| 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. |