[sah2ed]

How is Amazon harming society? I don't see how they harm consumers since either way, consumers are the biggest winners of those low prices.

If you are referring to self-published authors distributing ebooks being forced to take 35% on < $3 sales and 70% on > $3 sales on their platform; or merchants leveraging their reach to sell to a larger audience being undercut by Amazon on price then yes, they are harming society in some way.

But even their "harm" is as debatable as the "harm" of Henry Ford's mass produced cars displacing horse-drawn carriages mostly because they were more efficient at transporting people over the same distances as horses.

https://www.quora.com/How-long-did-it-take-to-get-horse-draw...

[fnl]

Plenty, here is a selection:

- Nice jobs with plenty of human interaction at local stores get replaced by low-wage, brain-dead jobs in sweatshops (distribution centers) and employees get replaced with self-employed gig workers (transportation services)

- Amazon makes huge profits it immediately keeps reinvesting, so it pays no taxes on gains, reducing the redistribution of wealth

- Of the taxes that would apply, Amazon, like all multinationals, makes use of legal loopholes only the privileged can "access"

- Amazon's data-centers are probably one of the world's largest consumer of electricity - which in turn mostly comes from fossile fuels and atomic energy, therefore polluting the world and driving global warming

- Having a large, controlling piece of the "job pie" means such companies can push wages and prices down, ultimately eliminating the middle class, that was built around SMEs

a.s.f.

[pad-throw]

I disagree with all your points:

>> Nice jobs with plenty of human interaction at local stores - Cashiers and other such store jobs are nice? Most such jobs at least here in the US are minimum wage, dead-end jobs which includes having to deal with rude customers and managers who would replace you in a heartbeat with two others for half your pay. What may be 'nice' to you the customer isn't necessarily 'nice' for the employees. Amazon offers convenience and time savings instead of human interaction. If this niceness of human interaction was that important or valuable to everyone, they would have voted with their wallets and gone to the stores instead of shopping on Amazon which means they value convenience and time more than the niceness of human interaction with strangers. So Amazon's popularity means capital is just being redirected to the most valuable actions.

>> self-employed gig workers (transportation services) - I believe it's the lack of healthcare and good social security (more so a problem in the US) that is the main 'problem' or 'risk' with the gig economy. Otherwise I am hard-pressed to see why people working on their own terms is really not better than long-term employments especially for commodity jobs like driving and transportation.

>> Amazon makes huge profits it immediately keeps reinvesting, so it pays no taxes on gains, reducing the redistribution of wealth - It keeps reinvesting its profits which means the money and capital is going back into the economy - in the means of cheaper prices, more services that startups and businesses be more efficient which means a whole order of more people than just the shareholders, benefit in some way from this capital. How is this reducing the redistribution of wealth? In fact companies who take and store profits (like Apple) and/or use them for share buybacks (like Google) are using this money less efficiently by returning it to only a small number of people who are Apple/Google share owners.

>> Of the taxes that would apply, Amazon, like all multinationals, makes use of legal loopholes only the privileged can "access" - You mention that all multinationals do this and that these are 'legal'. I really don't know why only Amazon is the one harming anyone here. I agree that everyone, including Amazon should pay their fair share of taxes. I am not a tax expert, but I just think that the fact that these 'legal loopholes' exist means that in todays world of global economies and multi-national companies, defining 'fair taxation' is very complex and not a simple black and white decision.

>> Amazon's data-centers are probably one of the world's largest consumer of electricity - which in turn mostly comes from fossil fuels and atomic energy, therefore polluting the world and driving global warming. - I can actually argue that Amazon's cloud would be a net positive for world pollution and energy consumption. Amazon's cloud data centers pack multiple millions of customer workloads from what would have been many, inefficient data centers into smaller number of very large, but also highly efficient data centers. Amazon has whole teams working on green/renewable energy sourcing for their data centers as well as designing more efficient hardware which means millions of businesses are automatically gaining the benefits. This is an important business effort for Amazon too because of their scale and visibility. I doubt that smaller businesses running their own hardware or data centers would ever care about their efficiency and/or the cleanliness of their source of their power.

>> Having a large, controlling piece of the "job pie" means such companies can push wages and prices down, ultimately eliminating the middle class, that was built around SMEs - Most if not all of Amazon's services have been built up on enabling others to do business and create more value - be it authors, sellers, or tech companies. Plenty of SMEs have leveraged and built on top of Amazon's services and had access to opportunities that they could never have. The SMEs that are getting 'eliminated' (like bookstores and such) need to adopt to the new situation where the value/services they provide are simply not in demand or the market has moved on and they have not adapted. Yes, there is a risk of having a large number of businesses depending on a single company but that is not the same discussion as Amazon being harmful.