Fede Duran

Updated Friday, March 29, 2024-18:42

  • Small business "Every day is a challenge for us, we go out to fight a war without weapons"

In 2005, Amazon

announced the launch of its

Prime

service , considered today a kind of inalienable surname. Even in the most brilliant cases, success does not come at the first opportunity. The initial price was $79 per year and the commitment of the company then led by

Jeff Bezos

was to guarantee unlimited orders without shipping costs and with a maximum receipt period for the merchandise of 48 hours.

It is estimated that six years after the premiere, only

four million homes were subscribed to the service

. Bezos uncovered the redeeming figure years later. In

2021

, the number of subscribers reached

200 million

worldwide.

In 2022, the

Seattle-based

big tech had a turnover of

474.55 billion euros,

9% more than the previous year. Prime then represented 6.9% of revenues, a relatively modest pinch that does not do justice to the dimension of the economic, labor and social earthquake caused in parallel by this business model.

The most obvious notch of the Amazon effect marks the face of

local commerce

, caught in a perfect storm where the inflation of the real estate market, the change in habits derived from the pandemic (consumerism is structured today on the internet) and the impossibility of competing come together. in stock with the immense hangars of the American multinational. It is not strange to walk through the old commercial arteries of any Spanish city and see how franchises and

house flipping

have transformed their appearance.

The impact that

hyperspeed culture

has at the workplace is explained by Amy Sorkheim in an article published in Engadget: "The company operates a fleet of cargo planes, experiments with drone deliveries and deploys thousands of delivery vans, although none of those "Amazon-branded vans are driven by real employees. Instead, independent companies, known as delivery service partners, outsource other drivers to handle this task." Many of them

urinate in bottles during delivery shifts,

others suffer accidents in warehouses and there have even been reports of espionage among the staff (the French Government imposed a fine of 32 million euros).

An aside: the European regulatory front promises new tensions as a result of the regulation of digital markets, to which neither Amazon, nor Apple, nor Alphabet, nor Meta adapt with sufficient conviction.

A philosophical approach

Perhaps the most overlooked defect of the Amazon effect hits at a social level. In a way as subtle as it is inexorable, the romance with the urgent is a

highway to anxiety and impatience

, moods that connect with other proven facts of the digital dimension, from the deterioration of memory or reading ability to the decline of narratives. classic audiovisuals (cinema), buried by

streaming

, series and weekend marathons (

binge watching

).

The most existentialist observers will go one step further and affirm without a shadow of a doubt that hyperspeed, superficiality and inconsistency also infect dating apps. Hence, fashionable terms such as

ghosting

have been coined , or it is not uncommon to block a person with whom you chatted amicably two days before. The latest trend in this stupid scenario is pointed out by the

New York Times

:

talking but not meeting.

From buying so much trinkets, from so much curing dissatisfaction with digital jewelry, sapiens has ended up becoming the main commodity. Bezos knows it well and people in his multi-million dollar league such as Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Elon Musk know it well.