Discussion
Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#absentee-rentier
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@pluralistic
Excellent article: informative and hilarious (and a bit depressing, but that is on them). It sounds like a terrible, hypothetical soap opera, but it is real 😐
Especially appreciate that you keep mentioning sources, I often miss that nowadays.
@pluralistic That picture, my first thought was "Captain Shitcard!" (And then "Of the AWS Shittyprise" when i realised who it was)
@pluralistic I collect famous quotes, important for nowaday's life, in a notebook. This one will join the treasures: " we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money."
Great. 💩💪🏽💩
Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There's its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers' labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon's platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods.
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@pluralistic Even when those platform sellers aren't selling through Amazon, all too often they're so trapped that the order still comes in an Amazon van and even from an Amazon warehouse. I'm no longer confused when my eBay order turns up in new Amazon packaging, but I certainly was at first - and I've just ordered from a shop's own website and it says it will come from Amazon.
But that did bring an example of how they're simultaneously stupid - todays order was shoes. Strangely enough I want them in my size. Amazon insists on trying to sell me "popular" options, i.e. the tiny sizes their captive sellers have overstocked
@HodgesC @pluralistic Amazon uses the same system even for very specific technical items. I buy Hardware or car parts sometimes and I go search on Amazon. Even though I'm specific with my search, it pushes results that are not correct and I don't notice. In the past I ordered items that were wrong because they were blended in with the right results. Of course they're useless for my needs so they are returned. Adding another cost to the seller I suppose.
Note: I quit Amazon couple years ago and after a couple weeks when I was in to look for items, not by, It offered me the $180 subscription for $9.99 so I took it for emergencies in the past year. I got better with my emergency needs so I am not even using it almost at all.
@alper @pluralistic Yes, I don't buy from Amazon for the same reason*. That's not because I don't like them as a company, though I don't, but because they're too frustrating to deal with. Bike and the occasional van parts are far better found on eBay, or proper online shops.
*With very few exceptions - they're the only way to get cheap rugged Chinese mobile phones, and a brand of bike gear I get on with. Also they are quick even though I refuse to get Prime, so I place maybe 2-3 orders/year.
This means that it costs Amazon itself *nothing* to get the merchandise *it* sells to your door: *more than 100%* of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who *compete with Amazon* in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit).
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Then there's AWS, Amazon's cloud business. This is another extraordinary success story: every company needs servers, and that's especially true of an e-commerce company like Amazon. By building *more* servers than it needs, Amazon transformed its own data infrastructure from a cost center into another profit center.
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Amazon's customers - many of whom are *also* its competitors - pay Amazon so much to rent space on its servers that Amazon gets its own (prodigious) computing *for free*, and realizes a profit on top of that.
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Taken on their own, these two facts constitute an extraordinary business story: one of the largest corporations in the history of the world has converted its two largest cost centers into profit centers, and those profits are substantially generated by extracting payments from the company's own competitors!
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Amazon's logistics and cloud computing are extraordinary, but they are eclipsed by the company's *most* profitable line of business, which is *payola*.
"Payola" is a word that old people like me just barely have context for and for anyone under fifty the word is likely a mystery, so a brief explanation is in order.
"Payola" comes from a massive 1950s scandal over bribes that record labels paid to radio DJs and station managers to play their music.
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Radio stations were given the use of a scarce and precious resource - exclusive control over slices of the only electromagnetic spectrum in the universe - and were expected to program material that the American public would find enjoyable, edifying and educational. In this system, radio stations were expected to make shrewd guesses about the music the public would enjoy the most, and play that.
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Because the selection process for the music that DJs played on the American public's spectrum was completely opaque, and because those selections could make fortunes for record labels, the system was ripe for corruption. Labels slipped literal envelopes full of cash and drugs ("payola") into the hands of DJs, station managers and owners, bribing them to turn songs into "hits" by cramming them into Americans' ears.
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The biggest predictor of a radio hit wasn't whether people liked the song so much that the stations rushed to play it, but rather, how much the labels were willing to spend in bribes to get their song played:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
This was a bad system all around. The American public got worse music. Musicians' own royalties were eroded by the label accountants' practice of charging off bribes to "promotions" they deducted from artists' royalty statements.
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Radio stations sucked. Labels bid away each other's margins, depriving themselves of operating capital to find and record new music and starving them of free cash flow to pay to musicians, employees and shareholders. As with every instance of corruption, this was a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses, which is why it continued for so long (decades!) and got so bad before anyone took action to end it.
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Amazon's payola isn't about radio play - it's about *search*. When you search Amazon, the top results do not represent Amazon's best guess about what product will best match your query: rather, Amazon *auctions off* those top results to its platform sellers. Amazon's search results reflect who paid the biggest bribe, not who has the best product.
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To pay for those bribes, platform sellers have to raise prices. Amazon helps them do this, by imposing a "most favored nation" clause on its sellers that requires them to sell on Amazon at a price that matches or beats the price charged everywhere else (Target, Walmart, a mom-n-pop, or the factory store):
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing
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Thus, Amazon imposes an *economy-wide* tax on nearly every product you buy. Amazon's junk fees average 51-60% of the purchase price of the things you buy there, and because Amazon has captured a supermajority of the richest 10% of Americans (who have almost all pre-paid for a year's shipping through Prime), every seller *must* sell on Amazon, or forego any hope of selling to most of the country's most prolific shoppers.
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Any seller who signs up for Amazon is agreeing to turn over *the majority* of their sales income to Amazon, and any seller who raises prices to recoup those sums, *must* raise prices everywhere, at every retail outlet in the country.
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AI has made Amazon *much better* at enforcing Most Favored Nation terms, because AI is actually pretty good at parsing competitors' websites and finding instances of discounting, which Amazon instantaneously punishes by relegating the sellers' product listings to page umpty-billion of Amazon's search results.
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There are plenty of junk fees that go into Amazon's 51-60% rake. A large slice comes from fees Amazon charges for access to its (very profitable) logistics system. Failure to use Amazon's fulfillment system *also* relegates your listings to the dregs of Amazon search results, so sellers pay a massive premium to have their parcels delivered by Amazon, to the exclusion of cheaper alternatives that are just as fast and reliable. *That's* why Amazon fulfillment is so profitable!
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While the Amazon tax is extracted through several types of junk fee, the most *profitable* junk fee of them all is Amazon's search payola. In fact, search payola *is the most profitable business that Amazon operates, full stop*.
Payola accounts for more of Amazon's profits than *anything else* the company does. It's more profitable than *all* the things Amazon sells directly. It's more profitable than AWS, Amazon's industry-leading cloud service.
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Amazon has created a system where the most sales go to the companies that pay the highest bribes, and those companies pass the cost of those bribes onto their customers. The first item on a typical Amazon search results page is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The top row is 25% more expensive. The best result is usually on the second screen, somewhere around the 17th position:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers
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Amazon actively helps its biggest bribers close the sale. Amazon has *lots* of "comparison shopping" systems built into the service, but one comparison tool is conspicuous by its absence: an "apples to apples" tool that lets you compare *unit* prices. Amazon's most prolific bribe-payers package their goods in weird quantities, selling everything from batteries to t-shirts to shampoo in larger or smaller quantities than their competitors.
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Sorting your search results by price doesn't actually tell you who's got the cheapest price *per item*, because the company with the cheapest AA batteries might be selling a smaller *quantity* of batteries at a higher price *per battery*.
Per-unit pricing is standard in retail. Indeed, if you go into a(n Amazon-owned) Whole Foods, you'll find per-unit pricing on the shelf tags, telling you how much the product costs per ounce or fluid ounce.
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Amazon *clearly* understands why shoppers would want to compare unit pricing, but offering a per-unit sort option to its search would make the bribery racket a lot less effective, because searchers could just sort by *unit* price and find the best bargain.
Let me remind you: *payola is Amazon's single largest source of profits*. When I was researching *Enshittification*, Amazon's take from payola was in the mid-$30 billion.
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A year later, when I did tour stops with Tim Wu (who was promoting his excellent book *The Age of Extraction*), I learned that this number had climbed to more than *$50 billion*. This year, it's on track to top *$80 billion*.
Amazon calls this bribery system an "advertising" product, but it's not "advertising" in the sense of the ads that Amazon's platform sellers might have once placed in the local newspaper.
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It's *payola*, more akin to the practice of packaged goods companies buying end-caps and whole shelves in the grocery store (a practice that is, in its own way, every bit as corrosive, though no grocery store has Amazon's economy-wide chokehold).
But there *is* a way in which this payola can be compared to advertising: it *competes* with advertising.
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