While I love many aspects of Amazon, their dominance is more than a little scary.
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If you enter “relentless.com” into your web browser, you might be surprised to see it takes you to Amazon.
That’s because CEO Jeff Bezos almost named his company “Relentless,” according to a 2014 New Yorker profile of Bezos.
But even though Bezos chose a friendlier name for the company, the “relentless” strategy has guided Amazon over the years as it’s evolved from an online bookseller to an e-commerce giant to the leader in cloud computing.
And, if need be, Amazon has a history of relentlessly snuffing out competitors and playing hardball wherever possible.
Here’s the latest example: On Sunday, Amazon informed third-party sellers that they could no longer use FedEx Ground for shipping items to Prime customers. When the news got out Monday in The Wall Street Journal, FedEx’s stock fell nearly 2% before recovering slightly to end down about 1%, and the delivery services company was forced to criticize the move.
“While this decision affects a very small number of shippers, it limits the options for those small businesses on some of the highest demand shipping days in history, and may compromise their ability to meet customer demands and manage their businesses,” a FedEx spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC on Monday.
Amazon has been steadily building out its own delivery network as it seeks to wean itself off of third parties like FedEx, UPS or the U.S. Postal Service. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that Dave Clark, the Amazon executive in charge of logistics, decided to cut out FedEx Ground because it wasn’t performing up to Amazon’s standards. And even though the block on FedEx Ground is temporary during the holiday rush, the decision was made at the height of the shopping season.
And it doesn’t hurt that Amazon was able to stick it to its future shipping and logistics competitor, showing FedEx it can swing the stock whenever it wants.
Recent article about what it's like to work in an Amazon warehouse; really makes you think twice about what it takes to deliver an item you ordered for same day delivery.