Amazon pick-up locations on university and college campuses throughout the United States, further exacerbating the privatization of public higher education. Although the company has lost money in the short term by offering its customers various perks and discounts, it helped the company to gain customer loyalty and market dominance. Amazon claimed nearly one of every two dollars in U.S. consumer purchases online.53
In this context, many sellers perceive few options other than to use Amazon.com to sell their goods. Amazon’s exploitative practices extend to third-party sellers who are charged a commission on their sales (usually 15 percent) made through Amazon.com as well as rising fees for using Amazon’s fulfillment, advertising, and other services.54 It also requires third-party sellers using Amazon’s platform to share information about their transactions, which the corporation uses to compete against them on popular items. The company has a long history of “predatory pricing,” or selling products below market cost in order to crush, outcompete, and sometimes even acquire other companies, such as Diaper.com and Zappos.55
Amazon uses transaction and consumer information from its online shopping platform to decide which products should be given the “buy box”—the eye-catching and convenient one-click “buy now” or “add to cart” buttons—that show up during online shopping searches. Amazon claims its mysterious algorithm that selects a default seller for the buy box is a neutral formula designed to maximize customer satisfaction. Yet, evidence suggests that Amazon gives itself a perfect score on measures of customer experience, giving it an unfair advantage over other sellers whose measures are affected by negative online customer reviews. The company also gives its Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) warehouse and shipping service a perfect score for measures related to fulfilling orders, which both encourages sellers to use their delivery service and reduces accountability for problems with FBA’s deliveries.56 Other research finds that “about three-quarters of the time, Amazon placed its own products and those of companies that pay for its services in that position even when there were substantially cheaper offers available from others.”57 Likewise, Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, only chooses Amazon items when asked to purchase something. No wonder a 2016 survey of independent retailers in the U.S. identified competition from internet retailers such as Amazon as the number one threat to their business,58 and critics are linking the growth of Amazon to a decline in small businesses.59
AMAZON’S GLOBAL LOGISTICS EMPIRE AND ITS IMPACT ON WORKERS, COMMUNITIES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Along with becoming the world’s largest e-commerce company, Amazon has quickly become one of the largest logistics companies in the world.60 Prior to Amazon, brick-and-mortar retail corporations such as Walmart dominated the global logistics industry. Amazon is currently disrupting the model that Walmart perfected. Much as Amazon handles its own warehousing, distribution, and fulfillment services, the company today increasingly manages delivery as well.
In the United States, although Amazon continues to use the U.S. Postal Service and private delivery companies, its packages, particularly Amazon Prime packages, are increasingly delivered by two main contingent groups of third-party Amazon workers: Amazon Flex drivers and Amazon’s Delivery Service Partners (DSPs).61 Amazon Flex drivers are gig workers, legally classified as independent contractors, who are paid per completion of a delivery route, or “block,” by the hour. Amazon Flex drivers use their own personal vehicles (or rented vans) to make deliveries. Similar to other gig-economy platform jobs, such as Lyft, Uber, Postmates, and Doordash, Flex drivers must pay for all expenses related to their vehicle, road tolls, parking, insurance, vehicle maintenance, among other expenses; in addition, these workers receive no overtime pay, benefits, union representation, or minimum wages. DSPs are small subcontracted “independent” parcel delivery firms with approximately 20–40 delivery vans that exclusively deliver packages for Amazon, mostly Prime. DSP fleets are limited to 40 vans to avoid unionization efforts and to increase Amazon’s flexibility and power over the price paid per delivery. By 2019, Amazon’s own delivery network surpassed the U.S. Postal Service as the carrier delivering the plurality of its packages.62
As Amazon’s promise of one-day shipping expanded, the company invested in its air cargo division: Amazon Air. These subcontracted pilots complain of being overworked and are among the lowest paid in the air cargo industry.63 Other skilled workers employed by Amazon also express concerns about their labor conditions. Among software engineers at Amazon, turnover rates remain very high, with the average duration lasting one year.64 Online outsourcing services, manifest in crowd or “ghost” work, arguably represent the worst-case scenario in this sense.65 Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowd-sourcing marketplace connects employers with a global pool of independent workers willing to do specialized or repetitive tasks for competitively low wages.66 Amazon employs vulnerable workers like these to augment the information available digitally, via Alexa Voice Services, to its Alexa personal virtual assistant.67
Other research shows how Amazon and other online service providers have contributed to the decimation of shopping centers and other retail markets.68 Grocery stores, many of which are unionized and offer decent salaries and benefits to its commercial workers in the Global North, are also closing up shop as they face growing competition from Amazon. As small businesses and brick-and-mortar retailers close in response to the rapid growth in e-commerce,69 many panicked cities and governments are losing tax revenue and turning increasingly to logistics and warehousing to attract jobs, which are far from ideal.
Today’s massive logistics and warehousing complexes are mostly located on the outskirts of major urban metropolitan areas and depend on large concentrations of low-paid labor, particularly workers of color.70 Typical e-commerce warehouse employees in the United States, disproportionately black and Latinx,71 toil long hours (often 10 hours or more per day among full-time workers and more than 40 hours per week) for low pay. In 2020, entry-level wages for Amazon warehouse workers were $15 per hour, or about $31,000 annually for workers employed full-time all year.72 Many of these non-supervisory blue-collar warehouse workers, known as “warehouse associates,” are precariously employed, either as temporary or seasonal workers.73 Amazon associates’ work is grueling. They quickly pick, pack, and load and unload goods in large warehouses, sometimes the size of 17 football fields. Full-time pickers, who store and retrieve items, sometimes walk for miles, while packers must stand on their feet for long hours and engage in highly repetitive motions that leave their muscles sore and injured. Workers’ motions are closely monitored through electronic scanning devices. Managers and supervisors pressure them to “make rate,” in order to locate, pack, and move items quickly, while minimizing their errors and “time off task.” Pressure to work fast and “make rate” increases the risk of workplace injury in an industry already known to be injury-prone. An investigation of Amazon’s injury records from 23 of its 110 fulfillment centers in the United States showed their rate of serious injuries (9.6 per 100 full-time workers) was about double the national industry average.74 Research on Amazon’s warehouse workers in other nations suggests that they share similar concerns regarding their low pay, employment security, pressure to work too fast, and lack of regard for workplace safety.75 Workers’ concerns about the corporation’s failure to protect their health and safety intensified during the COVID-19 outbreak, especially as the corporation failed to report potential cases, close facilities, and provide paid time out to its workers in a timely fashion.76
Seeking to minimize its labor costs and improve workplace speed and accuracy, Amazon has been on the forefront of warehouse automation, investing heavily in research and development of robots, digital scanners, automated conveyor belts, labeling machines, and other machinery. Reliance on subcontractors, sunk costs in traditional warehouses not suited for robotic equipment and other forms of mechanization, as well as difficulties in automating
