Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate: nobody actually loves Amazon. We just love not putting on pants to buy toilet paper.
For years, the pitch has been simple. Amazon is the big, beautiful monster of capitalism that crushes bloated retail margins and hands the savings directly to us. Prime is our digital passport to cheap stuff, fast shipping, and a mild sense of consumer nihilism. It’s the Walmart supercenter of the internet, except you don’t have to dodge rogue shopping carts in the parking lot.
Except, that’s a fairy tale we’re all collectively paying to keep alive.
The dirty little secret—one that the tech press whispers about while politely looking away so they don’t lose their affiliate revenue—is that Amazon isn’t saving us a dime anymore. In fact, they’re acting as a tollbooth for the entire internet, silently hiking prices on every single corner of the web. Even the places you visit when you’re actively trying to avoid Amazon.
Here is how the grift works.
If you run an independent online store today, you aren’t just competing with the almighty A-symbol. You’re playing a rigged game of roulette. To survive, you use cloud infrastructure—often running on open-source software, ironically enough—and you list your products across multiple channels to find buyers. But the moment you want to play in the big leagues of search, or use logistics that don’t involve sending packages via carrier pigeon, you hit the Amazon wall.
Amazon’s fees for third-party sellers have quietly bloated to absurd levels. We’re talking fulfillment fees, referral fees, advertising fees, and the existential fee of knowing that if your product actually takes off, an algorithm will just notice, knock off a cheap knockoff version, and bury you on page fourteen.
So what do independent merchants do? They pass those costs on to you. Not just on Amazon, mind you—everywhere.
If a merchant has to fork over nearly half their margin just to exist inside Bezos’s digital ecosystem, they have to artificially inflate their prices across their own direct-to-consumer websites just to stay afloat. Amazon’s sheer gravity bends the pricing curve of the entire internet upward. That boutique guitar pedal, that independent coffee brand, that obscure piece of oss hardware you bought from a dedicated specialist site? You’re paying an invisible Amazon tax on all of it, even though Amazon had zero to do with the transaction.
It’s protection money, digital edition. Nice little Shopify store you got there. Sure would be a shame if nobody could find it because you didn’t pay the toll.
We’ve traded local retail monopolies for a global tech monopoly that masquerades as a public utility. And the worst part is, we keep cheering for it because it gets to our doorstep in two days in a battered cardboard box with a smily face on it. We’ve become addicted to the convenience, ignoring the fact that the dealer is quietly bleeding every independent corner of the web dry.
Next time you think you’re getting a killer deal on Prime Day, remember: you’re just paying for the privilege of making everything else you buy online infinitely more expensive.
Hot Take: If you’re still waiting around for antitrust regulators to save us from this mess, don’t hold your breath. The only way out is to stop treating Amazon like a convenience store and start treating them like the digital landlord they are—one who desperately deserves to have their rent controlled.