Amazon—which some have called the “Earth’s biggest store”—is an important part of
many of our lives. We browse on Amazon, watch on Amazon, and buy on Amazon. We
freely disclose to Amazon our wishes, interests, and willingness to pay. You may well have
purchased or rented this textbook from Amazon.
In 2018, Amazon was the largest Internet retailer in the world, measured both by annual
revenue ($178 billion) and market capitalization (more than $800 billion). It was the
second largest private employer in the United States (after Walmart), with more than
540,000 employees (not counting the additional 120,000 or so temporary workers the company brought on each year during the busy holiday season). The Wells Fargo case

From its start in 1994 as a scrappy Seattle start-up selling books online, Amazon had grown at an astonishing pace; in 2017, Amazon was responsible for fully 70 percent of all growth in U.S. online commerce.2
By 2018, the company’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, had become the world’s richest
person, with a net worth greater than $100 billion. Shareholders in the company had been
richly rewarded; in early 2018, the price of Amazon’s stock was more than 12 times higher
than it had been a decade earlier. The company was enormously popular with consumers,
who turned to Amazon for one-click convenience, free and speedy delivery, and the ability
to compare a seemingly endless assortment of products on the basis of price and reviews.
Small businesses affiliated with Amazon Marketplace were able to tap into the company’s
global e-commerce platform and unrivaled logistics to reach customers they never could
have reached before. No doubt, many had benefited from Amazon’s success. The Wells Fargo case
Yet the company had also become the target of criticism from many quarters, charged
with destroying brick-and-mortar businesses, relentlessly driving their own employees,
unfairly besting competitors, and pressuring communities for concessions. Consider that:
∙ Much of Amazon’s success had come at the expense of brick-and-mortar stores. Iconic
retailers—such as Macy’s, JCPenney, and Target—had shed thousands of jobs as Amazon
attracted ever-larger slices of consumer spending. A leading economist calculated that
the rise of online commerce had caused the cumulative loss of 1.2 million retailing
jobs—positions such as cashiers, salespeople, and stock clerks—in the United States.4
Many of these jobs were held by women and minorities (who made up 60 percent and
40 percent, respectively, of department store employees). The Wells Fargo case
Traditional retailing, concluded
Scott Galloway, the author of The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook,
and Google, had been “ravaged and depopulated by a single player”—Amazon.
∙ Amazon’s own employees, by some accounts, were subject to an unusually punishing
work culture. An investigative report by The New York Times, based on interviews with
more than 100 current and former white-collar employees, found a pattern of setting
“unreasonably high” performance standards, continually monitoring performance, and
weeding out employees in a “rank and yank” system that one called “purposeful Darwinism.” Turnover rates were among the highest in the Fortune 500. Said one former
marketer, “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”

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