Hope you sent out your Prime Day cards!

I'm sorry, but are there two separate Amazon holidays now? I ask because there's another one next week and didn't we just have one, like in July?

Yeah, we did.

"That's just unfair. We hardly ever make
our employees poop in bags anymore."

-a billionaire we sent to space

You may have already noticed that I'm not a fan of Amazon. Sure, they can get virtually anything to your porch within hours and usually for less than it would cost for you to go to a store. But at what cost? Huh? Right, less cost, fine. I meant that metaphorically. At what cost? Yes if you need a lycra body suit or suction cups by tomorrow, they got you covered. But they also employ predatory business practices, make their staff poop in bags, and now brink and mortar retail is nearly dead in this country.

Above: A Bitcoin dispenser, seen here
defying it's own reason to exist.

I went to a mall the other day and it was perhaps the most depressing place I've ever been and I've been to Grimsby.* Three quarters of the storefronts were empty, coin operated massage chairs were everywhere, and they even had a Bitcoin dispenser. And it was out of order. Which I mean, admittedly, I don't know anything about Bitcoin, but isn't the whole point of Bitcoin that it's digital? And if it's digital can't you just use your phone? And isn't it just crime money to begin with?

What about the olds? Won't somebody 
please think of the olds?

And it's not that I care about malls per se. As someone who grew up with malls being a thing, it's possible that I'm more inclined to notice their increasingly rapid decline than later generations who never knew the unsupervised retail teen Thunderdome that was the mall. But we should all care about things like local economies and jobs and places for old people to walk early in the morning. The very things Amazon's not really free shipping and artificially low prices have strangled to death. 

Pictured: the moment an actor with a chart made
sure my generation would be renters forever.

It's gotten so bad that the Federal Trade Commission is suing and I mean, do they even do that anymore? I'm not like a business person, but it seems like it was the AT&T breakup and then nothing for like forty years of unfettered capitalism drunk on the ludicrous, Reaganonic promises of deregulation and trickle-down prosperity (which, that trickle's going to happen soon, right?). But now the FTC has awoken, bleary-eyed, and groping for its coffee, declaring in a stern voice that someone should probably do something about Amazon. Maybe.

Unless the company's strategy of pretend sales on equally pretend holidays pays off. After all, the larger the Amazon liturgical calendar, the less we'll all notice that they control stifling forty to sixty percent (depending on who you ask) of all online commerce. 

It's a monopoly, but the part of the game where one person has all the hotels and
most of the money and the rest of us are just waiting to go bankrupt.

*hopefully someday, someone somewhere who's been to Grimsby, England will read this and find that mildly amusing.