selling ebooks, are raising hackles in an industry under stress.
- 2013/10/10 [L..T] The Time Jeff Bezos Went Thermonuclear on Diapers.com "Amazon tracks its competitors extremely closely. So when an upstart called Diapers.com began catching on with parents by allowing them to easily schedule recurring orders of diapers and other essentials, Jeff Bezos took notice..."
- 2013/02/08 [L..T] Amazon unpacked The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?
- 2009/12/14 [L..T] visiting the Amazon warehouse Julia Sweeney recounts her trip to the Amazon.com warehouse in Whitesville, Indiana to deliver shipping stock of her CD and DVD Letting Go of God.
- 2009/07/18 [L..T] Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle “In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of [Animal Farm and 1984] from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.”