Report: Amazon’s Toll Road

Date: 1 Dec 2021 | posted in: Retail | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

Amazon is exploiting its position as a gatekeeper to impose steep and growing fees on the small businesses that must rely on its site to reach the online market, our new report finds. Even as these exorbitant fees bankrupt sellers, they are generating huge profits for Amazon, a fact that the tech giant conceals in its financial reports. These profits are not only the spoils of Amazon’s monopoly power. They are the essential fuel that feeds its market-domination strategies.… Read More

Issue Brief: How Amazon Exploits and Undermines Small Businesses, and Why Breaking It Up Would Revive American Entrepreneurship

Date: 16 Jun 2021 | posted in: Retail | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

In splashy campaigns and lobbying at the Capitol, Amazon claims that it has “a mutually beneficial relationship” with the small businesses that depend on its platform. This fact sheet tells the real story, and explains what Congress needs to do. … Read More

Report: Amazon’s Next Frontier: Your City’s Purchasing

Date: 10 Jul 2018 | posted in: Retail | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

A national contract opens the way for Amazon to take over billions of dollars in local government spending. In this report, we examine the contract and find serious concerns — including that it leaves local governments at risk of being ripped off, and sets Amazon up to expand its monopoly power. … Read More

In The Nation: Amazon Doesn’t Just Want to Dominate the Market—It Wants to Become the Market

Date: 15 Feb 2018 | posted in: Retail | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

Stacy’s Mitchell’s cover feature for The Nation looks at how Amazon is a radically new kind of monopoly with ambitions that dwarf those of earlier empires, and what we should do about it. … Read More

Amazon’s Stranglehold: How the Company’s Tightening Grip on the Economy Is Stifling Competition, Eroding Jobs, and Threatening Communities

Date: 29 Nov 2016 | posted in: Retail | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

Amazon has extended its tentacles across our economy. In this report, we pull back the curtain on the company, and find that it’s at the center of increasing inequality and diminishing opportunity, and that it’s concentrating power in ways that endanger competition, community life, and democracy. We also examine how public policy should address Amazon’s high costs.… Read More