Amazon.com is getting too big

Amazon.com, in recent years, has become the #1 online retailer, selling almost all of your needs in virtually all sectors of ecommerce and receiving your order within 2 days.  They are the largest internet company by gross revenue and could soon become the most valuable company.  Jeff Bezos, the company founder and CEO has the goal to become the first Trillion Dollar ($) company.

Most are not complaining and are satisfied with Amazon's service.  However, we have started to see some cracks developing in their formula which many do not see.  There are extreme risks to this type of business that could downplay the efforts to become the most valuable company:

1) Monopoly risk.  In 2017 Amazon.com made some large acquisitions in their expansion of the business.  Two of these important ones were Kohl's and Whole Foods.  Kohl's has remained a clothing store but is also now a hub for Amazon Returns.  Whole Foods has largely remained the same, except now customers can use their Amazon.com Visa Credit Card to get 5% back via the points system that can be redeemed on Amazon.com.  Amazon keeps pursuing efforts to acquire more and more companies, including buying certain healthcare businesses.  They want to absorb and buy out businesses from all different sectors.  Eventually, if they are appearing to be too large, the government will come after them and many smaller companies will file lawsuits against them.  The same thing happened to Microsoft in the late-1990s/early-2000s when Sun Microsystems (now called Oracle) filed the largest anti-trust suit ever which even reached the US Supreme Court! Since then, Microsoft has tried extra hard to NOT be a monopoly.

2) Labor Practices.  Jeff Bezos is now the richest man in the world, worth approximately $150 billion dollars but you don't become the richest unless you are sidelining everyone else.  Those who work at Amazon.com have to work extra long hours, meet insanely tough deadlines, go to the bathroom in cups, and do not make a great salary.  This has led to multiple strikes and pressure on the executive management.  If Bezos caves in to these demands, then the cost for labor will increase and this will eat into Amazon.com's bottom line, defeating the effort to become a trillion dollar company.  People's lives are at stake here!

3) Online listing issues.  Aside from the legal risks, Amazon needs to step up and make improvements to listings and returns of certain types of products.  Amazon doesn't have a really good or solid return policy for third party sellers and certain cheaper items (such as add-ons or anything under $9.99).  They tell you these items are "non-returnable" but if you have an issue with the item or the package was incomplete, then you cannot return the item directly or even initiate the refund process.  You have to contact Amazon directly and get them to refund you.  This is a poorly diagnosed procedure, since often we can find issues with items that are cheaper too.  Third Party Sellers on Amazon are usually okay to use, but sometimes you find bad apples who either ship too slowly, are dishonest with the items they resell, or at worst are total scams.  For these cases where you have a third party seller issue, you have to use Amazon's A-Z Guarantee procedure, which works sometimes but is a little tedious.  If the seller says they shipped to item but there isn't any tracking information, then you have to wait longer.  Furthermore, you will run into issues where the wrong picture of an item is displayed and receive a totally different item, but Amazon does not fix the listing.  Amazon needs to improve all of the above.

Amazon is no different than any company and now they are reaching their limitations as one of the largest companies, not breaking any limits.  With any super large big business, there are always cracks that form. If they truly want to be #1 then Amazon will have to start by first making the above improvements.