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"15 Facts That Show Amazon Is Destroying America"
by Epic Economist
"The empire being built by Amazon is a major threat to America, but most people don't have any idea of the sketchy things the company does to establish itself as one of the major players in the industry. The world's largest e-commerce retailer and the nation's second largest employer is actually crushing the retail industry and killing millions of jobs all over America. Given that its real estate footprint is significantly smaller than most brick-and-mortar retailers, the company’s overhead costs are significantly smaller. Offering low wages, using public services, and taking advantage of legal loopholes to get massive tax breaks also allow the giant company to operate on extremely thin profit margins that would kill many struggling players. In today’s turbulent economic environment, it’s getting increasingly harder to compete against Amazon. Since 2000, hundreds of thousands of retail stores have been shuttered as they failed to compete with Amazon's low prices and thin profit margins. A staggering number of jobs have also disappeared in the process.
As the retailer has grown, the number of independent businesses has dramatically fallen. Between 2007 and 2017, the number of small businesses fell by 165,000. About 52% of the nation’s small apparel, toy, and sporting goods stores disappeared, along with about one-third of small book publishers, RetailWire Data shows. For the record, 64% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats say Amazon is bad for small businesses, which highlights that even Congress is worried about the consequences of Amazon’s rapidly rising empire. On the other hand, the jobs created by the company are some of the lowest quality jobs in the U.S. Amazon workers are forced to live on starvation wages and rely on federal assistance programs to be able to get by. The retail giant does everything it can not to pay taxes and take advantage of public resources to make its business grow. What Amazon doesn't tell the public is that it is us, the U.S. taxpayers, who fund the company's exponential growth while they collapse our retail sector, the quality of our jobs, our supply chains, and our economy.
Economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson have estimated China’s manufacturing exports to the U.S. may have cost as many as 3.7 million jobs since 2001. If Amazon continues to crush brick-and-mortar retailers at the pace it’s been doing for the past decade, by 2033, it would lead 22% of them to go bankrupt, costing 2.5 million jobs. Add in the jobs Amazon will kill at grocery stores, drugstores, warehouses, and delivery services, and the total would be well over 3.7 million. And unlike the manufacturing jobs lost to China, which were clustered in a comparatively few counties, those retail jobs are located in every city, town, and hamlet in America. Unlike other retailers, Amazon employs significantly fewer workers, which means that most of the laid-off employees wouldn’t be hired by the retailer, and our national unemployment rate could face a spike. “What Amazon won’t tell us is that every job created at Amazon destroys one or two or three others,” they wrote.
It is evident that Amazon's growing market dominance is eroding opportunity and fueling inequality in the U.S. The retail giant uses its market power to kill competition and take over one industry after another. The more they annihilate small businesses and retailers, the more power they have. All of this power concentration is endangering competition, independence and democracy in our country. That's what we're going to expose today."
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