We aren’t comparing capitalism to that.
We are comparing a deeply broken antitrust regulatory environment that is ending capitalism, or ant least the free market competitive style of capitalism you are romanticizing, and replacing it with leveragism or legal cartels or whatever you want to call it.
Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them.
Amazon should have been required to split off AWS from Amazon years ago, and I’d say there’s a very good argument to be made that their fulfillment business constitutes a national monopoly. FedEx and UPS don’t actually provide the services that FBA does, which makes Amazon a monopoly.
What do you meany nobody can compete with Amazon? It happens all the time across the various markets they're in: e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
How much investment money and customer volume do I need to make that business viable?
This is actually a great example of the consumer winning out due to Amazon's business. Pre-Amazon, 24 hour shipping was literally not a thing, even 2 day shipping, especially for free, was a major innovation of the site.
So for fulfillment for general goods, I do think this is something that you will never be able to compete with Amazon on as a small player profitably. However, there is plenty of competition in specific verticals, such as Instacart or Doordash for groceries specifically. And if you want to be a toilet paper producer/seller, that is possible too (just not the fulfillment part but again I'm not sure why we expect "toilet paper fulfillment" to be a valid category that needs to be a thing), for example I bought my phone case from Dbrand due to the strength of their product and marketing. As a small player you need to compete on specific verticals but that has always been the case. Amazon was originally a book seller.
As with all successful businesses, you start small.
You figure out what's your edge. You are resourceful.
You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
Pro-tip: selling (rather than producing) toilet paper is probably never a big business anyhow.
> You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
This idea bleeds into the definition of a monopoly. I can’t just make a mobile operating system like Apple and Google because I won’t have a competitive advantage. I can’t make my own Amazon competitor because their edge is that they deliver more packages than UPS or FedEx. I can’t compete with Google search because the web browser that comes with Android defaults Google on the home page.
Sure, nobody is trying to do 100% of what their competitors do, but I wouldn’t be able to do 5% of what Amazon does even if you handed me billions in seed capital.
Meanwhile, lots of people are starting and building successful businesses.
And hopefully you can agree that, conceptually, monopoly businesses do exist and have existed in the past.
Amazon itself is not going to be shy about changing the rules in its favor.
I have no idea what this means.
Competing in which market? Amazon is a conglomerate operating in e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
I don't see it. In each of the industries they operate in, they face fierce competition. Many of those competitors also compete with Amazon across multiple of those industries plus others that Amazon does not compete in.
Competition is by definition tough. But I push back against the original thesis that Amazon has such leverage that it is impossible to compete with them (in all the cases, you're not just competing against them!)