What Is Amazon? (2019)

&gt; It is the most successful social welfare system ever implemented, saving billions and billions of dollars for everyday Americans without costing taxpayers a dime. It is a testament to the power of compounding interest, to the power of a focused plan executed violently for decades.<p>A social welfare plan? Are you for real?<p>Both Walmart and Amazon are pioneers of modern union busting practices. They screw workers over as much as they can get away with to squeeze out the maximum amount of labour. Instead of writing this you could as well spit in the face of working class people.<p>The premise of this article so willfully ignorant of material reality, that it is impossible to take this serious.

I use Amazon a lot and I have Amazon Prime but I&#x27;ve started to do big purchases elsewhere.<p>Because, frankly, the difference between having 25 relevant SKU&#x27;s in a smaller store versus 1000&#x27;s on Amazon doesn&#x27;t matter to me when I only want to buy one of them. The right one.<p>I don&#x27;t want to have to try and work out if it&#x27;s real or counterfeit, or how reputable the brand is, or whether the listed specs are accurate - I&#x27;m happy to pay a bit extra for a store&#x27;s merchandisers to do that for me.<p>So yeah, I&#x27;d buy a USB Stick from Amazon, but a television, not so much. I&#x27;m not even sure how they can solve these problems (how can you police&#x2F;accurately rank a huge inventory?) but at the very least they could get rid of co-mingled inventory etc. that are making it even worse.

You lost me at &quot;It is the most successful social welfare system ever implemented, saving billions and billions of dollars for everyday Americans without costing taxpayers a dime. &quot;<p>A good portion of Walmart employees are on food stamps because Walmart doesn&#x27;t pay living wages. If anything Walmart exists on the tax payers dime.

I&#x27;ve always thought of Amazon as an Operating System, not in the typical way we see an OS (as something that resides on a small personal computer or server), but a large abstraction that deals with higher level concepts, yet at the same time able to handle minute details and work with lower-level concepts (Think SKUs, receipts, billing etc) and higher level concepts like AWS, which Amazon runs on due to self dogfooding.

If there ever was an article where tl;dr applies, this would be it.<p>Ultimately it’s a fairytale version of the history of Walmart and Amazon viewed through the lens of each company being an algorithm.<p>I’m not sure this carries much insight other than the importance and power of focus on customer satisfaction (which may seem obvious but in my experience bears repeating).