Amazon Storefronts Help Small Business

"Amazon helps small-town businesses"

 
Amazon is responsible for the closure of thousands of storefronts in America and now offers their platform to business owners so that Amazon can get a piece of every online sale they make.

Amazon claims their Amazon Storefronts, "a curated destination to shop exclusively from American small and medium-sized businesses" helps small businesses. Perhaps, but it will never offset Amazon's total devastation of Main Street America and suburban shopping malls, thanks to the overwhelming power of Amazon's marketing machine and predatory business practices. Then there are the many local jobs that have been lost, along with the local tax revenue from those jobs. Sure, Amazon creates some jobs in regional distribution warehouses; jobs that exploit workers and take such a physical and mental toll that few people can handle it for long.

According to syndicated columnist Jim Hightower:
"Bezos followed the business path mapped by Rockefeller and other 19th Century robber barons: (1) ruthlessly exploit a vast and vulnerable low-wage workforce; (2) extract billions of dollars in special government subsidies; and (3) wield every anti-competitive tool you can find or invent to get what you want from other businesses." 

Amazon's revenue has been growing at more than 20% a year, and yet Amazon paid no federal income tax for 2018. Through various tax breaks and credits, the company received a tax rebate of $129 million.

But this is not just Amazon's doing -- everyone who shops online is also at least partially responsible for the decline in brick and mortar retail. The choices we make on where to spend our money have consequences. Some of those consequences have been particularly unpleasant for Red States and Rust Belt States.