Amazon doubles down on a ‘new’ payment method for online purchases: Cash Amazon -- the e-commerce giant better known forpatentinga way for customers to pay online with a single, frictionless click -- is now investing in a different checkout option in the US: cold hard cash. It’s called Amazon PayCode... Andthe program, which is already available in 19 countries outside the US, allows customers to pay for their online orders at any Western Union location. According to Amazon, 80% of Americans live within 5 miles of one of the 15k participating Western Unions. The payment process works like this: When customers select the PayCode option when checking out, they receive a QR code. Then, they have 24 hours to fork over some greenbacks at the local W. Union. What does Amazon even get out of this? In some ways, cash is still king: Last year, cash was still the most frequent method of payment in the US, accounting for31%of all transactions -- more than online payments, credit cards, debit cards, or checks. So by offering a cash checkout option, Amazon hopes to squeeze some dollars from people who are biased toward cash -- primarily older buyers, lower-income individuals, and people making purchases under $10. This won’t be the first time that Amazon has (reluctantly) embraced hard currency: Amazon’s Go stores started accepting cash after debuting as cash-less, and the company also runs a program called Amazon Cash that enables customers to preload their benjamins into Amazon accounts.
The master of cutthroat capitalism: Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest man, and Amazon is America’s second-largest private employer. As regulators hope to reign in the retail behemoth, it is preparing to fight back. This profile gives us a fascinating look at the inner-workings of the company, and it begs the question: Is Amazon truly unstoppable?(The New Yorker) “Amazon is learning that a flywheel, once spinning, is very hard to stop.”
Amazon quietly fires 3 of its major delivery firms following a spotlight on fatalities Amazon has terminated its contracts with third-party delivery firms Inpax, Sheard-Loman, and Letter Ride following damning reports by BuzzFeed News and ProPublica that documented deaths connected to the 3 contractors. Amazon’s move to wash its hands of the firms will reportedly put more than 2k people out of work in 8 states -- all while dodging any liability. But the reports raise the question of whether the pressure Amazon puts on its drivers to meet their speedy delivery goals -- offering next-day and even same-day service -- could be partly to blame. Amazon: High goals, low barriers The e-commerce behemoth started rolling out its network of US delivery fleets in 2014. Since then, Amazon drivers have been involved in over 60 serious crashes -- at least 10 of those resulting in fatalities. Amazon’s delivery promise has drivers reportedly delivering north of 250 packages a day. During peak holiday periods, drivers say the number could rev as high as 400, according to Business Insider. To meet Amazon’s goals, drivers say they were forced to skip meals, ordered to pee in bottles, and coached to speed without wearing a seatbelt to deliver more packages in less time. Amazon’s lofty expectations would have even a trained getaway driver spinning their wheels, yet drivers for these firms are given only a few days of training before hitting the road, with generally little to no delivery experience required. Why isn’t Amazon held accountable? It’s all in the contract Other than dictating routes for third-party drivers, Amazon prides itself on keeping its hands off the wheel when it comes to labor and operation logistics -- claiming the company is just in it to lift up entrepreneurs who want to make a dent in the delivery game. But, when workers are exploited or people are hurt in crashes, the third-party companies take the heat, while Amazon walks away from the wreckage virtually unscathed
Amazon’s Marketplace woes extend to food products It’s more zaniness from the ’Zon. As CNBC reports, Amazon is regularly selling expired foods ranging from beef jerky to baby formula. Yummo. What’s the (expired) beef? It’s well established that Amazon Marketplace, which consists of millions of third-party sellers, has an issue with counterfeit and unsafe products. Amazon might have gained some culinary cred after it purchased the upscale grocery chain Whole Foods, but customer reviews show a real problem with expired, unsafe, or just-plain-gross edibles. For example, multiple reviews for Fiji bottled water claim shoppers received “recycled” Fiji bottles filled with tap water. That’s a big ew to l’eau. A data analytics firm found that 40% of the sellers of Amazon’s 100 top-selling food items had at least 5 complaints about food being expired. The Fiji thing apparently isn’t an isolated incident. How does this keep happening? Food is part of the 58% of merchandise sold by 3rd-party sellers in Amazon’s $900B empire. Third-party merchants making up the Marketplace can be official distributors or randos selling product they picked up in clearance aisles and closeout sales. Further muddying the waters: Two sellers can exist within the same listing, so it’s truly luck of the draw whether a transaction goes well. Amazon says Marketplace vendors must provide expiration dates and 90-day shelf lives if they’re selling food products... but that’s clearly not happening. Consumer safety advocates worry that the problem is going to get worse as the Marketplace grows.
Amazon Cases Amazon faces a series of lawsuits over combustible hoverboards that were bought over the platform. The cases are challenging the idea that Amazon is not liable for the safety of the products traded in its marketplace—though so far, Amazon has argued its side successfully in court. WSJ
Amazon v. Fedex Amazon has for a while shunned FedEx for its own U.S. deliveries, but now it's also banned third-party sellers from using FedEx's ground delivery service for Prime deliveries. Amazon says the ban will remain in place until FedEx's delivery performance improves. FedEx says it "limits the options for those small businesses on some of the highest shipping days in history." Wall Street Journal
this dude just can't drop it: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/481920-trump-adviser-bezos-escalate-feud Trump adviser, Bezos escalate feud President Trump's top trade adviser and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Thursday escalated their feud over allegations that Bezos has declined to sit down with the White House to discuss the online retail giant's struggles to combat online counterfeits. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro in an interview with The Hill on Thursday morning accused Bezos of pawning him off on "flacks and hacks" as he sought a personal meeting to talk about curbing the spread of counterfeits on e-commerce platforms like Amazon. "Bezos is the one guy on high who can quickly fix this problem at Amazon, the market leader," Navarro said. "So this meeting between Bezos and the White House ... it’s not trivial, it can be pivotal in the fight to protect American consumers and workers." Several hours later, Bezos, in a thinly-veiled swipe at Navarro, posed a question to his 1.4 million Instagram followers: "Let's say you're at a big cocktail party and someone you don't know comes up to you while you're talking to your dad and girlfriend and asks for a meeting. Let's say this person is the kind of person who actually uses the word 'minions' to describe the people who work for you." "How do you respond?" Bezos, who has been on the receiving end of attacks from Trump himself for years, wrote. "A) Yes, I'll definitely meet with you; B) No, I won't meet with you; C) Tell you what. Call so and so and they'll work something out; D) Quietly resolve to become a shut-in." Navarro said he has been asking to meet with Bezos for months as he leads the Trump administration's escalating campaign to crack down on the hundreds of billions of dollars of fakes spreading online each year. He says, when he approached Bezos at a public event last month, Bezos agreed to a meeting and told him get in touch with another Amazon executive — Jay Carney — to set it up. Carney, the former White House spokesman for President Obama, did call Navarro several days later, according to Navarro. But Carney did not arrange a sit-down with Bezos himself — instead, Carney offered meetings with vice president-level Amazon officials. A source familiar with the exchange told The Hill that it was a "miscommunication," and Bezos left the exchange with the impression that he'd told Navarro to get in touch with Carney. Navarro pushed back on that account of events and asked, "How can you trust Amazon when Jeff Bezos won’t own up to a conversation we obviously had?" The unusual catfight between a top Trump adviser and one of the country's most powerful tech executives emerges against a background of animosity between Trump and Bezos, a simmering battle that Amazon has alleged cost them a $10 billion contract with the Pentagon. Trump for years has railed against Bezos over his ownership of The Washington Post, a newspaper that Trump has accused of being biased against him. And in an unprecedented move, Amazon sued the Pentagon last year over allegations that Trump intervened to keep a lucrative cloud-computing contract away from the company over his personal disdain for Bezos, a "perceived political rival." Amazon's lawsuit against the Pentagon is ongoing. Navarro brushed off any connection between his frustration with Bezos and the president's vendetta: "This is not about that. Period. Full stop." He derided Bezos's Instagram post as a "wonderfully banal passive aggressive post from the would-be author of 'Zen and the Art of Counterfeit Trafficking.'" "Simply meeting with a White House representative to discuss a very serious issue would have be so much more constructive," he said. Amazon said in a statement on Wednesday that it plans to make executives available to meet with Navarro "as often as necessary." But Amazon had not gotten in touch with Navarro personally as of Thursday morning, he said.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-seeks-depose-trump-esper-153929311.html Amazon wants Trump to testify on ‘order to screw Amazon’ in Pentagon deal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Amazon Web Services said on Monday it was seeking to depose President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper in its lawsuit over whether the president was trying "to screw Amazon" when the Pentagon awarded a contract for cloud computing to rival Microsoft Corp. <MSFT.O> The Amazon.com Inc <AMZN.O> unit alleged that Trump, who has publicly derided Amazon head Jeff Bezos and repeatedly criticized the company, exerted undue influence on the decision to deny it the $10 billion contract. Known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud, or JEDI, the contract is intended to give the military better access to data and technology from remote locations. In the lawsuit, Amazon said it seeks discovery "demonstrating exactly how President Trump's order to 'screw Amazon' was carried out during the decision making process." Without this, "the Court cannot objectively and fully evaluate AWS's credible and well-grounded allegations about bias and bad faith," the lawsuit said. Bezos also owns the Washington Post, whose coverage has been critical of Trump. Along with Trump and Esper, Amazon seeks to depose former Defense Secretary James Mattis, Pentagon chief information officer Dana Deasy and four other procurement officials, court records show. An Amazon spokesperson said that "President Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to use his position as President and Commander in Chief to interfere with government functions – including federal procurements – to advance his personal agenda. "The question is whether the President of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of the DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends," the spokesperson added. The lawsuit also says Amazon's protest against the decision occurs against the background of impeachment, "which is grounded in the President's repeated refusal to separate his personal interests from the national interest." President Trump has been acquitted on impeachment charges by the Republican-controlled Senate. The lawsuit also mentions other instances of alleged interference from Trump. For example, his alleged interference in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' award of a $400 million border wall contract to Fisher Industries in December 2019 and a report that Trump intervened in the General Services Administration’s solicitation of bids to move the FBI's headquarters to a new campus in the suburbs. The current FBI offices are near a Washington hotel owned by Trump's company. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House declined to comment. Last month, Amazon filed a motion in court to delay the Department of Defense deal with Microsoft until a court rules on its protest of the contract award. The procurement process has been delayed by legal complaints and conflict of interest allegations. Esper has denied there was bias and said the Pentagon made its choice fairly and freely without external influence.
Amazon force Amazon has forced a pause in the U.S. Defense Department's $10 billion JEDI cloud contract with Microsoft. A Federal Claims Court judge granted Amazon an injunction Thursday, while the case goes ahead. Amazon alleges that it lost out on the military contract because of pressure from President Trump, who is less than keen on CEO Jeff Bezos and his Washington Post. BBC