Amazon's Inevitable Enshitification...

Amazon's business offering is changing… because it NEEDS to change.
The tech conglomerate has so many fingers in so many pies it has found itself exposed to basically every risk (and opportunity) in the market today.
Softening demand from maxed out consumers, pushback from exploited third party retailers, returns fraud, investors who want to actually start seeing some profits on all the AI hype, a growing dependence on advertising revenue, a degrading customer experience, competition from chinese retailers (who are selling a lot of the same crap anyway) and the fact that they are literally running out of human beings who haven’t already worked for them before and quit.
It’s easy (and honestly sometimes a little bit fun) to point out the flaws and challenges in a business that has screwed over so many people, but the Amazon case study is more important than that.
It perfectly encapsulates the strengths and weaknesses of THE modern business strategy as it tries to be so many different things to so many different people.
You might think that all of these problems are just another recession indicator, or yet another case of juicing short term gains at the expense of long term reputation, but the inconvenient truth is that a lot of these challenges were inevitable from the very beginning.
Online retail is the most competitive business in the world. Amazon dominated early e-commerce by offering an incredible service below cost to build a one stop market place, but now that it has that… it cannot maintain it without making a long list of very unpopular sacrifices.