Is Amazon.com getting too big?

In the restaurant where I work there is always a newspaper by the edge of the bar.

It's refreshing to see an actual newspaper instead of just checking the news feed on my phone once in awhile.

Today there was a big article in this newspaper in which a journalist stated that despite loving Amazon.com, he was very worried that they were becoming so big that they were appearing very much like a monopoly.

Let's take a look at what Amazon.com actually has and does.

Source: Amazon.com

First of all, there is the website itself.... Amazon.com. You can buy movies, books, and other things here.

There's also Amazon Prime. At first this was just two day shipping, then it got upgraded to one day shipping, then it developed a streaming service, and added music streaming as well, and now you can even read a few free books every month with it.

They've recently added a new feature too. You can now watch live Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime. That's a pretty cool feature, but it kind of makes me say....

Wow that's an awful lot of things that Amazon Prime can do.

Of course Amazon also has the echo units. The echo units are capable of a lot of interesting things and most people that I know actually have more than one unit. I should say that you don't technically need Amazon Prime to use these but it certainly makes them more useful.

Source: Pixabay.com

I remember when ebooks were first coming out people said that they were going to kill the brick-and-mortar bookstores. To be honest that did seem to be the case as I noticed several companies like Borders going out of business.

Now that a lot of the brick-and-mortar bookstores are gone, Amazon is opening its own brick-and-mortar stores. Ha. They pulled the old bait-and-switch by making people think that printed books will no longer be a thing, but now they are going to control them.

That's pretty weird isn't it?

Should we talk about Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods?

I've never really been a fan of Whole Foods because I find every single item in that store to be incredibly overpriced. You could literally just go next door to a different store and play a much lower price.

Having said that Amazon has taken them over and if you're a Prime member I believe you can get a 10% discount.

I've also seen a few videos on YouTube that show individual Amazon grocery stores that don't appear to be associated with Whole Foods. These stores seem to have some sort of electronic payment system. I haven't seen any around here though but it looks like they have control over more than one brand of grocery store.

There are so many things going on with Amazon.com that is absolutely shocking. Did you know that they have a MMO in the works that looks absolutely amazing? I wouldn't be surprised if the whole world is playing it when it comes out.

To be honest it is kind of a concern. I wonder if Amazon.com really is getting too big?