Jeff Bezos was very trending recently.

He went to space through his company Blue Origin, through which he wanted to promote space tourism.

As you can see, Jeff is always trending. He got divorced in 2019, became the richest man. And after that, he had worked on his face too and made his face somewhat plastic-type.

If you look at his empire, then there are many companies which they control directly,

And have invested in many others,

But today we will be talking about the company which jeff started from scratch and took it to the top,

This smile between A to Z tells that amazon has all the products from A to Z.

You can watch videos on Prime Video, and order groceries too,

They have such a big range of servers too.

But,

These were all good things, but Amazon has a dark side too,

And we will be talking about that in this article because it is not being talked about,

We can talk about so much to understand amazon's dark side but

I have kept the discussion structured and point-wise,

The first point is underpaid and overworked employees,

Amazon says that they give salaries of more than 40 million Americans to their employees,

But the truth is that they get 15 dollars per hour,

And that's why more than 4000 of their workers eat at food stamps, as they cannot afford their food,

And it is very high as compared to different big companies,

It was told that they have to work for 12 hours and there is only a 12-minute break in between.

And that time is deducted as well if you were working slower than usual

And they have to sort one new order in every 2 seconds,

for 12 hours,

and they get only a 30-minute unpaid lunch in between

so this underpaid and overworked employee structure shows that amazon has a dark side,

which is very less discussed,

The second is that Amazon does not pay taxes,

Now, this is not Illegal,

But when you see that Amazon is a multi-billion-dollar company,

And they are not even giving their workers enough money and getting more work out of them,

so they must be giving money somewhere,

But you are wrong here too,

Amazon paid 0 dollars a federal taxes from 2016 to 2018,

And their federal tax in 2019 was-

Just guess. What is your income tax,

Minimum 5%. 10% or 15-20%

But they paid just 2% tax of their total revenue,

They saved it by using many legal loopholes, which you can read in this article,

They basically invest money in RND to save their taxes,

But they have structured everything so smoothly that they don't have to pay any tax,

And the current president Joe Biden says that he will not let this run anymore,

The third thing is Amazon Copy cats,

Now imagine that you have the world's largest marketplace from where so many people buy things,

so you must have so much data,

And you must know from that data that which product does well and which does not,

Which has positive feedback and which one has a negative one,

And what can you do with so much data,

You can start producing any product at a large scale and in a way that it starts selling,

And also because you have the platform, you can place it on the top so most people buy that.

And Amazon does this with Amazon Basics,

You can read about how amazon destroys their own partners,

Because amazon thinks that they can make cheaper products and sell them,

And this is a very dangerous monopolistic model,

Because when Amazon has the store and makes all the things too,

Then the competition will die down slowly,

and this is not good for anybody,

Because if there is only one supplier then he can decide the price and you will be in trouble,

The next point is about Alexa,

When Amazon launched Alexa,

then you must have thought that such a smart Speaker in just 20 dollars, which interprets and executes everything so fastly,

Then how is the processing done in it and which chip is being used in it,

The truth is that this is not just a speaker but all its processing is done at the amazon server,

And that box is always listening to you,

Hence it takes all your data and sends it to the server,

Because it can be needed to be processed anytime,

Because there is a very big network of amazon Alexa,

And many articles have been published about how snooping is made very easy using this,

Which is very less discussed,

The next point is very interesting,

You can say it dark side or the acumen of the businessmen,

Bit this is very interesting,

You must be watching Netflix,

Netflix uses Amazon web services' server or AWS,

And hence Netflix pays amazon for that,

Now more the content uploaded on Netflix, more will be the amount it should pay to amazon,

Now Amazon's prime video is also there, which is a competitor for Netflix,

But more the content on Netflix, the money amazon makes,

Which means amazon earns even when his competitor is growing,

The next and last point is environmental impact,

see, One thing is important for a web portal like amazon,

which is the overconsumption of everything,

You are being asked to buy products that you don't even require by showing you their ads,

"Throw the old one, but the new one"

And this overconsumption is very harmful to our environment,

We have read studies that the more products we buy, the more garbage is been produced,

and a big part in that is which nobody needed,

But people just impulse bought them,

And Jeff Bezos says that he is spending 10 billion dollars on protecting the climate

On the other hand, his own company earns on the basis which is harmful to the environment

And also their carbon emission is more than a whole country(Switzerland)

And they have deal with oil companies which they defend often

Hence duality can be seen here,

On one hand, they say that they will protect the environment

And these things are also being done on the other hand

I did not want to scare you, you used Alexa before and will use it afterward too,

Shopped on Amazon before too and now too, Even I will,

But I just wanted to show that when there is so much glittering part of anything,

Like Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Space Travel,

Then there is a dark side of that too,

On which we should talk too.

That's it for today's article I hope you liked it. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter where you can get links to interesting articles, where we discuss weekly news. You can not even give us suggestions there but also help us improve it. So I will meet you there, and also in the next article, till then take care of yourselves.