Amazon Abuse Of Power

People have been going to Amazon to buy a variety of products for awhile now. Amazon quickly became one of the largest retailers in the world (Gensler, “The World's Largest”), selling anything from singing toothbrushes to designer home decor to the latest in technology. But with all that success comes power. How do we know that Amazon isn’t misusing that power? Can we trust the company that controls three quarters of the e-book market? The answer is no. Based on Amazon’s overwhelming success and immense power, Amazon is untrustworthy and unreliable. The first reason that Amazon is untrustworthy is that they became careless in the making of their products. Recently there was a solar eclipse that could be seen from around the world. People

Thousands of writers, booksellers, and publishing companies asked the United States Department of Justice to look into Amazon for antitrust violations (Streitfeld, “Accusing Amazon of” ). The Authors Guild, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of Authors’ Representatives and Authors United sent a series of letters and statements to the Department saying, “Amazon has used its dominance in ways that we believe harm the interests of America’s readers, impoverish the book industry as a whole, damage the careers of (and generate fear among) many authors, and impede the free flow of ideas in our society.” (Qtd. in Streitfeld, “Accusing Amazon of”). This quote shows that Amazon is using its power to intimidate their employees and partners rather than using it to come to an agreement between companies. Amazon uses the writers’ books as “loss leaders”, but the writers struggle with the loss, not Amazon(Streitfeld, “Amazon

Statistically, working at an Amazon fulfillment center is less dangerous than working at a department store (Bernton and Kelleher, “Amazon Warehouse”), but that might not be entirely true. The Seattle Times interviewed Amazon workers at an Amazon warehouse in Campbellsville, they said, “Three former workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Campbellsville told The Seattle Times there was pressure to manage injuries so they would not have to be reported to OSHA, such as attributing workplace injuries to pre-existing conditions or treating wounds in a way that did not trigger federal reports.” (Bernton and Kelleher, “Amazon Warehouse”). Amazon was using their power to compromise the safety of their own workers so they wouldn’t jeopardize their safety record. The article in The Seattle Times goes on to say that there were reports of warehouse officials trying to persuade doctors into treating the injuries so that it wouldn’t trigger a report of any kind. However Amazon claims that there is no proof that their procedures are working or failing. The Amazon company said, “Since we ship hundreds of millions of packages a year, employ tens of thousands of associates, and record millions of work hours, it isn’t possible to accurately portray the effectiveness of our procedures… ” (Bernton and Kelleher, “Amazon Warehouse”). Despite these claims by Amazon, the evidence is there that Amazon