People, asked from where it came
Would very seldom know
They would simply click and ask
“Was it not always so?”
–David R. Henderson, “The Incredible Amazon Machine.”
If you’ve read The Incredible Bread Machine, you’ll recognize where I got the idea for the poem above. My poem was motivated by a Facebook post by my friend Ross Levatter. He has given me permission to quote his post.
First:
May I take a moment to give praise to Jeff Bezos? Think if this pandemic had developed 25 years ago, before Amazon. Before the presence and power of Amazon dramatically increased the impact of FedEx, UPS, and other home delivery services. Back in the day when you had to go out and interact with large numbers of people in order to purchase everything you needed. This would all be much worse.
Amen, brother.
Ross expands on the point:
It’s not MERELY (as if this could be a “merely”) that Amazon is the EVERYTHING store, that you can get virtually everything you need from the store–groceries to restaurant delivery to TVs to toiletries to video games to…books), it’s not just that you can now download ebooks instantaneously…it’s not just that he’s developed an entire entertainment sub-industry to fill Amazon Video so we have things to watch while we’re homebound. It’s how he’s changed OTHER companies, other industries. Two brief examples:
FedEx and similar companies are now much more efficient than two decades ago because 1) Amazon became a major customer and made demands for efficiency, and 2) Amazon started its own delivery fleet to compete with them.
Ever notice how EASY it is to open packages these days? Remember when they came in fused hard plastic containers impossible to open with anything short of a chain saw? You don’t see that any longer because Jeff Bezos told companies if they wanted to sell their stuff on Amazon they had to develop easier ways for his customers to open them. Amazon, I believe, even aided in the research to create a new industry standard. As a result, in the time of pandemic, it’s much less likely you will cut yourself and bleed while opening packages.
Although my addition to follow doesn’t measure up to Ross’s great examples, here’s one little way Amazon changed my life that I haven’t seen commented on before. (I told former EconLog blogger Art Carden about it a few years ago and he told me that he started applying my strategy.)
Even before I retired two and a half years ago, I rented an office in downtown Monterey where I could hide out and get my work done without interruption. I would be working on an article, either academic or popular, and would want access to a book. I might find it at the Naval Postgraduate School library and I could quickly look on line for it. But then I would have to go in and get it. That meant finding a place to park. If I was on a research quarter, which is when I was typically writing, I would sometimes not go in for 4 or 5 days. If I could do without the book for a few days, which was almost always the case for academic articles, I could go to Amazon and buy a used copy for about $3.99 plus about $3.99 shipping. By the way, I’ve never seen anyone else make this point, but I think the reason the listed shipping price is so high is that the seller doesn’t have to charge you tax on the shipping price. In a zero-sales-tax world, I would bet the price would be more like $4.99 and the shipping would be more like $2.99.
So I would save a trip to the library and have my own copy that I could mark up to my heart’s content. Thanks to my new friend Jeff.
READER COMMENTS
Philo
Mar 19 2020 at 10:38pm
I used to check books out of the library and then forget to return them–perhaps even lose them. I would owe fines for lateness and, perhaps, much larger charges for replacement and recataloguing. When Amazon came along, I often found it advisable to buy (probably second-hand) my own copy of the book. Inter alia, this saved me from some the costs of my carelessness and disorganization. And, yes, Amazon is also wonderful for merchandise other than books.
Matthias Görgens
Mar 20 2020 at 2:43am
And the actual physical incarnation of books doesn’t took all that much energy and effort to produce. So from a whole-economy point of view, books as disposable one-use items still makes sense.
Libraries are still fun to hang out in.
gwern
Mar 20 2020 at 5:34pm
I’ve bought hundreds of used books to scan and upload online, and I’ve found that Amazon is rarely the best place to buy a used book (curiously, even their wholly-owned subsidiary Abe Books typically beats Amazon proper), in part because Amazon is also the only place which has such high listed shipping prices. You will find plenty of used stores like Better World Books where shipping is like $0.99, or simply bundled in. (I have no idea how they can make a profit off selling me a book for a total cost as low as ~$2, shipped, even considering that they get many for free and can use sub-minimum-wage labor if they are like Goodwill, but I’m happy to buy it!)
My understanding from reading seller discussions about this question is that Amazon has a fixed minimum shipping price ($3.99), and so there is a floor on the total price, which is why there are all those $0.01 + $3.99 shipping prices – the real price is lower, but that’s as low as Amazon will let them sell for since there is a shipping minimum.
Why? One theory is that Amazon prizes a simple uniform buyer experience much more than any lost orders from having a floor on price. Pretty much everything is $3.99 shipping from the marketplace, or free via Prime, end of story. My theory is that it’s also partially a way to tame the Marketplace: the sellers on Amazon are a lot less trustworthy in general than most Abe sellers (I’ve had several Amazon sellers ‘cancel’ my order or send the wrong thing or do so very slowly), and also less trustworthy than individual chains like Better World, and it ensures that ‘exit scam’ style accounts can’t offer a flood of listings for $1 total, pick up orders, and disappear. (Even if they don’t make any money, it make the customers angry.)
IronSig
Mar 20 2020 at 10:26pm
I’ve been searching since listening to an episode of “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” last fall, but does this Ross Levatter have anything to do with “V is for Veidt?”
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