In 2019, Amazon formally closed its retail business in China,22 and strengthened its efforts in Latin America, Australia, and India. The established Argentinian online retailer, Mercado Libre, has kept Amazon at bay in Latin America.23 Still, Amazon’s Latin American operations include logistics centers in Mexico and Brazil, multiple call centers in Colombia, and corporate offices as well as call centers in Costa Rica—Amazon’s biggest Latin American location.24 Direct competition from multi-service e-commerce companies remains less consequential in Australia and India. It took two years for Amazon to double its sales in Australia, where the company’s retail market share was 3 percent in 2019, just ahead of Melbourne-based Kogan. com’s 3 percent retail market share, though both were eclipsed by eBay’s 22 percent share.25 Though e-commerce in India is an emerging market—3 percent of the nation’s total consumption—the nation’s 1.3-billion customer base represents “one of the world’s fastest-growing retail markets.”26
Although not omnipresent around the globe, Amazon capitalism remains important not only due to its sheer size and value, but also because it has propelled many novel features that currently animate the world’s economy. Amazon capitalism pioneered and helped to spread “one-click” instant consumerism at the expense of workers, communities, and the ecological balance of our planet. Amazon’s 440 million-metric-ton carbon footprint rivals that of competitors, such as Walmart, and even the world’s largest energy companies.27 Indeed, the speed-up of consumerism, including expedited (free) shipping of consumer products, represents a tidal shift in the global economy, driven largely by finance capitalism. Each month, approximately 200 million unique users visit Amazon.com to purchase consumer products.28 Along with Amazon products, they purchase goods sold by third-party sellers, who have been using Amazon’s shopping platform since it became public in 2000. By 2016, as many as 2 million sellers across the globe sold their goods through Amazon.com, although most were individuals selling a few items.29
Along with other high-tech companies, such as Google, Amazon has also been on the forefront of a phenomenon that Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” Surveillance capitalism refers to “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.”30 Amazon employs a collaborative filtering engine to surveil consumers using its electronic shopping platform in order to promote its own commercial interests. Each time customers purchase products through Amazon’s online shopping platform, they turn over their private information and buying habits to the corporation.31 Amazon executives use this data to decide which products to manufacture and sell, and at what price, as well as what products to suggest to customers, and in what order. Although Amazon claims this strategy is designed to serve customers by “anticipating” their needs, critics highlight how Amazon’s use of surveillance technology manipulates consumers to further the corporation’s own commercial interests.32 Likewise, Amazon uses electronic technology to surveil its fleet of workers, including warehouse workers, delivery drivers, ghost writers, and other high-tech workers, in order to extract valuable information about their work flow that is used to further exploit, discipline, and control workers, increase labor efficiency, and inform the development of workplace automation and other business investments.33
Amazon’s surveillance technologies pose serious privacy and civil liberty threats in the context of the company’s operations and relationships to governments and municipal police. Along with providing cloud data storage for the U.S. Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, Amazon has pioneered and sold new surveillance technologies. Amazon’s 2018 acquisition of the Ring home surveillance system has also fueled the rapid penetration of the state-corporate nexus of surveillance of everyday life.34 In addition to Ring, police departments in several U.S. states are already using Amazon Rekognition, a new face-recognition computer system and database, and the system has been offered to the U.S. Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Civil rights organizations have raised concerns about the use of this new surveillance technology, which tends to misidentify people of color more commonly than white people, and which could be used to better identify protesters. Likewise, hundreds of anonymous Amazon employees sent a letter to Jeff Bezos, declaring that “We refuse to build the platform that powers ICE, and we refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights.”35 Moreover, contrary to Amazon’s pseudo-liberal image, the corporation has given massive sums of money to right-wing politicians in its attempt to garner influence and buy elections.36
AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX AND MULTIFACETED CORPORATION
Amazon is far more than simply a major online retailer. Indeed, “no other tech company does as many unrelated things, on such a scale, as Amazon,” Duhigg reported in The New Yorker in 2019.37 Overall, in 2018, Amazon “collected” US$122 billion directly from online retail sales, and another US$42 billion by “helping other firms sell and ship their own goods.”38 In addition, during that same year, Amazon earned US$26 billion from its Web-services (AWS) division39 that sells cloud computing services—i.e., storage space, bandwidth for website hosting, and processing power—to individuals, and companies such as Netflix and Instagram,40 and Amazon itself.41 Although AWS supplies 10 percent of Amazon’s revenues, the company’s operating income, or the funds remaining after expenses are accounted for, “dwarfs any other sector,” pulling in US$606 million more than Amazon made in North American sales in 2016.42 Moreover, Amazon took in US$14 billion in Amazon Prime and other subscription services, “hundreds of millions of dollars from selling the Echo,” US$17 billion from sales at more traditional (off-line) brick-and-mortar stores, including Whole Foods, and the fully automated Amazon Go stores, along with US$10 billion in advertising sales and other activities.43 Analysts reported in 2019 that banks and credit unions were bracing for the coming Amazon “invasion” of banking.44 At that time, Amazon was already funding small-business loans, reducing fees for merchants who use Amazon Pay,45 and seeking to compete with prepaid wireless providers.46
Business analysts diverge over the reasons for Amazon’s rapid growth, with some pointing to its use of a business school strategy known as the “flywheel,” “loosely defined as a sort of self-reinforcing loop. Where possible, projects [are] to be structured to bolster other initiatives underway at the company.”47 More critical analyses, including our own, highlight the role of neoliberal policies and politics, such as the weak enforcement of antitrust laws, corporate welfare, and weak labor laws in the United States and other countries, which have facilitated the rise of Amazon’s monopoly power and its exploitative labor and business practices.48
AMAZON’S GROWING MONOPOLY POWER AND CORPORATE DOMINANCE
LaVecchia and Mitchell also rightly point to the growing monopoly power the corporation has gained through dominating “the underlying infrastructure—the online shopping platform, the shipping system, the cloud computing backbone—that competing firms depend on to transact business.”49 The rapid growth in Amazon’s online shopping platform, and the company’s use of this platform to both sell its own goods and those of other sellers, helps to illustrate their concerns.
As of 2020, there were over 150 million Amazon Prime members, making it the world’s second largest paid subscription program. Indeed, about 60 percent of American households are Amazon Prime members. Among the affluent, the numbers are even higher. A staggering 82 percent of households making more than US$112,000 per year are Amazon Prime members.50 Prime members pay an annual subscription fee in order to utilize Amazon’s platform and receive perks such as free, expedited shipping on millions of items purchased through Amazon. Amazon Prime membership is also growing rapidly among U.S. households earning less than US$50,000 annually,51 partly due to fee discounts of 50 percent or more for college students and very low-income households.52 To further
