[lotsofpulp]

> First, who said anything about profit? That isn't even part of the definition of monopoly.

The commenter is responded to compared Amazon to the other big tech companies. Profit margin is an indicator of how much control a business has over its market. You cannot earn high profit margins if your customers can go somewhere else if you increase your prices, which means low profit margins means competitors exist.

Shipping logistics is not a huge thing. UPS/FedEx/USPS do what Amazon’s logistics do. All the other retailers also have warehouses (including their stores) all over the US. You might have to wait 1 or 2 or 3 days longer to receive the item, but it is not huge.

I would guess book stores would have gone out of business anyway, due to the ease of shipping books and the lack of urgency of people needing them. Little reason to pay all the capital and labor costs of running a book store if book buyers do not mind buying online. And of course, ebooks came along anyway.

The big competitive advantage Amazon had in earlier years was they did not have to collect sales tax from customers in most states, and they arbitraged that into gaining market share and allowing them to invest in their logistics and expand without incurring heavy losses. But that has been gone for 5 years since the South Dakota v Wayfair ruling in mid 2018.