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You know how amazon became a market leader? By avoiding paying taxes and other costs that retail businesses had to pay just to exist, undercutting any competition and forcing them out of business.
There's two stories here. The first is how did they get rich selling commoditised stuff. Books then whatever widgets. When they did that, any mail order co. could set up and play by the same rules as Amazon. Plenty of other pure play e-commerce outfits were setting up. Amazon were just better than both the new entrants and the established retail cos. where it mattered; business, tech, fulfilment, customer experience, which risks to take, luck. The combined effect of Amazon and the others put some slow old businesses in trouble. This it turns out was small beer.
The second story is how did they become a market leader in being fucking massive. They took big risks whilst delivering what people wanted; ridiculously good subscription buying services (Prime), a marketplace platform, a media platform that wasn't shit, and then they re-sold the tools they used to deliver their services to other businesses. They pretty much created a market for these. Nobody was really 'retailing' this kind of stuff.
Personally I don't think tax avoidance enabled this. I don't think being stingy with employee pay and conditions enabled this. I think both of those are a symptom of how big they are now. It's undeniable that they do it, but I don't think you can claim their success is because of it.
tl;dr they were dominating where it mattered before they were 'evil'.
Howard-
Early on as a book seller - you're likely right. They were way more agile, and put themselves in a position where they could just eat their competitors lunch.
ridiculously good subscription buying services (Prime)
Personally I don't think tax avoidance enabled this
Prime at least is physical delivery, which makes it easier to follow (for me at least). To deliver this they've taken advantages of roads and other infrastructure , educated workforce, educated and skilled customer base etc, but not paid for any of it through taxes.
They wouldn't be able to offer their service without it all being in place, but they've contributed nothing towards it.
I imagine you could make a similar claim for their IT side. They seem to set up their data centres in countries with decent infrastructure and skills to exploit (Ireland, Luxembourg), but which also conveniently behave as tax havens.
christianSpaceman
Right, so ignore the guy profiting from this and blame individuals.
You know how amazon became a market leader? By avoiding paying taxes and other costs that retail businesses had to pay just to exist, undercutting any competition and forcing them out of business.
But again, its the individuals fault for all this ...