[sfvisser]

> Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at the expense of making himself poorer.

No, they both got richer. Maybe Bezos had a chance to make his employees slightly more rich and himself less so, but ultimately no-one got poorer here.

[Volundr]

No one? What about the brick and mortar stores that lost volume? Or even the other budding online marketplaces that were choked out of existence?

[kansface]

They aren’t his employees?

[nerdponx]

I think GP is wrong-as-intended, but is still somewhat correct-as-written, indirectly.

Amazon's growth has pushed various companies out of business, reducing employment opportunities at companies other than Amazon. So any employee who works at Amazon for lack of other opportunities, and if those other opportunities would have existed if Amazon hadn't put them out of business, then yes, that employee is poorer.

This scenario is somewhat contrived on an individual scale, but it seems obvious to me that corporate consolidation and monopoly-ish-ization should lead symmetrically to monopsony-ish-ization in the labor market. But I am not a professional economist and I would be interested to see any actual research on this topic.

[aaroninsf]

This is not just wrong, but profoundly wrong.

The reconstruction of the American retail landscape that consumers experience only as "buying I guess kind of a lot of my stuff from Amazon" (or Walmart, or a very few other entitities; and their lesser-known agricultural oligopoly peers),

is so total at the manufacturing/logistics/supply chain/fulfillment level, as to defy our comprehension.

The world that we live in has had the mechanisms of how it produces and delivers goods to its citizens changed in more far-reaching ways within the last two decades than since the industrial or agrarian revolutions.

AND,

this reorganization has meant millions of people worldwide have had their utility redefined, and "optimized," to their detriment in terms of opportunity, income, stability, benefits, etc. ad nauseum.

To pick one straw out of the tornado: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38212124-nomadland

But that is literally one of a thousand examples; the "gig economy" and its infinitely examined (and litigated) sharp edges provide as many more as you would like.

Fast-fashion and next-day fulfillment and fungible goods from Chinese "companies" with machine-generated meaningless names clogging Amazon results pages, do not come at no one's expense.

TANSTAAFL.