New York Magazine does a piece that looks at the question…..
Interacting with Amazon, for most of its customers, broadly produces the desired, expected, and generally unrivaled result: They order all sorts of things; the prices are usually reasonable, and they don’t have to think about shipping costs; the things they order show up pretty quickly; returns are no big deal. But, at the core of that experience, something has become unignorably worse. Late last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon’s customer satisfaction had fallen sharply in a range of recent surveys, which cited COVID-related delivery interruptions but also poor search results and “low-quality” items. More products are junk. The interface itself is full of junk. The various systems on which customers depend (reviews, search results, recommendations) feel like junk. This is the state of the art of American e-commerce, a dominant force in the future of buying things. Why does it feel like Amazon is making itself worse? Maybe it’s slipping, showing its age, and settling into complacency. Or maybe — hear me out — everything is going according to plan.
Like most tech companies, Amazon’s corporate outlook at the beginning of 2023 wasn’t ideal: falling stock price, rising costs, geopolitical concerns, real inroads by labor organizers, the end of the “pandemic shopping habits” that were, just two years ago, predicted to accelerate e-commerce adoption by leaps and bounds. On January 4, Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, who was elevated to the top post in 2021 after Jeff Bezos stepped back, said the company planned to eliminate “just over 18,000 roles.” Cuts had begun last year with a focus on Amazon’s devices division, including Alexa. The expanded cuts would target Amazon’s stores division, which wasn’t much of a surprise. In 2022, Amazon announced it was pulling back on some of its physical retail plans, including bookshops and its uncanny “4-Star” stores, which stocked chaotic assortments of well-reviewed Amazon products.
In 2022, the company pulled back on some other plans as well. In July, it reportedly started trimming products from its private-label business through which it has long sold a range of its own products, some branded as Amazon Basics, others with house labels such as Solimo, Pinzon, and Wag. (The prevalence of house brands is arguably one of the ways in which the Amazon shopping experience is actually normal.) One concern was that Amazon’s own-brand expansion had started to draw antitrust attention with regulators accusing the company of using internal data to identify and then undercut competitors. Another issue — one deeply connected to Amazon’s fundamental weirdness — is that the traditionally lucrative business of selling cheap store-brand alternatives to popular products wasn’t especially profitable for Amazon…..
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If you understand Amazon as an aspiring megascale infrastructure company — a provider of systems, services, capacity, and labor — its junkification makes sense. Amazon hasn’t been acting like a store for a while. In its ideal future, selling things to people is everyone else’s problem. And so is Amazon.
image…Reuters
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