New book is delving into Amazon's goal of total business
dominance.
The book is titled The Everything War,
Amazon's ruthless quest to own the world and remake corporate
power.
And joining us right now is the author,
Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Maggioli.
It's great to see you.
Good morning. Congratulations on pub days tomorrow.
The book will be out tomorrow,
but so many questions about Amazon.
You've been publishing a number of the excerpts and other
stories that relate to the issues that you raised in
the book in the Wall Street Journal over the past
week. We've debated some of them around the table here
even.
And I'm so curious as you've
delved into this book, and maybe it's a moral question,
there are a lot of tactics that Amazon uses to
try to get in underneath their competitors and understand how
folks are doing certain things.
They're they're even, you know,
saying that there's somebody else in some cases
to find out some of this information.
And I'm curious whether you think this is right or
wrong
ultimately, You know, so Amazon likes to tout all the
good it does for small businesses and for
consumers on its website. But what I found in investigating
this company for the book is that it actually spies
on its third party sellers.
It steals ideas from entrepreneurs.
It has decimated retail jobs and it gouges a lot
of these third party sellers that it holds up as
an example of the small businesses that it's helping.
And they say that their customer obsessed.
But what I found is they're also competitor obsessed right
now.
They're misrepresenting themselves to get on rival platforms to get
secrets.
And that's not a normal business tactic.
Well, let's talk about a couple things.
Let's let's talk about the tactics in just one second.
But the customer obsession versus the competition obsession.
There is an argument to be made that the customer
obsession has both helped them grow their business,
but has also helped consumers over there's one of the
reasons that I happen to be a prime consumer,
meaning I pay for the prime membership and whatnot is
because I think,
and maybe I, I'm misunderstanding it.
I think for the most part,
I get a pretty great deal.
The convenience of it is to me seems pretty worthwhile.
And so I think to myself,
this is a pretty great store.
Am I am I, am I mis thinking this?
I don't think you're mis thinking it,
but I think that most customers don't realize that,
you know, 60% of what is sold on Amazon is
sold by third party sellers and it's an unregulated bazaar.
And you know, they do say that their customer obsessed
and that it,
you know, exists to a certain extent,
but it also flies in the face of some of
the things that they're selling,
things like carbon monoxide detectors that don't detect carbon monoxide
or
children's toys with lead in them.
If you are so customer obsessed,
why would you be selling items like that?
When you talk about the tactics,
and one of the ones that we were talking about
at this table last week was this Big River investigation.
This was a company, effectively made-up company
to try to pretend that they weren't Amazon so they
could go onto
platforms like Walmart and others to try to sell products
on them effectively so they could understand what's going on
behind the scenes.
Right? I imagine. And, and we were debating the morality
of this.
I imagine that there's a lot of folks who are
always looking at their competition,
trying to figure out how they work things.
It would shock me if somebody at Walmart is not
trying or hasn't tried at some point in the ball
game to sell products on the Amazon marketplace,
which is a very open marketplace.
I'd be shocked if they hadn't opened an account on
Shopify to see how it works,
to see how quickly the shipping really
takes place, to see what kind of
of advertising and promotion they're going to try to charge.
So This is why we we were sort of debating
what this really,
you know, how we're supposed to feel about all of
this.
How do you feel about it?
I would say that there's competitive intelligence like secret shopping
or,
you know, maybe an employee set someone up an account
on a rival website.
What Amazon did here was they set up an entire
shell company.
They were super secretive and then they misrepresented themselves.
They even took meetings with their rivals to get information
and shared it back with Amazon executives.
And I think that goes beyond the normal secret shopping
or the benchmarking that a lot of companies do.
And ultimately it comes down to what they learned,
how it was used, and it that gets into like
the legality of it.
Underneath this whole book, I think is a bit of
a,
a
Lena Khan question, which is
frankly, what should happen to this company?
Is this company good for society,
bad for society? And if you think it's not good
for society,
not good for the consumer,
is it supposed to be broken up?
Is it supposed to be regulated in a different way?
Is it supposed to be fined?
If you believe that some of these things are not
appropriate,
where do you land? So the FTC obviously sued Amazon
for being a monopoly.
And if you read the the lawsuit closely,
they say that maybe they'd go after structural remedies,
which could be a breakup of the company.
But there's a question here.
You know, Amazon's been around for nearly 30 years.
It has all these tentacles that are market leaders you
could get into like a Standard Oil situation where you
break it up and the pieces are just so big
in their own right that they're market leaders that they
just gain more power and they increase in value.
So I think that's what the regulators are grappling with
right now.
Do you think it's a monopoly?
I, I, I, I online,
obviously it has a huge market share,
but the question is, are we supposed to define it
strictly as online?
Are we supposed to define it as retail writ large?
Right. I I don't know if it's a monopoly in
the legal terms,
but I would say that they definitely resort to some
business tactics.
And they had their finger on the scale in a
lot of ways.
And you see that in a lot of examples in
the book.
Right. Final question, what does,
what does Amazon said to you about all of this?
What was the process like with them?
Were they saying, yeah, so I did a full Fact
Check of the of the book with them.
They did not really, you know,
participate on an official basis.
So they didn't give me access,
but I got a ton of access on my own.
And did they call you up when they saw the
book and say,
this is crazy, we love the book,
we hate the book, we love you,
we hate you. What? They haven't read the book yet?
I guess we'll see it tomorrow.