Thread by @stacyfmitchell

1. For years, Americans failed to recognize Amazon as a monopolist, because we bought Jeff Bezos’s big lie – that bookstores, small publishers & print books were being driven out of business not by monopoly power, but by “progress.” They were going the way of the horse & buggy.

2. Now Amazon is building a vast brick-and-mortar retail empire. It’s slated to include thousands of supermarkets, dozens of bookstores, and, according to new reporting in the @WSJ, department stores too.
wsj.com/articles/amazo…

@WSJ 3. Jokes on us, eh? Bezos knew all along that the future of retail — and with it, the vast consumer goods industry — was always going to have a significant brick-and-mortar component. Physical retail has huge advantages.

@WSJ 4. All along, the question wasn’t whether brick-and-mortar retail would continue in a big way. The only question was who was going to own it. Bezos had a three-part strategy.

@WSJ 5. First, use predatory pricing and other monopoly tactics to clear the field of countless independent retailers, which excel a face-to-face commerce.

6. Second, set yourself up as a gatekeeper to online shopping, thereby generating huge cash flow from the monopoly tolls you can levy on all the firms that have to ride your rails to get to market.

7. And finally, use that huge stream of cash to move into the depleted world of physical retail and capitalize a big network of your own stores.

8. Back in the 2000s, if you pointed out what Amazon was doing, as I did, and as many independent bookstores did, you were dismissed as a luddite and even ridiculed by many journalists, commentators, and lawmakers.

9. And everywhere he went, Bezos peddled the Big Lie: “Amazon is not happening to book selling; the future is happening to book selling,” Bezos told 60 Minutes in 2013.

10. It’s funny how the future looks exactly like the past — there’s just a new logo on the awning. -end-