What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” Tells Us About What Amazon Is

What this mainly says to me is that my life is going to get much worse - as Amazon logistics cannot deliver to my house.

I used to be a big user of Amazon prime, but they recently swapped over to logistics for my rural area which has no cell service and huge distances between houses and that apparently means they can’t deliver. They try and packages sit at the local warehouse for a couple of weeks before being sent back to Amazon.

Originally, some drivers would be foolish enough to try to come up here without cell, but by and large, they were unable to find the property- mainly because the house is not visible from the road, even if the mailbox is on the road, and mapping apps do a bad job. So I’m assuming the drivers don’t get paid or in some other way get punished and this means that a bunch of Christmas presents didn’t show up, and we stopped using Amazon entirely.

Since that we’ve already had a problem with one vendor we purchased from directly that tried to send something to us via Amazon logistics, and it got returned to them. This was not mentioned on the webpage, and when we contacted them, they got really angry with us for giving them an “undeliverable address” – they literally did not want to give us a refund. They really didn’t like: It’s deliverable by USPS, UPS, and FedEx as a response. But eventually, we got a refund.

I’m assuming this is going to be my future more and more now.

A gargantuan "everything company" like Amazon is the very definition of a monopoly. In any functional society this beast would have long since been broken up before becoming dominant in multiple industries. At this point, they're pretty much emblematic of the rot at the core of western society.

The pattern is quite simple.

Build infrastructure to serve internal operations at a scale no rational external buyer would justify. Optimize it to a level that drives marginal cost below the buyer’s internal alternative. When the surplus capacity is too large to write off, open the API and sell it.

Forgot the last part: when you have eliminated all the competition and have all your customers locked in with no other options, raise the price.

We need to get back to preventing (or breaking up) monopolies.

Amazon in a logistics and infrastructure company. It tries to be a lot more than that but isn’t very competitive outside the core skills.

Logistics = Getting stuff to your door super fast… Amazing, nobody is better.

Other stuff = An app and website that doesn’t suck and lets you find what you want amidst a sea of junk. Not great here.

Infrastructure = AWS core services which are quite good.

Other stuff = Nearly everything AWS tries to do on top of base commodity infrastructure, which is a hot mess.

Other stuff = Alexa, which is a has-been also-ran now that’s struggling to compete in the GenAI era. Rando also-ran businesses like Amazon Music. Various sports things that seem to be more Andy Jassy’s pet projects than anything. Physical retail with some keeping the lights on via Whole Foods but nearly everything else here has been shut down as a failure.

This read was mildly interesting, but I'm left thinking that the study of any sprawling monopoly will come up with similar mildly interesting and irrelevant rationalizations of success. Once you get as as big as Amazon was in the early 2010s, provided your culture doesn't melt down (by itself no small feat), you are well positioned to expand and flatten adjacent parts of the economy.

So the question is whether you read this to be inspired by it and attempt to create your own monopoly, or to be afraid of it and start thinking about regulation. Or both :-)

It's kind of fascinating how well Amazon can repeat this. Google has attempted this literally dozens of times with various sub-businesses and failed almost every time. Amazon has a real skill in doing this well that many other large tech companies simply don't have.

This gets the story of AWS wrong and it should be fundamentally suspect because of that.

<sarcasm> Time to investigate Apple again for monopolistic practices in their ebooks store! </sarcasm>

More seriously, it's somewhat mind-boggling that Amazon is allowed to keep it's "everything store" business, it's logistics business, and it's internet business all under one roof. The P&G discussion here highlights how insane it is that this isn't being investigated and prosecuted.

These types of services almost seem squarely in the space of what governments should/could do with intelligent leadership.

It is probably not too late for a state-driven type of service layer like this from some rationally led government somewhere in the world.

I wanted to find this interesting, but it has AI/LLM signs of writing all over it.

The dig in the middle - "you can skip the next part, but if you do skip, are you even a real reader? Not judging. Just saying" - ugh. Why would I bother reading every word if you likely didn't write every word?

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