Listen: How Amazon Swallowed the Economy on “This Is Hell”

Date: 3 Apr 2018 | posted in: Retail | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

ILSR’s Stacy Mitchell is the guest on the March 24 episode of This Is Hell, a longform interview podcast from Chicago’s WNUR. In the episode, “No competition: How Amazon swallowed the economy,” Stacy talks competition, platforms, and Amazon with host Chuck Mertz.

“[Amazon] is not an open market in which people can buy or sell goods freely and of their own accord,” Stacy says in the episode, of Amazon’s Marketplace. “What you have is a private arena that is controlled by a single player. It would be as if Walmart not only set up a store on the edge of town, but bought up all the other real estate and got to decide which companies got the choice spots, how much rent they had to pay, when they could open, what they could sell. This is essentially a dictator over the commercial sphere.”

Listen to the 35-minute conversation on the This Is Hell site, or search for it in your podcast app of choice.

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Stacy Mitchell

Stacy Mitchell is co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and directs its Independent Business Initiative, which produces research and designs policy to counter concentrated corporate power and strengthen local economies.