alt Hacker NewsTo steal Benn Jordan’s ideas, capitalism is replacing itself with leveragism.
You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition. Starting a competitor to Amazon would be more difficult and capital intensive than starting a new car or rocket company.
There is no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours. Walmart can’t do it, Costco can’t do it, Target can’t do it, Dollar General can’t do it.
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> It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition.
That's an interesting theory. How do you reconcile it with the observable reality of there being thousands of e-commerce stores, marketplace platforms, and other sales channels operating in direct competition with Amazon?
> You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
Speak for yourself. Their delivery service is awful and I'd choose UPS 100% of the time instead if they gave me the choice.
It was Amazon's increasingly slow and unreliable deliveries that caused me to cancel Prime earlier this year, and I'm strongly motivated to shop elsewhere now because I know that the package will be delivered by someone other than Amazon's own service.
> no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours
Amazon has been dropping the ball pretty regularly on shipping recently.
Any one store, but there are plenty of niche stores that compete for whatever thing you are looking for.
> There is no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours.
Thats an edge case isn’t it?
Your example actually is in support of capitalism, because I can guarantee you that under some centralized government system this would not happen!
Not to mention the sheer number of things that they offer unrelated to the commerce side of things
I don't even live in the US or shop on Amazon anymore but I still have a Prime subscription just in case something good is on Prime Video (this doesn't happen often...)
Actually I just remembered there were several things recently that I could not find locally and so I used international shipping from Amazon.com which turned out to be way cheaper than you would expect I think mostly due to the Prime subscription