Amazon: “The Great Equalizer”
Amazon: “The Great Equalizer”
Plus: Living in times of crisis, Richard III wants to watch the world burn, and Sky Cake.
Amazon, like many Big Tech firms, has become popular to hate. Particularly in the imagination of progressive antitrusters and other economic populists, the company plays the villain’s role on the story of 21st-century retail — that of a greedy, soulless, and all-powerful string-puller, dedicated to enriching itself at the expense of the Little Guy.
The Little Guy disagrees.
In a recent piece for RealClearMarkets, this author spoke to several small-businesspeople whose businesses rely on Amazon. Their stories — the stories of the very sorts of businesses Amazon purportedly murders — contravenes the populists’ histrionics.
In recent weeks, I interviewed several small businesses selling products on Amazon’s marketplace. While they came from wildly diverse professional backgrounds, and run very different businesses, they all told the same basic story.
The sellers I spoke with say critics’ arguments badly misrepresent reality. They argue that Amazon — to a degree unlike any other marketplace or retail outlet, online or off — puts brand-new small businesses in direct competition with the biggest corporate giants, ratcheting up competition and expanding consumer choice.
Regulators’ myopic focus on Amazon makes little sense, I was told, since it places far fewer constraints on entrepreneurs than legacy retail does.
“It’s the only marketplace that everybody has equal access to,”Andy Horrow argues. “Can you imagine the government coming after Kroger and saying, ‘Hey Kroger, you need to do a better job selling small businesses’?”
Horrow understands the legacy retail space and upstart e-commerce better than almost anybody. He spent more than a decade at PepsiCo, where he worked on brands including Gatorade and Tropicana. The company’s name recognition and vast resources ensure its products always find space on supermarket shelves, bar and restaurant menus, and wherever else customers look for a beverage.
Today, Horrow serves as president of Protein2o, a 12-employee company that produces high-protein health drinks. Protein2o lacks the resources of his former employer, but armed with the tools of the digital economy, he can compete directly with the biggest players in his industry.
Horrow says Amazon’s marketplace gives small businesses the opportunity to circumnavigate the retail industry’s traditional gatekeepers. Supermarkets and big-box stores — which have finite shelf space — generally require new brands to demonstrate pre-existing financial success and further charge exorbitant “slotting fees” for prime display placement. Charting the brick-and-mortar retail world often proves a challenge too complex and too costly for inexperienced, cash-poor startups to surmount. In contrast, Horrow says Amazon’s marketplace has empowered him to compete with giant brands like Gatorade, Vitaminwater, and BODYARMOR.
“I call Amazon ‘the great equalizer,’” Horrow says. “As long as I can spend effectively in a search-and-display environment, and target effectively, I’ve got just as much of a chance to succeed as [giant brands] do,” he adds.
Some Wisdom
In October 1939, C.S. Lewis gave a sermon arguing that humankind, even when facing crises, must continue to study and to search out that which is worthwhile and beautiful.
Lewis offers perspective regarding the perpetually chaotic nature of life:
The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal.
…
Men are different [from insects]. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.
Besides their profound insight into human nature, Lewis’s words give warning: Do not take the current moment’s challenges as license to act dishonorably, to abandon principle, or — as many of today’s politicians and pundits wish to do – to “burn it all down.”
Principle must be applied practically, of course, and without compromise political success cannot be had. Sometimes, to defeat Hitler, the Good Guys must ally with Stalin.
Nonetheless, the choice to adopt nihilism, relativism, or iconoclasm is voluntary. Circumstances cannot force anybody to abandon what is good. Lewis’s perspective gives serves as antidote to scaremongering.
Some Beauty
William Shakespeare’s second great historical tetrarchy — Henry VI, Parts 1–3 and Richard III — depicts the War of the Roses, the decimation of a once-noble and once-stable England. Henry VI, a young and indecisive king, fails to manage his nobles’ rank ambition and thirst for vengeance. His own weakness, and his nobles’ dogged refusal to put aside their grievances, give victory to in the French in the Hundred Years’ War, ravage England over years of domestic conflict, and ultimately destroy Henry, his royal line, and a generation of peers.
As Richard III begins, Richard laments his place in the new Yorkist regime. Whereas in Henry VI, Part 1 the nobles wrought havoc to vindicate various personal interests, Richard wants war simply because he cannot stand to live in peace.
Richard opens the play with these famous words:
Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths; Our bruised arms hung up for monuments; Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front; And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them; Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity: And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams, To set my brother Clarence and the king In deadly hate the one against the other: And if King Edward be as true and just As I am subtle, false and treacherous, This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up, About a prophecy, which says that 'G' Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
Some Humor
As Richard prepares for the Battle of Bosworth — where he will lose life and crown — he says, “Conscience is but a word that cowards use / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.”
Richard must have seen comedian Patton Oswalt’s “Sky Cake” routine. (Fair warning: Oswalt works very blue.)