Why I Love Amazon

Why did they want to break up the old New York Yankees? Because they were too good.

Same goes for mega-retailer Amazon. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is now calling for breaking up one of the most successful companies in the world.

I don’t know. I can’t think of a single thing I’ve ever gotten out of Elizabeth Warren, but Jeff Bezos has given me the world. I order a lot of stuff from Amazon. I am an unapologetic fan of the company,

Amazon is successful because it works so incredibly well for consumers. I’ve never had a bad customer experience with them. I can find stuff I can’t find anywhere else. I don’t have to get out of my chair to go shopping (I hate to go shopping). It’s easy to order. Stuff arrives at my door usually within a few days and without shipping charges or with small ones. They make returning what I don’t want very easy. Prices are good. What’s not to like?

Now, I also buy plenty of stuff from local retailers. Yesterday alone I had coffee at Barriques, bought bakery at Bloom, ordered a book at Mystery to Me, had lunch at the Weary Traveler and got my dinner from Delaney’s. But I didn’t do that because I think it’s any kind of moral imperative. I did it because I like their products and services. Local retailers win my business not because they’re local, but because they offer me something as a consumer that I want.

In Madison buying local is a sort of religion. It’s a liberal sacrament right along with eating kale. But the daily piles of Amazon boxes at my condo building mail boxes and the blue trucks plying the streets of the near west side suggest that even card-carrying liberals are making Jeff Bezos richer.

Some day (I hope that day will be long after I’ve been shipped out of this life) Amazon will go out of business. Nobody ever thought that Sears, Gimbels, Marshall Fields or Shopco would ever go under, but they did. They didn’t fold because of the moral furor of liberals. They just got outcompeted by the likes of Amazon; companies that gave consumers what they wanted in a world where people didn’t have the time or inclination to drive to the mall. That same kind of thing will happen to Amazon some day.

And, by the way, Amazon is not even the nation’s leading retailer. That’d be WalMart. Amazon controls only 4% of the retail market in the U.S. and only 1% globally.

But for now Amazon is an example of the free market working at its best. Consumers would not be benefitted by messing it up, as the paternalistic liberals, led by Warren, want to do. As a consumer I love Amazon because it gives me everything I want. I don’t need Elizabeth Warren “fixing” it for me.

Sorry, but I’m just not buying what Warren is trying to sell me.

Welcome to the 241st day of consecutive posts here at YSDA. Thanks for reading!