In the book "The Everything Store," Jeff Bezos mentions that the public tends to hate companies as they get bigger and that managing the company's image is very important.
All politics aside, I find it very interesting that this seems to be a law that people just think companies are evil when they are big.
I think it makes sense. When you're small, you don't have a lot of power. If you create CodyStore tomorrow and do things I don't like, I'll just ignore you. When you become as large as Amazon, you start crowding out competition and so even if I don't like some of Amazon's actions, I have no choice - I end up doing business with them regardless of my personal feelings.
Plus, as you get bigger, you start looking at how you can marginally increase your growth. You go from "just make people happy" to "we could probably exclude a lot of low-margin items from Prime shipping and not see cancelations while improving our profits". You start trying to tie things together so that if people want one part of your experience, they need to accept other parts. You start trying to figure out how to optimize your labor cost, potentially in ways that aren't great for your workers. You start getting a lot of people that can improve the company in ways that aren't necessarily evil, but aren't exactly friendly. By this time, people don't really have an alternative.
I mean, a lot of people loved Walmart when it was new. It was this all-in-one store with great prices. Over time, competing businesses were crowded out of the market by Walmart and customers had less choice. It also meant that retail labor had less choice with Walmart becoming a greater percentage of the jobs. It also meant that businesses selling things like TVs had less choice and Walmart could pressure them.
I think power is ultimately pretty toxic. Amazon has succeeded in part because it's really good at what it does. However, another part of its success is the power it exerts on competitors, over labor, over suppliers, and over customers. Small companies just never have power to exert so they can never seem that unfriendly. Unfriendly small companies just cease to exist or at least can be ignored. Unfriendly large companies can use their power to force a lot of things to try and keep their throne.
These are really good points and I agree with the idea of what you're saying 100%. I also agree with the specifics of Amazon and where they have clearly gone past the "nice guy" line.
I would love to hear if there are examples of companies that have "done everything right" that are still loved. I feel like there is a natural journalistic hatred towards anyone very large (and sometimes it is totally deserved). Perhaps there are no pure large companies and that's why...or perhaps most business decisions are tradeoffs where either side won't please everyone and that just opens up room for attack. I really don't know the answer (even if we agree that Amazon deserves the negative press).
In Howard Schultz's biography about Starbucks, he mentions the same phenomena. After Starbucks started getting big, activists would start attacking the company for some flaw which Starbucks knew they were the least bad in the industry in and he would get quite frustrated.
It was only after talking to activists that he realized they were also well aware that everyone else in the coffee industry was even worse than Starbucks but because they weren't as famous, activists would intentionally target the #1 player because that's the way to play the news cycle.
I do think when you grow bigger it's more difficult to manage your image or keep it pristine, but I don't think it's necessary that you get hated. Costco seems to be generally well liked and ubiquitous. The only real complaints I ever hear about Netflix are expiring licensed content. Disney has always had detractors, but I think they're generally well liked.
Well to produce a Blue Whale trucks loads of krill need to die. How do you think the krill feel about that law?
Replace krill with humans and sooner or later Jeff the Blue Whale needs full time protection in a special sanctuary. In Nature if the Whale gets too efficient the eco system collapses and then reboots. Stability trumps Bigness.
Interesting that you're getting your point of view from a book by Bezos. Regardless, people don't hate Amazon because they're big. They hate Amazon because they feel empathetic towards the thousands of workers who complain about the working conditions and how they're treated.
> In the book "The Everything Store," Jeff Bezos mentions that the public tends to hate companies as they get bigger and that managing the company's image is very important.
All politics aside, I find it very interesting that this seems to be a law that people just think companies are evil when they are big.