PBS ended its day at the TCA Winter Press Tour with Frontline’s Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos – and if you’ve been thinking about your own Amazon addiction, this program will make you think more than twice.
Frontline producer James Jacoby was blunt in his assessment of the company. “There’s a military-like precision to their operation which is awesome, but it comes at a cost to labor force and the environment,” he said. “We’re all accustomed to the convenience. The film explores some of the cost to that and the calculus of how to deliver on that convenience. Taking stock of where the empire is now was our focus. Forty percent of all computing in the cloud happens on Amazon Web Service (AWS.) PBS is housed on AWS. Alexa is embedded in more than 20,000 devices.”
Franklin Foer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, has written about Amazon’s unstoppable growth. He added, “It began as a bookstore, became the everything store and now it’s the everything company. That comfort we have with Amazon has us inviting it further and further into our home. The essential question the film asks is how, when you have a company so cemented into our existence, is an entertainment powerhouse, has contracts with the government, what does it mean to have so much power concentrated in one company and so much power harbored in a single individual?”
Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, has studied Amazon for years and says the central question is the power Amazon has from a democracy perspective, “It’s not just its size, Amazon has structural power. If you make anything, you have to ride Amazon’s rails. You have to use their AWS. Alexa has to be your operating system. Amazon has this godlike view of our lives and of businesses. It’s a fundamentally different kind of monopoly problem.”
Mitchell says they did a survey of 1,000 independent businesses last year that had both brick and mortar businesses and e-commerce sites and 90% of them said their business is negatively affected by Amazon. She added, “Now these independent businesses have a bitter decision: if they choose to sell on Amazon, they give up a lot of their revenue and product knowledge. If they don’t sell on Amazon, what do they do? They give up the online market.”
Jacoby said they had access to some Amazon executives and when questioned about these issues, the executives say that if businesses want to reach customers, they’re Amazon Prime members. Jacoby said, “They think they’re doing a huge service to small businesses.”
The Frontline special also examines the course of Bezos’ career from the mid-1990s to the present. “You see the cultivation of a goofy affable image from early on,” said Jacoby. “But he also has Napoleonic ambition. He runs a ruthless enterprise inside. He’s obsessed with Thomas Edison and models himself as the Edison of his time. He talks a lot about his philosophy of failure: taking big bets is the way to win. We also learn about his relationship with Wall Street and how it’s allowed him to fail more than any other CEO.”
Stacy Mitchell added that the relationship between Amazon and Washington, D.C. is a very close one as Amazon spends more on lobbying than any other corporation, and Bezos bought the largest mansion in D.C. Mitchell opined, “As a democracy, we should be very uneasy about it.”
Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos airs February 18 on PBS.