Would it be better if they could develop robotic "pickers" so that the warehouses didn't employ anyone?

no one mentioned amazon drones?

A new study entitled The “Amazon Tax”: Empirical Evidence from Amazon and Main Street Retailers comes from the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University, released in April 2014.

The researchers looked at consumer behavior in five states (California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia). They compared spending patterns before and after the states required permanent collection of taxes on Amazon purchases between 2012 and 2013.

The data comprised daily transactions for 2,807,476 households from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2013, and included both banking (i.e., checking, savings, and debit card) and credit card transactions. Researchers observed the date, amount, and description of each transaction. Among the findings:

• Amazon sales fell by 9.5 percent following introduction of mandatory sales tax across all states in the value of products (net of sales tax).
• The total dollar amount spent by consumers on Amazon, including taxes, decreased by 2.8% in the wake of a law’s implementation.
• Avoiding sales tax was especially important for large purchases. When sales tax laws were in place, people decreased their spending by 15.5% on purchases larger than $150, and by 23.8% on purchases equal to or larger than $300.
• With sales tax collected, people moved away from from Amazon to competing retailers, both brick-and-mortar and online. There was a 19.8% increase in purchases at the online operations of competing retailers. There was a 2.0% increase in local brick-and-mortar expenditures at these retailers.
• For purchases over $300, there was a 23.7% increase in purchases at other online retailers and a 6.5% increase in purchases at local brick-and-mortar retailers. Amazon Marketplace merchants, who are generally not subject to the Amazon Tax, experienced a 60.5% sales growth on large (over $300) items.

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2422403

I for one welcome our mechanical box packaging overlords.

Amazon.com Inc later this year plans to launch a marketplace for local services, a broad term that encompasses anything from babysitters to handymen to birthday clowns, beginning with a single market, several people familiar with the matter said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/10/us-amazon-com-services-idUSKBN0EL20S20140610?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

ya'll are missing the juiciest -

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-solomon/under-amazons-cia-cloud-t_b_4467265.html

That graph is kinda nuts!

For the third quarter, Amazon posted a net loss of $437 million, more than 10 times wider than the $41 million loss from a year ago.

Huge losses will continue in the fourth quarter, Amazon said. The company projected losses as high as $570 million for the fourth quarter, and revenue of $27.3 billion to $30.3 billion.

Want to grow the revenue of your start up company? So easy: Just ask people for a 10$ bill for giving them back a 20$ bill. Sure, that's not profitable, but you'll find plenty of new "customers", and your revenue will skyrocket.

Such kind of "growth" fooled investors during the "new economy" bubble 14 years ago, and it still seems to work pretty well for Amazon and a few other companies. But one day investors will want to see profits, and that's then be the beginning of the end of companies like Amazon.

" Amazon is just the tool." The tool to transfer money out of their country?

Revenue from e-books leveled off in 2013 at $3 billion after increasing nearly 50 percent in 2012, according to BookStats. But Kindle Unlimited is making the glut worse, some writers say.

The program has the same all-you-can-eat business model as Spotify in music, Netflix in video and the book start-ups Oyster and Scribd. Consumers feast on these services, which can offer new artists a wider audience than they ever could have found before the digital era.

Some established artists, however, see fewer rewards. Taylor Swift pulled her music off Spotify this fall, saying it was devaluing her art and costing her money. “Valuable things should be paid for,” she explained.

Holly Ward, who writes romances under the name H.M. Ward, has much the same complaint about Kindle Unlimited. After two months in the program, she said, her income dropped 75 percent. “I couldn’t wait and watch things plummet further,” she said on a Kindle discussion board.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/technology/amazon-offers-all-you-can-eat-books-authors-turn-up-noses.html

Management tried to respond, but fucked up

https://medium.com/@jaycarney/what-the-new-york-times-didn-t-tell-you-a1128aa78931

As the story noted, our reporters spoke to more than a hundred current and former employees, at various levels and divisions, over many months. Many, including most of those you cited, talked about how they admired Amazon’s ambitions and urgency even as they described aspects of the workplace as troubling.

https://medium.com/@NYTimesComm/dean-baquet-responds-to-jay-carney-s-medium-post-6af794c7a7c6