Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/10/the-zen-of-picking.html
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This is fascinating stuff. I really appreciate you creating a post about it. Off to read the full article.
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So wait, now we’re mourning the demise of Big Box Retailers? shuffles papers on the desk I need to update my list.
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The full article is great, though I am left wondering what a
Red Dead Redemption 2-scented candle
is. That hyphen makes all the difference…
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Smells like BOTH dread and despair!
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choicest morsels
Good name for a band.
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Sounds like a discontinued cat food…
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I was amused that it was barrel shaped. That’s the first thing I think of when I think of Red Dead Redemption 2. Barrels.
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Blessed be the bottom-feeders. These guys kept my friend in Product 19 cereal for a long time.
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This is the most Bruce Sterling thing I’ve read that wasn’t, well, Bruce Sterling.
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Amazon takes the Craphound’s soul. 
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I know exactly the kind of guys who would do stuff like this. If you are fanatical and lucky enough you can make a living doing it, and there is always the promise of the big payday. If they weren’t doing this they would find some other way to gamble.
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It is red and it has a dual smell of both dead and redemption.
Ain’t grammar great! 
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I know it’s the in thing to crap all over Amazon, but the cascade failure that are bargain bins and liquidation sales that take sales from struggling-but-still-alive business and give them to zombie businesses (that are dead, but haven’t stopped moving yet), are not an Amazon thing, they’re a recession (and/or bursting bubble) thing.
Every time I see an unquestioned statement in an article that describes any first-world economy as “booming”, I think; No, that’s not what’s happening. This is not some wonderful economic environment that would be all puppies and rainbows if it wasn’t for a few unchecked, predatory, would-be monopolies. This is an economic death spiral. If your metrics are saying things are getting better, there’s something wrong with your metrics. Every time a retail shop implodes, its competitors are undercut and get a little be closer to being the next flare-out. Every time a restaurant closes and sits empty for months, slightly fewer people come to that area to eat and every nearby restaurant gets closer to shutting up shop. Every time a business goes under owing money to other businesses, that’s a buch of other businesses wondering if this is the last invoice they can afford to write off, or it’s employees that might finally have to sell off their house and drag the average house prices further down, or it’s another hundred or thousand people whose households now have negative disposable income, just waiting for their credit card to max out.
I’d love to lay blame at the feet of a few big businesses, but it’s economic mis-management at the national government level, plain and simple. Exploitative entities like Amazon may do better than average in a failing economy, but the reckoning is coming for them too.
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This. And it’s not like government doesn’t have the tools to address this, or hasn’t dealt with these types of monopoly-creating circumstances before. It’s entirely a matter of choice by government. And the choice has been to both permit and encourage this type of agglomeration.
Do you want monopolies? Because this is how you get monopolies.
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