But even this doesn’t have to be scary. Amazon’s recent decision to raise the wages of its US and UK employees demonstrates that, regardless of its size, it is still vulnerable to pressure from organised labour, activists and politicians in exactly the same way as other companies.

Amazon’s enormous global distribution network makes purchasing goods extremely convenient, a huge improvement on the stupid time-wasting practice of “going to the shops”. The bad stuff about it is it has some obvious remedies that go unapplied, not because the company is uniquely powerful or evil but because those remedies would affect all of its competitors as well. The relevant conflict here isn’t between Jeff Bezos and Gerry Harvey – it’s between both of them on one side and the large mass of the rest of us on the other. Give me my bendy rollers but also a fair economic system that works for everyone.

via There is a lot that is scary about Amazon – but hate the economic system not the enormous global company | Eleanor Robertson | Australia news | The Guardian