Inside Amazon's Evil Core

Exposing the "Death by Jeff" culture.

April 25, 2024, Los Angeles, CA – Originating in a garage in 1995 as an online bookstore, Amazon's ambition grew unchecked, morphing it into a daily necessity and disrupting every business sector while ruthlessly dismantling competitors using thuggish strategies to choke competition and exploit its loyal customers. Now, this untamed behemoth is besieged by regulatory hurdles, entangled in FTC litigation, and drowning in a rising tide of consumer distrust.

Amazon's ruthless maneuvers, orchestrated under the guise of "Death by Jeff," have left a trail of bankruptcies akin to a graveyard for traditional retailers: Toys "R" Us, Linens ’n Things, Radio Shack, Filene’s Basement, Modell’s, and more. Shopping malls, once relying on foot traffic, echo with emptiness. Local entrepreneurs are resigned to minimum wage jobs at big box retailers and Amazon fulfillment centers, and communities are left fractured and desolate.

Amazon's insatiable appetite for disruption spans every sector imaginable, from groceries (Whole Foods) to web hosting (AWS), pharmaceuticals (Amazon Pharmacy), TV & movies (Prime Video), fashion (Zappos), diapers (Diapers.com), online books & music (Audible.com), electronics and security (Amazon Ring), delivery logistics ("Fulfilled by Amazon"), and beyond, leaving a wake of destruction in its path.

Amazon has come to control much of online retail by bulldozing competition and using its own sellers' data to birth Amazon's own competitive private label brands. Amazon purposefully avoided collecting taxes for years, exploited partners, and even recruited senior management from competitors to replicate their top products. Amazon staff engaged in corporate espionage and worked undercover on Walmart, eBay, and other marketplaces for nearly a decade as a third-party seller called ‘Big River,' its mission is to scoop up information on pricing, logistics and other business practices. (WSJ - 'Inside Amazon’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals' - Dana Mattioli

According to people familiar with Big River and corporate documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Big River uses its sales across multiple countries to obtain pricing data, logistics information and other details about rival e-commerce marketplaces, logistics operations and payments services.

Despite the Wall Street bets and the Amazon CEO's voracious quest for unregulated success, as with all illusions, at some point reality hits.

According to Elizabeth Rowe, a University of Virginia School of Law professor specializing in trade secret law, misrepresenting themselves to competitors to gain proprietary information can lead to lawsuits on trade secret misappropriation. According to an email viewed by the Journal, Amazon's internal lawyers reminded Big River team members not to disclose their connection to Amazon in their conversations with FedEx.

Amazon's nefarious practices aren't limited to external competitors. A part of Amazon’s success is a cutthroat culture where employees are incentivized to win to an unusual degree, utilizing stack ranking -- grading employees against each other and cutting the bottom 6% of an (all-star) pool of performers each year. Amazon's notoriously high employee turnover ensures that employee's restricted stock units, paid at the end of the third and fourth year, may never be received.

Amazon tentacles reach far. Amazon is the number one, two or three player in a staggering number of industries, from e-commerce to cloud computing, giving the company unrivaled access to partner, seller, and even mining the proprietary competitor data of its third-party sellers on Amazon.com to reverse engineer bestsellers and undercut them on pricing. Amazon executives pump aspiring entrepreneurs for intelligence about their inventions and share the proprietary information with Amazon teams that stand to benefit, only to ghost the entrepreneurs and create similar Amazon products. Amazon recruited a senior manager from Trader Joe’s snack-foods business, grilling her for well-guarded and legally protected secrets, proprietary product data, and margins. (WSJ - 'Inside Amazon’s Push to Crack Trader Joe’s')

In 2017, Lina Khan published a paper that accused Amazon of being a monopoly, having grown so large and embedded in so many industries it was akin to a modern-day Standard Oil. Chairing the FTC in 2023, Khan filed a monopoly lawsuit against Amazon in what may become one of the largest antitrust cases in the 21st century. “Amazon now takes one of every $2 that a seller makes, ... and prices are higher for shoppers as a result,” said FTC Chair Khan.

Beneath the veneer of convenience lies a cesspool of deceit: counterfeit, fraudulent, fake, replica, dangerous and deadly China goods, stolen items, phony product and seller reviews, the scam "Amazon's Choice" endorsement, a manipulated "Buy Box," ineffective intellectual property enforcement, and rigged pricing. Not the mosaic matching Jeff Bezos' claim of "the Earth's most customer-concentric company."

As the truth emerges, consumers are urged to reconsider their reliance on Amazon's tainted empire. The innocuous cardboard boxes bear not just goods, but the weight of a company's unchecked power. Or better yet, consumers can turn away altogether.

Note: Portions adapted from “The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power” written by Dana Mattioli