It’s the holiday season, a time when many of us are shopping for gifts. For many of us, shopping online has become our solution to going out and about to local stores. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive officer of amazon.com, wants shopping through Amazon to be our first response. That’s why his company works so hard at making the Amazon shopping experience quote “convenient and friction-free.”
However, easy, friction-free shopping via Amazon comes with a price. Maybe not the price that appears on your billing statement, but a price nonetheless. Amazon is insinuating itself into every aspect of life that it can. So far, nothing seems to be stopping its pervasive reach.
On today’s “A Public Affair,” we’ll be talking in with Olivia LaVecchia, Minneapolis-based researcher with the Community-Scaled Economy Initiative of the Institute for Local and “Amazon’s Stranglehold: How the Company’s Tightening Grip Is Stifling Competition, Eroding Jobs, and Threatening Communities.”