Shlesh Paudel SPCH-1315 Ar.docx

Shlesh Paudel
SPCH-1315
Articles and their sources for persuasive speech
1.The EMPIRE of Everything. (cover story)
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Authors:
MITCHELL, STACY
Source:
Nation. 3/12/2018, Vol. 306 Issue 7, p22-33. 7p. 4 Color
Photographs, 1 Diagram, 3 Graphs.
Document Type:
Article
Subject Terms:
*MONOPOLY capitalism
*ANTITRUST law
Company/Entity:
AMAZON.COM Inc. DUNS Number: 884745530 Ticker: AMZN
AMAZON Web Services Inc.
People:
BEZOS, Jeffrey, 1964-
Abstract:
The article offers information on the e-commerce company

Amazon and its alleged monopoly on several markets in the
U.S. Topics discussed include the company's chief executive
officer (CEO) Jeff Bezos, the cloud computing services
provided by Amazon Web Services, and the need for improved
antitrust laws in order to prevent a Amazon's monopoly on the
market.
Full Text Word Count:
4389
ISSN:
0027-8378
Accession Number:
128001748
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· Show all 9 images
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The EMPIRE of Everything
Full Text
Top of Form
Section:
Features
Amazon is a radically new kind of monopoly that aims to do far
more than dominate the market—it aims to become the market.
Chris lampen-crowell started to feel the undertow four years
ago. Gazelle Sports, the running-shoe and apparel business he
founded in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1985, had
grown steadily for decades, adding locations in Grand Rapids
and Detroit and swelling to some 170 employees. But then, in
2014, sales took a downward turn. From the outside, at least, it
was hard to see why. Gazelle Sports was as beloved as ever by
local runners. People continued to flock to its free clinics and
community runs. And scores of enthusiastic reviews on Google
and Yelp, along with an industry ranking as one of the best
running-shoe retailers in the country, gave Gazelle Sports and

its e-commerce website plenty of prominence in online
searches.
The problem wasn’t so much that customers had made a
conscious decision to buy their running gear elsewhere,
Lampen-Crowell says. Rather, a number were doing more of
their overall shopping on Amazon—and as the online giant
became a pervasive, almost unconscious habit in their lives,
they had started dropping into their Amazon shopping carts
some of the items they used to buy from Gazelle Sports.
Lampen-Crowell’s initial response was to double down on
marketing his company’s own website. But while that helped,
there were many potential customers who still had little chance
of landing on it. That was because, by 2014, nearly 40 percent
of people looking to buy something online were skipping search
engines like Google altogether and instead starting their product
searches directly on Amazon.
By the fall of 2016, the share of online shoppers bypassing
search engines and heading straight to Amazon had grown to 55
percent. With sales flagging and staff reductions under way,
Lampen-Crowell made what seemed like a necessary decision:
Gazelle Sports would join Amazon Marketplace, becoming a
third-party seller on the digital giant’s platform. “If the
customer is on Amazon, as a small business you have to say,
‘That is where I have to go,’” Lampen-Crowell explains.
“Otherwise, we are going to close our doors.”
Gazelle Sports isn’t alone. Faced with Amazon’s overwhelming
gravitational pull on the Internet’s shopping traffic, thousands
of Amazon’s competitors—from small independent retailers to
major chains and manufacturing brands—have felt compelled to
join its orbit.
Setting up shop on Amazon’s platform has helped Gazelle
Sports stabilize its sales. But it’s also put the company on a
treacherous footing. Amazon, which did not respond to an
interview request, touts its platform as a place where
entrepreneurs can “pursue their dreams.” Yet studies indicate
that the relationship is often predatory. Harvard Business

School researchers found that when third-party sellers post new
products, Amazon tracks the transactions and then starts selling
many of their most popular items itself. And when it’s not using
the information that it gleans from sellers to compete against
them, Amazon uses it to extract an ever larger cut of their
revenue.
To succeed, sellers need to “win the buy-box”—that is, be
chosen by Amazon’s algorithms as the default seller for a
product. But according to ProPublica, “about three-quarters of
the time, Amazon placed its own products and those of
companies that pay for its [warehousing and shipping] services
in that position even when there were substantially cheaper
offers available from others.” As more third-party sellers have
agreed to sign up for these services, Amazon has repeatedly
raised its fees, with ful-fillment fees rising this year by as much
as 14 percent for standard-size items (and more for oversize
goods), on top of similar increases in 2017.
For now, Lampen-Crowell’s primary suppliers have chosen not
to sell directly to Amazon, giving Gazelle Sports and other
independent retailers exclusive access to their products and,
with it, a measure of insulation from Amazon’s predatory
tactics. That could change, however. In 2016, Amazon backed
Birkenstock into a corner, threatening to allow a deluge of
counterfeit Birkenstocks onto its site—many from overseas
sellers—unless the shoe company agreed to sell directly to
Amazon the niche products it had previously reserved for
specialty retailers. Birkenstock pushed back, but other
companies, including Nike, appear to have caved to a similar
demand.
Lampen-Crowell tries not to spend time worrying about whether
his suppliers will one day be pressured to do the same. An
entrepreneur at heart, he keeps his focus on finding ways to
succeed and doesn’t let his attention stray too far into questions
of Amazon’s market power. “Whether this is monopolization…”
he says, and then pauses. “If you take this to the end, Amazon
controls the rules.”

It’s easy to mistake amazon for a retailer. After all, the
company, which was founded in 1995, sells more books and
toys than any other retailer, and is projected soon to become the
top seller of clothing and electronics. It now captures nearly $1
of every $2 that Americans spend online.
To think of Amazon as a retailer, though, is to profoundly
misjudge the scope of what its founder and chief executive, Jeff
Bezos, has set out to do. It’s not simply that Amazon does so
much more than sell stuff—that it also produces hit television
shows and movies; publishes books; designs digital devices;
underwrites loans; delivers restaurant orders; sells a growing
share of the Web’s advertising; manages the data of US
intelligence agencies; operates the world’s largest streaming
video-game platform; manufactures a growing array of products,
from blouses to batteries; and is even venturing into health care.
Instead, it’s that Bezos has designed his company for a far more
radical goal than merely dominating markets; he’s built Amazon
to replace them. His vision is for Amazon to become the
underlying infrastructure that commerce runs on. Already,
Amazon’s website is the dominant platform for on-line retail
sales, attracting half of all online US shopping traffic and
hosting thousands of third-party sellers. Its Amazon Web
Services division provides 34 percent of the world’s cloud-
computing capacity, handling the data of a long list of entities,
from Netflix to Nordstrom, Comcast to Condé Nast to the CIA.
Now, in a challenge to UPS and FedEx, Amazon is building out
a vast shipping and delivery operation with the aim of handling
both its own packages and those of other companies.
By controlling these essential pieces of infrastructure, Amazon
can privilege its own products and services as they move
through these pipelines, si-phoning off the most lucrative
currents of consumer demand for itself. And it can set the terms
by which other companies have access to these pipelines, while
also levying, through the fees it charges, a tax on their trade. In
other words, it’s moving us away from a democratic political
economy, in which commerce takes place in open markets

governed by public rules, and toward a future in which the
exchange of goods occurs in a private arena governed by
Amazon. It’s a setup that inevitably transfers wealth to the
few—and with it, the power over such crucial questions as
which books and ideas get published and promoted, who may
ply a trade and on what terms, and whether given communities
will succeed or fail.
Amazon is “something radically new in the history of American
business,” New Yorker writer George Packer has observed. But
it’s not without antecedents. In the 19th century, men like
Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller harnessed a
disruptive new technology—the railroad—and used the control
that it gave them over market access to weaken their industrial
competitors and extort money from farmers and small
businesses. Their actions sparked a broad movement against
monopolies, which led, over the following decades, to the
passage of a robust body of antitrust laws. The central purpose
of these laws was to protect liberty and democracy from
concentrated economic power, or what Franklin Roosevelt
called “industrial dictatorship.”
By the time Bezos set up his bookselling operation on the
Internet, however, these laws were no longer being enforced in
accordance with their original purpose. In the 1970s, an
ideological revolution swept through the fields of law and
economics. Led by the conservative legal scholar and former
Nixon solicitor general Robert Bork, among others, this new
school of thought dismissed concerns about the impact of
monopolies on the rights of citizens and even on competition.
Its proponents argued that antitrust law should be reduced to a
single, narrow goal: maximizing efficiency. And efficiency,
they insisted, was something that big, consolidated corporations
could deliver better. These ideas were codified under Ronald
Reagan, whose administration left the antitrust laws intact but
altered the way that regulators interpreted and enforced them.
These changes won support from an ascendant faction of
liberals, who made efficiency more appealing by recasting it as

the source of lower prices for consumers.
“Antitrust laws have been largely reduced to a technical tool to
keep prices low,” notes Lina Khan, director of legal policy at
the Open Markets Institute. As a consequence, so long as
Amazon has appeared to benefit consumers, it’s been allowed to
grow using tactics that would once have drawn antitrust
scrutiny. Amazon has an extensive history, for example, of
selling goods at a loss in order to wrest market share from
competitors that lack the financial backing to sustain similar
losses. Bezos, a former hedge-fund executive who has an
unparalleled gift for selling his vision to Wall Street, has
always been candid with investors about this strategy. In a letter
to shareholders after the company went public in 1997, he wrote
that he would pri-oritize “long-term market leadership
considerations rather than short-term profitability.” Over the
next six years, investors barely winced as Amazon lost $3
billion selling books and other items below cost. The
investment paid off: Bookstores shut down in droves, and today
nearly half of all books, both print and digital, are sold by
Amazon.
Amazon has also used below-cost selling to crush and absorb
upstart competitors. In 2009, it acquired the popular shoe
retailer Zappos after reportedly losing $150 million selling
shoes below cost in order to force the rival company to the
altar. Likewise, when Quidsi, the firm behind Diapers.com,
emerged as a vigorous competitor, Amazon offered to buy it;
when Quidsi’s founders refused, Amazon slashed its diaper
prices below cost. Bleeding red ink, Quidsi eventually agreed to
Amazon’s offer. Over time, this behavior has had a restraining
effect: Start-ups intent on challenging Amazon are unlikely to
find investors and so never get off the ground. “When you are
small, someone else that is bigger can always come along and
take away what you have,” Bezos has said.
Amazon’s many tentacles provide it with novel ways to strong-
arm suppliers. By leveraging the interplay between the different
parts of its business—retail, e-commerce, manufacturing—it can

amplify its market power over them. For instance, when
Amazon began producing its own apparel two years ago, one
aim was to erase the only real bargaining chip that fashion
brands have: their ability to decline to sell to Amazon. Speaking
at a fashion-industry event, Jeff Yurcisin, a vice president of
Amazon Fashion, explained that uncooperative designers would
now face knockoffs: “When we see gaps, when certain brands
have actually decided for their own reasons not to sell with us,
our customer still wants a product like that.”
Amazon’s dominance has been aided by Bezos’s prescient grasp
of how the seemingly wide-open Web could be turned into a
winner-take-all environment. In 2005, Amazon launched Prime,
a membership program that provides free two-day shipping and
other perks for $99 a year. As a stand-alone service, Prime is a
money-loser; Forrester Research estimates that Amazon loses $1
billion a year on the shipping alone. The point of getting people
to fork over $99 has never been about the money, though—it’s
about the psychology. When people pay for Prime, they
naturally want to maximize the value in free shipping they
derive from it by doing more of their shopping on Amazon.
Already, some 80 million Americans, accounting for more than
half of the country’s households, are Prime members. Studies
show they are less likely to comparison-shop, and they spend
almost twice as much with Amazon as non-Prime customers.
With Alexa, Bezos has found a way to lure people even deeper
into Amazon’s ecosystem. Alexa is the voice assistant that
powers the company’s Echo speaker, and it makes buying from
Amazon as effortless as a passing thought. “The fact that it’s
always on, you never have to charge it, and it’s there ready in
your kitchen or your bedroom or wherever you put it, the fact
that you can talk to it in a natural way—removes a lot of
barriers, a lot of friction,” Bezos has said of the speaker. One
such friction is choice: If you ask Alexa for batteries, you won’t
get to choose Duracell or Energizer; Amazon’s brand is the only
option. With Alexa, Amazon will “slowly but surely take
control of your preferences,” predicts Scott Galloway, a

professor of marketing at New York University. The digital
giant has already sold at least 20 million of these devices.
Although Amazon continues to earn relatively mea-ger profits
compared with rivals like Walmart and Apple, its stock price
has soared, almost doubling in value over the past 18 months
and making Bezos the wealthiest person in the world. Investors
see where this is heading. In 2016, Chamath Palihapitiya, a
venture capitalist and owner of the Golden State Warriors, put a
name to it: Amazon, he told an audience of fellow investors, “is
a multitrillion-dollar monopoly hiding in plain sight.”
What Amazon’s giddy investors already understand, however,
regulators have so far failed to grasp. Last June, Amazon
announced its intention to buy Whole Foods. The deal gives
Amazon a prominent foothold in the pivotal grocery industry
and much else besides. With Whole Foods, Amazon gains new
ways to cement its dominance online, including by extending its
package-delivery infrastructure to 470 stores nestled among
millions of urban consumers. And it allows the company to blur
the distinction between online and offline retail, accelerating
the spread of digitally driven commerce and, with it, Amazon’s
power. Yet, just two months after the deal was announced, the
Federal Trade Commission gave it the green light, concluding
that the merger did not warrant an in-depth review.
As it grows, amazon is exposing the defi-ciencies of the
Reagan-era changes in how we think about corporate
concentration. By collapsing antitrust enforcement to consider
only prices, we have lost sight of what earlier generations knew
about monopolies: that they can harm us as producers of value,
not merely as consumers of it. And their control over our
livelihoods and the fate of our communities is inherently
political: It’s a threat to liberty and democracy.
Economists have recently begun to document a link between
corporate concentration and rising inequality. Dominant
companies, they’re finding, are funneling the spoils to a small
number of people at the top. And by reducing the number of
their competitors, these companies are also making it harder for

workers to get a fair wage and for producers to get a fair price.
A particularly troubling data point in this research is the loss of
a long-standing pathway to a middle-class life: starting a
business. The number of new firms launched each year has
fallen by nearly two-thirds since 1980, and many economists
believe that corporate power is to blame. This lack of start-ups
is fueling a broader decline in the ranks of small business:
Between 2005 and 2015, the number of small retailers fell by
85,000, a drop of 21 percent relative to population.
In this story of concentrated power and wealth, Amazon is a
central character. In a 2016 survey, independent retailers ranked
competition from Internet retailers like Amazon as the biggest
threat to their businesses, more worrisome than big-box stores
or rising health-insurance costs. And their decline is having
ripple effects up the supply chain. As more of the market shifts
to a single gatekeeper, manufacturers say they are having a
harder time introducing new products. Local businesses “are in
a much better position as small retailers to do that boot-
strapping,” says Michael Levins, the founder of Innovative
Kids, a book and puzzle producer that’s been in business for 29
years.
At the same time that many communities are seeing local
businesses disappear, they’re also losing retail jobs. This past
year, more people lost jobs in general-merchandise stores than
the total number of workers in the coal industry. Even as
Amazon expands its network of warehouses, it isn’t creating
enough jobs to make up for the losses it’s causing. The basic
math of what’s under way is startling: Retail accounts for about
one in 10 American jobs, and Amazon needs only half as many
workers to distribute the same volume of goods as traditional
stores require. Plus it’s likely to need even fewer workers in the
future: Since 2015, Amazon has invited elite engineering teams
to compete in an annual robotics challenge. Their mission is to
design a robot that can select and grasp assorted items, a task
that, for now, only humans can do.
This kind of wholesale upending of an industry happens

periodically, and, as a rule, we don’t run out of jobs. But today,
in the absence of a flush of new businesses creating new
opportunities, work for many people has become increasingly
precarious—and, in the case of Amazon workers, punishing.
People who work inside the company’s warehouses describe the
pace as grueling, with “unit-per-hour” rates set so high that
failure and exhaustion are routine. Amazon’s approach to work
is at once futuristic and a throwback to labor’s distant past.
Robots zip around, laden with products, while many of the
people they interface with are temporary employees. Amazon
calls these workers “seasonal,” but, in fact, it relies on them
year-round.
As it moves into package delivery, Amazon is bringing its labor
model along, relying in part on Amazon Flex drivers, who use
their own vehicles, take directions from an app, and are paid a
piece rate for each batch of boxes they deliver. The impacts are
already being felt at the US Postal Service and UPS, whose
hundreds of thousands of unionized employees constitute one of
the last surviving corners of the working middle class. A few
months ago, over the objections of the Teamsters union, UPS
began placing ads for drivers who will use their own vehicles.
As a result of the economic shifts that Amazon is helping to
propel, the country is being divided into a starkly unequal
geography. Only a handful of metro areas are gaining
significant numbers of good jobs from Big Tech. And as the
formation of new businesses declines, they’re also being
consolidated into fewer places: In contrast with previous
recoveries, when new firms were widely dispersed, half of all
businesses started between 2010 and 2014 were located in just
five metro areas. Even winning cities are marked by disparity:
In Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered, the median home
value now exceeds $700,000, while the un-sheltered homeless
population doubled over 10 years. It’s not hard to imagine a
future in which Amazon’s cashierless supermarkets and
nondescript bookstores populate better-off neighborhoods, while
other communities become increasingly barren of commercial

activity.
In the left-behind towns and neighborhoods, the despair that has
set in stems from more than just economic hardship. There is a
pervasive sense of powerlessness that is toxic to democracy. In
1946, the sociologist C. Wright Mills and the economist
Melville J. Ulmer published a detailed study of several matched
pairs of cities. The cities in each pair were similar in all
respects except for one main difference: One city’s economy
was composed of many locally owned firms, while the other’s
was largely controlled by absentee corporations. The cities that
possessed a degree of local economic power had a bigger middle
class and a greater variety of jobs, Mills and Ulmer found. But
their most important findings had to do with civic health. The
cities with a robust local economy invested more in public
infrastructure and services, and their residents were involved in
community affairs in greater numbers.
Today, using large-scale statistical techniques, sociologists
have confirmed Mills and Ulmer’s broad conclusions, finding,
for example, that communities that possess more local economic
power are better able to solve problems. But these ideas are no
longer reflected in policy. Now, instead of actively seeking to
disperse economic power, policy-makers encourage its
concentration. Many elected officials are as enthralled with
Bezos as his investors are, and they’ve been equally willing to
fund Amazon’s growth. Congress has repeatedly declined to
pass legislation that would allow states to require out-of-state
retailers to collect sales taxes. This allowed Amazon to largely
avoid collecting sales taxes for nearly two decades, giving it a
price advantage that research shows helped drive shoppers to its
site. Then, as Amazon’s warehouse expansion began to compel
its compliance with sales taxes, the company started angling for
local development incentives. It’s raked in more than $1.1
billion through these deals, according to Good Jobs First, and
more than half of the warehouses that Amazon built between
2005 and 2015 received public subsidies.
Then, last fall, Amazon set off a frenzied bidding war to land its

second headquarters. In the ensuing months, as the leaders of
more than 200 cities groveled to attract the company’s eye, they
sent a clear message to their constituents: Amazon’s widening
reach is something to be wished for fervently. For Amazon, this
public-relations windfall—coming at the very moment when
some are beginning to question its power, and propelled, in
many cases, by leading progressive mayors—may prove even
more valuable than the subsidies that elected officials are
offering. And those offers have been astonishingly large:
Maryland is dangling $5 billion, along with close proximity to
Congress. In New Jersey, meanwhile, Senator Cory Booker,
former governor Chris Christie, and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka
put together an offer worth $7 billion. That’s $2 billion more
than Amazon says its new headquarters will cost.
In june of 2016, senator elizabeth warren gave a headline-
grabbing speech calling for action to check monopoly power.
She singled out several dominant companies, including Amazon,
noting that “the platform can become a tool to snuff out
competition.” And she argued that we should use antitrust
policy to break up concentrations of power and broaden
opportunity, presenting a progressive economic vision that has
more to offer people than simply an enhanced social safety net.
In recent months, a growing number of political leaders have
started to make the case for restoring antitrust policy to its
former strength and purpose. The US House of Representatives
now hosts the newly formed Antitrust Caucus. Its founders
include Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA), who, interestingly,
hails from Silicon Valley, and who urged antitrust enforcers last
summer to undertake a much more thorough review of the
Amazon–Whole Foods merger than they did. Another member is
Congressman David Cicilline (D-RI), who’s been outspoken
about the destructive power of dominant tech platforms to
manipulate consumers and impede start-ups. The caucus’s first
piece of legislation, which would require the antitrust agencies
to retrospectively review the effects of mergers they have
approved, has been introduced by Congressman Keith Ellison

(D-MN), who believes that “massive monopolies are threatening
our democracy.”
Democrats aren’t the only ones pushing for a more muscular
approach to monopolies. Missouri Attorney General Josh
Hawley, a Republican and candidate for the US Senate, has
launched an antitrust investigation of Google.
How might we use the tools of antitrust law to check Amazon’s
power? One approach would break the company into two pieces
by spinning off its e-commerce platform from its retail
operation, thereby eliminating the conflict inherent in
controlling market access for one’s competitors. We could then
designate the resulting platform company as a common carrier,
obligating it to offer all sellers access on equal terms, just as we
did with the railroads. Alongside this, we need to once again
police predatory pricing, the practice of selling goods below
cost to drive out competition. Antitrust enforcers and the courts
dismissed predatory pricing as a concern in the 1980s on the
grounds that the tactic rarely succeeds. Amazon has shown
otherwise.
Amazon will undoubtedly respond to any effort to rein it in by
making its dominance seem like the inevitable outcome of
technological progress. When Bezos was asked several years
ago about his company’s effect on publishers and booksellers,
he responded: “Amazon is not happening to bookselling; the
future is happening to bookselling.” Bezos would like us to
believe that we shouldn’t expect to enjoy the benefits of the
digital revolution without surrendering our markets to
Amazon’s control. But history tells a different story: Federal
antitrust cases against AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft all produced
a surge of innovation and start-up activity in their wake. Back
in Michigan, Lampen-Crowell is eager to compete. He’s added a
series of injury-prevention workshops to the calendar, along
with a schedule of weekly runs with various goals, from
improving speed to helping residents stay active during the
state’s long winters. The question now is whether we as citizens
will insist that this business, and many others like it, have a fair

chance to succeed.
The God of All Things
Major Amazon acquisitions and investments
Investments
Acquisitions
* Sold to Google
The Everything Store
The growing share of online shoppers who start their search on
Amazon
· 18%
· 30%
· 39%
· 44%
· 55%
March to Dominance
History of Amazon’s expansion, from birth to the present
Onward, Upward
Amazon’s share of online retail sales in the United States
· 22%
· 27%
· 30%
· 34%
· 40%
· 46%
Cornering the Market
A comparative look at Amazon’s market value
COMPANY
MARKET CAP. 12/2007
MARKET CAP. 12/2017
% CHANGE
Sears
$12.7B
$0.44B
-96%
JCPenney
$10.62B

$1.04B
-90%
KOHL’S
$8.9B
$7.5B
-47%
macys
$15.5B
$8B
-42%
TARGET
$13.2B
$7.6B
-25%
BEST BUY
$21.6B
$17.6B
-16%
NORDSTORM
$44B
$33B
-15%
Walmart
$196.3B
$288.1B
46%
amazon.com
$39.6B
$555.29B
1318%
Source: ycharts.com (values for 2007 and 2017)
GRAPH
GRAPH
GRAPH
PHOTO (COLOR): Master of the game: Jeff Bezos marking the
introduction of new Kindle gadgets in 2012.

PHOTO (COLOR): Behind the curtain: A worker hunts for an
item in an Amazon Prime warehouse in New York.
PHOTO (COLOR): Where have all the shoppers gone? The
Westland Mall in Columbus, Ohio.
PHOTO (COLOR)
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
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2. The Riddle of Amazon.
Authors:
THOMPSON, DEREK
Source:
Atlantic. Nov2013, Vol. 312 Issue 4, p26-31. 4p. 2 Color
Photographs.
Document Type:
Article
Subject Terms:
*MAIL-order business
*MARKET capitalization
*CORPORATE profits
*ATTITUDES of capitalists & financiers
*BUSINESS models
Company/Entity:
SEARS Roebuck & Co.
NAICS/Industry Codes:
454110 Electronic shopping and mail-order houses
454113 Mail-Order Houses
People:
BEZOS, Jeffrey, 1964-
Abstract:
The article discusses the business model of the online retail
company Amazon.com in light of its lack of profits and
sprawling reach into several consumer markets under the
leadership of chief executive officer (CEO) Jeff Bezos. Topics
include the attitudes of investors regarding Amazon's market
capitalization, a comparison between Amazon and the retailer
Sears Roebuck, and Amazon's mail-order philosophy.
Full Text Word Count:
1494
ISSN:
1072-7825
Accession Number:

91621073
The Riddle of Amazon
Full Text
Section:
Dispatches
BUSINESS
The global shopping behemoth is beloved by investors despite
practically nonexistent profits and a bewildering grand strategy.
What exactly is Jeff Bezos trying to build?
IF THERE'S A SENTENCE that sums up Amazon, the weirdest
major technology company in America, it's one that came from
its own CEO, Jeff Bezos, speaking at the Aspen Institute's 2009
Annual Awards Dinner in New York City: "Invention requires a
long-term willingness to be misunderstood."
In other words: if you don't yet get what I'm trying to build,
keep waiting.
Four years later, Amazon's annual revenue and stock price have
both nearly tripled, but for many onlookers, the long wait for
understanding continues. Bezos's company has grown from its
humble Seattle beginnings to become not only the largest
bookstore in the history of the world, but also the world's
largest online retailer, the largest Web-hosting company in the
world, the most serious competitor to Netflix in streaming
video, the fourth-most-popular tablet maker, and a sprawling
international network of fulfillment centers for merchants
around the world. It is now rumored to be close to launching its
own smartphone and television set-top box. The every-
bookstore has become the store for everything, with the global
ambition to become the store for everywhere.
Seriously: What is Amazon? A retail company? A media
company? A logistics machine? The mystery of its strategy is
deepened by two factors. First is the company's communications
department, which famously excels at not communicating.
(Three requests to speak with Amazon officials for this article

were delayed and, inevitably, declined.) This moves discussions
of the company's intentions into the realm of mind reading,
often attempted by the research departments of investment
banks, where even bullish analysts aren't really sure what Bezos
is up to. "It's very difficult to define what Amazon is," says R.
J. Hottovy, an analyst with Morningstar, who nonetheless
champions the company's future.
Second, investors have developed a seemingly unconditional
love for Amazon, despite the company's reticence and, more to
the point, its financial performance. Some 19 years after its
founding, Amazon still barely turns a profit -- when it makes
money at all. The company is pinched between its low margins
as a discount retailer and its high capital spending as a global
logistics company. Last year, it lost $39 million. By
comparison, in its latest annual report, Apple announced a profit
of almost $42 billion -- nearly 22 times what Amazon has
earned in its entire life span. And yet Amazon's market
capitalization, the value investors place on the company, is
more than a quarter of Apple's, placing Amazon among the
largest tech companies in the United States.
If Amazon doesn't seem entirely coherent in the context of its
contemporary rivals -- it appears to be simultaneously
competing with Walmart, eBay, Netflix, Microsoft, and Apple,
for starters -- it makes considerably more sense in the historical
context of American shopping. "I think Amazon's efforts, even
the seemingly eccentric ones, are centered on securing the
customer relationship," says Benedict Evans, a consultant with
Enders Analysis. The Kindle Fire tablet and the widely rumored
phone aren't frivolous experiments, he told me, but rather
purchasing devices that put Amazon on the coffee table so
consumers can never escape the tantalizing glow of a shopping
screen.
In a way, this strategy isn't new at all. It's ripped from the
mildewed playbooks of the first national retail stores in
American history. Amazon appears to be building nothing less
than a global Sears, Roebuck of the 21st century -- a large-scale

operation that aims to dominate the future of shopping and
shipping. The question is, can it succeed?
IN the late 19th century, soon after a network of rail lines and
telegraph wires had stitched together a rural country, mail-order
companies like Sears built the first national retail corporations.
Today the Sears catalog seems about as innovative as the
prehistoric handsaw, but in the 1890s, the 500-page
"Consumer's Bible" popularized a truly radical shopping
concept: the mail would bring stores to consumers.
But in the early 1900s, as families streamed off farms and into
cities, chains like J. C. Penney and Woolworth sprang up to
greet them. Sears followed, building more than 300 stores
between 1925 and 1929 that specialized in "hard" goods like
household appliances and spare parts for a mobile technology
revolutionizing retail: the rapidly proliferating automobile. The
company's focus on the emerging middle-class market paid off
so well that by mid-century, Sears's revenue approached 1
percent of the entire U.S. economy. But its dominance had
deflated by the late 1980s, after more competitors arose and as
the blue-collar consumer base it had leaned on collapsed.
The company's warehouses are proliferating, enabling limited
same-day delivery to urban areas -- but will that yield a durable
competitive advantage?
Now that Internet cables have replaced telegraph wires,
American consumers are reverting to their turn-of-the-century
shopping habits. The car is fading in the American imagination.
Malls are shutting down. Families, meanwhile, have
rediscovered the Consumer's Bible while sitting on their
couches, and this time, it's in a Web browser. E-commerce has
nearly doubled in the past four years, and Amazon now takes in
revenue of more than $60 billion annually. The Internet means
to the 21st century what the postal service meant to the late
1800s: it welcomes retailers like Amazon into every living
room.
"Sears took advantage of the U.S. postal system and railways in
the early 20th century just as transportation costs were falling,"

says Richard White, a historian at Stanford, "and Amazon has
done the same with the Web." Its national logistics machine
mimics Sears's pneumatic-tube-powered Chicago warehouse, but
is more powerful, and much faster. Its instinct to sell tablets
stuffed with e-books echoes Sears's decision to create Allstate
to bundle insurance with the company's car parts. And its latest
trick would have astonished even Richard Sears himself: same-
day delivery of the products you select from your living room.
Like the mail-order giants did a century ago, Amazon is moving
to the city. In the past few years, the company has added
warehouses in the most-populous metros to cut shipping times
to urban customers. People subscribing to Amazon Prime or
AmazonFresh (which, in exchange for an annual payment,
provides fast delivery of most goods or groceries you'd like to
order) commit themselves financially, with Prime members
spending twice as much as other buyers. If those subscriptions
grow numerous enough, Amazon's search bar could become the
preferred retail-shopping engine. Some analysts even suggest
that this puts the company on a collision course with Google for
search-advertising lucre. After all, if Amazon had everything
you could want -- and the capacity to put it on your doorstep in
just hours -- why would you Google a product ever again?
AT LEAST, that's the vision. Defenders say Amazon is trading
the present for the future, spending all its revenue on a global
scatter plot of warehouses that will make the company
indomitable. Eventually, the theory goes, investors expect
Amazon to complete its construction project and, having swayed
enough customers and destroyed enough rivals, to "flip the
switch," raising prices and profits greatly. In the meantime,
they're happy to keep buying stock, offering an unqualified
thumbs-up for heavy spending.
But this theory assumes a practically infinite life span for
Amazon. The modern history of retail innovation suggests that
even the behemoths can be overtaken suddenly. Sears was still
America's largest retailer in 1982, but just nine years later, its
annual revenues were barely half those of Walmart. "The

economic countryside is littered with the carcasses of
companies that thought they had a [durable] competitive
advantage," says Alex Field, an economic historian at Santa
Clara University. "Just look at BlackBerry or AOL."
Amazon is not as insulated from its rivals as some think it is.
Walmart, eBay, and a bounty of upstarts are all in the race to
dominate online retail. Amazon's furious spending on new
buildings and equipment isn't an elective measure; it's a
survival plan. The truth is that the company benefits from a
beautiful but delicate tautology: Amazon has won investors'
trust with a reputation for spending everybody to death, and it
can spend everybody to death because it has won investors'
trust. For now.
"Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being
run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of
consumers," Slate's Matthew Yglesias joked earlier this year. Of
course, Amazon is not a charity, and its investors are not
philanthropists. Today, they are bankrolling an effort to fulfill
the dreams of the turn-of-the-century retail kings: to build the
perfect personalized shopping experience for the modern urban
household. For once, families are reaping the dividends of Wall
Street's generosity. The longer investors wait for Amazon to
fulfill their orders, the less we have to wait for Amazon to
fulfill ours.
PHOTO (COLOR)
~~~~~~~~
By DEREK THOMPSON
Copyright of Atlantic is the property of Atlantic Media
Company and its content may not be copied or emailed to
multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright
holder's express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.

3.Replaceable You.
Authors:
SHELL, ELLEN RUPPEL (AUTHOR)
Source:
Newsweek Global. 11/30/2018, Vol. 171 Issue 16, p20-27. 8p.
12 Color Photographs, 2 Black and White Photographs.
Document Type:
Article
Subject Terms:
*AUTOMATION & economics
*ROBOTICS
*INTERNET stores
*RETAIL industry
*LABOR costs
Company/Entity:
NAICS/Industry Codes:
452999 All other miscellaneous general merchandise stores
453999 All other miscellaneous store retailers (except beer and
wine-making supplies stores)
453998 All Other Miscellaneous Store Retailers (except
Tobacco Stores)
Abstract:
The article looks at how automation, robotics and the shift of
consumers to online retail has impacted employment and
physical stores in the retail industry. Information is provided on
online retailer Amazon, noting that the company continues to
open warehouses but is expected to hire less humans in the
future due to labor costs.
ISSN:
2572-5343
Accession Number:
133232685

Replaceable You
Full Text
Top of Form
Section:
FEATURES
Economists were skeptical that automation could permanently
displace human workers on a large scale. It looks like they were
wrong
ROUTE 9 SKIMS BY BOSTON AND cuts clear across
Massachusetts to Pittsfield, a city of roughly 50,000, the largest
in Berkshire County. Well east of Pittsfield, Route 9 becomes
Worcester Road, named for a city that in earlier times was the
nation's largest manufacturer of wire—barbed wire, electrical
wire, telephone wire and the wire used in the making of
undergarments by the Royal Worcester Corset Co., once the
largest employer of women in the United States. Older
Worcester residents can still recall the factory bells pealing to
signal the start and end of the workday. Now, the bells are
silent, and the wire and corset factories have been replaced with
three of the nation's largest employers: Walmart, Target and
Home Depot.
If this sounds familiar, it should. It has been nearly two decades
since retail overtook manufacturing as the nation's most
important job creator, employing roughly one of every 10
American workers—more people than in health care and
construction combined. That's a lot of jobs.
Of course, not all retail jobs qualify as what most of us consider
good jobs. Today, the average hourly wage for a nonsupervisory
retail worker is $11.24, and less than half of retail workers
receive benefits of any kind. Still, as a nation, we've come to a
sort of uneasy peace with this trend. We know that
manufacturing employs far fewer Americans today than it once
did—that iPads and Macs aren't made in America and neither
are many televisions, appliances, tools, toys or clothes. We also
know that shopping for these appliances, tools, toys and clothes

is an all-American pastime: On average, we spend nearly 45
minutes a day (more than 270 hours per year) purchasing goods
and services. Retail has become the world as we know it, and
many of us expect to make our living working in that world.
And yet, traditional retail is under threat—from the same forces
that are disrupting virtually every sector of the American
economy. Last month's announcement of historically low
unemployment numbers brought cheers but also confusion:
Given what economists called the nation's "full employment,"
why did so many of us feel left behind? After all, Americans
have acquired more education and are more productive than
ever before. Yet, as it turns out, our feelings of being ripped off
are justified: More than 80 percent of us are not reaping the
bounty of our own education and productivity. For while
unemployment is technically at a historic low point,
underemployment is rampant. Fully 20 percent of men aged 24
to 55 do not have full-time jobs, and nearly half of all new
college graduates are unable to find a job that comports with
their education. (Contrary to popular thinking, college students
are not impractical "basket weaving" majors—roughly 40
percent earn degrees in "occupational" disciplines, such as
business, legal studies and public administration, an 80 percent
increase since 1970.) And while Uber drivers and freelance dog
walkers technically count as "employed," they are not employed
in the sort of occupation that typically offers a living wage. The
bottom line is this: Technology has advanced at a breathtaking
pace, while the policy designed to help workers deal with these
changes has lagged far behind. Hence, the financial benefits of
technological change accrue mainly to the few, while the
majority of Americans are left with crumbs—precarious,
unstable employment that reflects neither their abilities nor
their potential.
"We're at a unique point in human history," Rice University
computer scientist Moshe Vardi says. "We are sitting on the
cusp of an enormous change."
In retail, this is the challenge: When it comes to profits, no

brick-and-mortar store—no matter how efficient—can hold a
candle to e-commerce, which since 2014 has become the fastest-
growing retail sector by far. China's Alibaba Group—Asia's
most valuable company—is the world's largest player in this
keenly competitive arena. But Alibaba has so far failed to gain a
foothold in the United States. In America, Amazon—the nation's
fastest-growing employer—reigns supreme.
Analysts predict that by 2020, one-fifth of the multitrillion-
dollar U.S. retail market will have shifted to the web and that
Amazon alone will reap two-thirds of that bounty. The company
already captures one of every two dollars Americans spend
online and is by far the nation's biggest seller of books, music,
video games, cellphones, electronics, small appliances, toys,
magazine subscriptions and what seems like almost everything
else—hence its nickname, "The Everything Store." The
company grabs gobs of market share in nearly every retail
category, including its own food line. It produces TV shows and
movies; manufactures thousands of products, from batteries to
baby food; and owns such familiar brands as Zappos, Shopbop,
IMDb, Audible and Twitch. Amazon Handmade is challenging
Etsy with the artisanal set, and Amazon Business is threatening
Staples and other independent office suppliers. And with every
click, the company gathers critical information—our addresses
and credit histories, as well as everything we've ever bought or
even looked at on the Amazon site—and uses the data to build
an even more intimate relationship with each of us, with the
goal of cultivating still more of our business.
Thanks to automation and a killer business model, Amazon is so
efficient that it reaps nearly twice the revenue per employee of
Walmart, despite the fact that Walmart, too, has a substantial
online presence. Worldwide, Amazon has installed over 100,000
robots to labor in "perfect symbiosis" with humans in its
warehouses and has plans to install many thousands more.
While it's not clear what constitutes perfect symbiosis, the
robots are said to save the company $22 million annually, per
warehouse. The company's master plan of an autonomous future

also includes goods delivered by drones and self-driving
vehicles.
For while Amazon continues to open warehouses around the
globe and staff them with many thousands of human beings,
estimates are that every human on the Amazon payroll—whether
full-or part-time—displaces two humans at traditional brick-
and-mortar operations. And that's a feature, not a bug: As Tim
Lindner, a veteran IT analyst, confided in a note to industry
insiders, eradicating jobs is the explicit goal of any online
retailer. As he once wrote: "Labor is the highest-cost factor in
warehouse operations. It is no secret that Amazon is moving to
highly automated operations within its distribution centers,
and…it has additional technology that can further reduce the
number of humans it needs to process customer orders.… You
have heard the old programmer's phrase, 'Garbage in, garbage
out.'… [With] the diminishing reading abilities of humans on
the Receiving dock, finding an automated solution to eliminate
the 'garbage in' problem is the holy grail. Amazon may have just
patented it."
By garbage, Lindner meant human error, the alternative to
which is apparently robotic precision. And robots can be very
precise, especially when it comes to routine tasks. Sawyer, an
industrial robot created by the former Boston-based Rethink
Robotics, offers an impressive illustration of how all-embracing
a robot arm can be. Sawyer is the brainchild of Rodney Brooks,
the inventor of both Roomba, the robotic vacuum, and PackBot,
the robot used to clear bunkers in Iraq and Afghanistan and at
the World Trade Center after 9/11. Unlike Roomba and
PackBot, Sawyer looks almost human—it has an animated flat-
screen face and wheels where its legs should be. Simply
grabbing and adjusting its monkey-like arm and guiding it
through a series of motions "teaches" Sawyer whatever
repeatable procedure one needs it to get done. The robot can
sense and manipulate objects almost as quickly and as fluidly as
a human and demands very little in return: While traditional
industrial robots require costly engineers and programmers to

write and debug their code, a high school dropout can learn to
program Sawyer in less than five minutes. Brooks once
estimated that, all told, Sawyer (and his older brother, the two-
armed Baxter robot) would work for a "wage" equivalent of less
than $4 an hour.
Robots loom large in discussions of work and its future, a
conversation that can get mired in false assumptions. Until
recently, many economists were skeptical that automation could
permanently displace human workers on a large scale. People
have always shifted away from work better done by machines,
but the economic principle of "comparative advantage" predicts
that humans will maintain an edge in many fields. Under this
logic, technology will not displace us but set us free to do less
dangerous, more challenging things, essentially the very things
that make humans human.
For example, in 2016, the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration officially recognized "software" as a driver of
self-driving cars, thereby putting the nation's 4.1 million paid
motor vehicle operators—drivers of taxis, trucks, buses and
Uber—on notice. Theoretically, this will free these drivers to
fill new roles—such as ones in Amazon warehouses. But these
warehouses are also becoming automated, as are any number of
other places with jobs once filled by the vast majority of what
economists call "middle-skill workers," the very people who
once populated—and bolstered—the American middle class.
Workers like the thoughtful department store salesman who
helped measure you for the suit you wore to your daughter's
wedding, the patient butcher who carved out the chops for the
pre-wedding dinner or the travel agent who helped plan the
honeymoon.
Of course, human workers are complicated. We get tired,
hungry, distracted, angry, confused. We make mistakes,
sometimes egregious ones. Machines lack our frailties and
biases and are better equipped to weigh evidence fairly, without
prejudice or false assumptions. Perhaps most critically,
machines can retain and process data far more accurately than

we can, and that data is growing exponentially.
Every minute of every day, Google services 3.6 million searches
in the United States alone. Spammers send 100 million emails.
Snapchatters send 527,000 photos, and the Weather Channel
broadcasts 18 million forecasts. This and more data—properly
collected, codified and analyzed—can be applied to automate
almost any high-order task. Data can also serve as a surrogate
for human experience and intuition. Online shopping and social
media sites "learn" our preferences and use that information to
make values-based assessments to influence our decisions and
behavior. And, increasingly, machines excel in the tasks once
thought uniquely human.
"Computers are able to see and hear, and have face-recognition
capabilities that are significantly better than humans," says
Vardi. "Machines understand the human world far better than
they did just a few years ago. And we haven't discovered
anything in the human brain that can't be modeled."
Bart Selman is a professor of computer science at Cornell
University and an expert in knowledge representation—
basically, translating the real world into terms computers can
understand and act upon. He cautions that computers do not yet
have full human capabilities. For example, they lack "common
sense" and an ability to grasp the deep meaning of language.
They are unable to "make meaning" in the human sense, and this
sometimes leads them down the wrong path. Still, he says, these
shortcomings are likely temporary. "The [artificial intelligence]
community believes that machines will match human
intelligence within the next 15 to 20 years," he says.
And robots need not be perfect, only equal to—or a tad better
than—complicated and expensive humans. And technologists
are working hard to make sure they are a tad better. For
example, in the case of retail, it's become clear that many of us
avoid the self-service checkout line—we prefer the cashier to
punch in our purchases rather than do so ourselves. So it seems
that the job of cashier—among the largest retail employment
categories—is not directly at risk. But Zeynep Ton, an MIT

management expert who focuses on the retail sector, says self-
service checkout is only a first step and not a terribly smart one.
"Customers recognized that self-service checkout is not an
innovation, but merely a way of outsourcing the job to them, so
they didn't like it," she says. "But new technology is coming
that will make self-service checkout so much easier and faster,
and that will have a real impact on retail employment."
Experts caution that the so-called apocalypse in retail predicted
a few years ago has not yet come to pass. In fact, for every
company closing existing stores, two more are opening new
stores. Retail is a highly competitive industry, and technology
is transforming not only the way we shop but the way we
connect with brands—for example, just a few years ago, who
would have imagined that Amazon would open actual retail
stores? And while e-commerce has grown to 10 percent of
retail, that still leaves 90 percent for brick-and-mortar stores.
But those brick-and-mortar stores, too, are undergoing radical
change that has serious implications for America's workforce.
Kasey Lobaugh is chief retail innovation officer at Deloitte
Consulting LLP. "The loss of market share by traditional retail
companies is not simply an online vs. bricks-and-mortar battle,
with traditional retailers losing the e-commerce game," he says.
"Traditional retailers are also being challenged by what we call
ankle biters," small, nimble companies that—thanks to
technology—can reach consumers without a massive capital
outlay.
As example, Lobaugh cites food trucks, which he says
increasingly pose a threat to many fast-food outlets. Unlike
restaurants pinned down by a pair of Golden Arches, food
trucks are nimble—they can home in on areas where customers
are most likely to gather at any particular time. They can also
tailor their offerings to a particular region or even a
neighborhood, as well as use Facebook or other media to get out
the word on their menu items and locations. Small, specialty
stores also have far more flexibility than large department
stores. "Technology has reduced the cost of entry into new

markets, so in retail there are fewer big, monolithic companies,
but more small competitors," he says. "Companies are
diversifying to meet the specific needs and desires of
consumers—everyone's piece is getting smaller, but there are
many more pieces."
Technology has engendered a two-tiered retail landscape—with
more high-end boutique-type stores appealing mostly to high-
wage earners, and many more discount stores appealing to
price-sensitive customers. "More than 1,000 discount stores
opened in the U.S. this year alone, as did a large number of
what we call 'premier' high-end niche stores," Lobaugh says.
What's declining is what marketers call the "balanced" store—
department stores and other retailers that balance quality and
price for mid-market customers.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the decline of the "balanced"
store correlated with the decline of the American middle class
over the past decade. "Between 2007 and 2017, income gains—
an average increase of $50,000 in household income—went
mostly to the top 20 percent of earners," Lobaugh explains. "In
fact, this group gained more than 100 percent of the increase,
because the bottom 40 percent actually lost ground. The middle
40 percent gained $10,000 per household. But their expenses
increased—food, housing, transportation. Health care
skyrocketed. On top of that came digital necessities—things like
cell-phones and data plans. That leaves most people very little
money to spend on retail, which means they have become very,
very price sensitive."
Lobaugh prefers not to speculate about what all this meant for
the retail worker, other than to say the trend was
"transformative." But what is clear is that discount stores
employ fewer workers per square foot of store space and tend to
offer low wages and fewer hours: The number of hours per
employee has actually dropped over the past decade. John
Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-
based global outplacement & career transitioning firm, said he
sees more changes ahead. "I think we're in the opening phase of

what happened to manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s," he
says. "There's no question that store workers are vulnerable to
technology and that untold numbers have already been
displaced."
Asked where all these retail workers had gone, he says it was
likely many had found new jobs in trucking, shipping,
distribution—that is, warehousing.
And after all, in October, Amazon announced its decision to
raise minimum wage at its warehouses and retail outlets to $15
an hour, a big jump for many retail workers.
But despite what it predicts will be a banner holiday season,
this year Amazon took on far fewer seasonal employees than
usual—100,000 employees versus 120,000 the previous two
years. And while an Amazon spokeswoman insisted that
automation is not a factor in this reduced workforce, others
seem to not agree. In a recent report, Morgan Stanley analyst
Brian Nowak soothed the fears of Amazon shareholders
concerned with the wage increase by pointing out that
automation had already and would continue to reduce the call
for labor, and therefore reduce overall costs. When asked about
this, Lobaugh again tactfully declined to comment—other than
to say that while the retail sector had lost less ground than most
people assume, retail employees were another matter. "There
are winners," he says, "and then there are losers."
Hod Lipson, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia
University, directs the Creative Machines Lab, where he and his
students train machines to be reflective, curious and, yes,
creative—including in the kitchen. When we spoke, he was
putting the final touches on a device that uses software to
concoct beautifully composed gourmet delights from a jumble
of pastes, gels, powders and liquid ingredients. From the looks
of it, this machine could compete with a three-star Michelin
chef and her entire staff. When I ran this thought by Lipson, he
groaned. He says scientists and engineers like himself have a
reflexive urge to automate almost every difficult task. The
whole point of engineering, he says, is to alleviate drudgery and

increase productivity; in the past, that was almost always the
right thing to do, the good thing to do. But now he's not so sure.
"Automation and AI will take away pretty much all of our jobs,"
he says. "If not within our lifetime, then within our
grandchildren's lifetime. This is a new situation in human
history, and we're not prepared for it. Maybe we think we are,
but we're not."
Warehouses are becoming automated, as are any number of
other of other places with jobs once filled by what economists
call "middle-skill workers," the very people who once
populated—and bolstered—the American middle class.
A high school dropout could program Sawyer in minutes, and it
would work for the equivalent of under $4 an hour.
Ellen Ruppel Shell is author of the job: work and its future in a
time of radical change, from which this piece was adapted.
PHOTO (COLOR): SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND The
Amazon fulfillment center in, New Jersey still hires humans—
for now. The company currently employs 100,000 robots in its
warehouses worldwide.
PHOTO (COLOR): Sawyer of Rethink Robotics.
PHOTO (COLOR): GOODBYE TO ALL THAT A Walmart
cashier;
PHOTO (COLOR): women employed by the Royal Worcester
Corset Co. in Massachusetts in 1902;
PHOTO (COLOR): New York taxi drivers protesting recent
inroads by the car service Uber, which, among other things, has
launched a groundbreaking self-driving car.
PHOTO (COLOR): STUCK IN THE MIDDLE Dog walkers may
not be at risk from robots and automation, but "middle-skill"
jobs like long-haul trucking and warehouse jobs will;
PHOTO (COLOR): robots and vision systems at Amazon.
PHOTO (COLOR): BIG LOSSES, SMALL WINS Even as it
opens brick-and-mortar stores (the first, here, in Seattle in
2015), Amazon is hiring fewer seasonal employees for the
holidays this year;
PHOTO (COLOR): Sawyer in action;

PHOTO (COLOR): food trucks, which are nimbler and more
media-savvy than fast-food chains. "Everybody's piece is
getting smaller, but there are more pieces," Lobaugh says.
PHOTO (COLOR)
PHOTO (COLOR)
Copyright of Newsweek Global is the property of Newsweek
LLC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple
sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.
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4. Amazon says it can ship items before customers order
Authors:
William M. Welch
@williamwelch
USA TODAY

Source:
USA Today. 01/20/2014.
ISSN:
0734-7456
Accession Number:
J0E108322227414
Amazon says it can ship items before customers order
Full Text
Section: Money, Pg. 02b
Online retail giant Amazon says it knows its customers so well,
it can start shipping even before orders are placed.
The company, which last year said it wants to use unmanned
drones to speed package delivery, gained a patent last month for
what it calls "anticipatory shipping," The Wall Street Journal
reported over the weekend.
Amazon, according to a story in the Journal online, says it may
box and ship products that it expects customers in a specific
area will want, based on previous orders and other factors it
gleans from its customers' shopping patterns, even before they
place an online order.
Among those other factors: previous orders; product searches;
wish lists; shopping cart contents; returns; and other online
shopping practices.
Amazon has worked to cut delivery times as a way of
encouraging more orders and satisfying customers, such as by
expanding its warehouse network and making some overnight
and even same-day deliveries.
Amazon reportedly didn't estimate how much delivery time it
expects to save, or whether it has already put its new system to
work.
"It appears Amazon is taking advantage of their copious data,"
Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester Research analyst, told the
Journal. "Based on all the things they know about their
customers, they could predict demand based on a variety of

factors."
To minimize the cost of unwanted returns, Amazon said it might
consider giving customers discounts or even making the
delivered item a gift.
(c) USA TODAY, 2014
Source: USA Today, JAN 20, 2014
Item: J0E108322227414
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5. VISIONS OF THE AMAZON
What Has Shifted, What Persists, and Why This Matters
Candace Slater
University of California, Berkeley
Abstract: For many people throughout much of the world today,
the terms ".Ama-
zon" and "rain forest" are synonymous— indeed, it seems as if
the two must have

always intertwined. However, while this much-invoked realm of
shimmering, fragile
nature, together with its ferocious jungle alter ego, does have
deep roots in the past,
its present-day incarnation has much to do with the global
environmental movement
that began emerging in the 1960s and has continued to morph
over time. This article
examines contemporary representations of the Amazon with an
eye to what is now
changing, as well as why. It underscores the key role that these
depictions play in
shaping policy, which gives them an importance far
transcending purely narrative
concerns.
Until very recently, the prevailing popular image of Brazilian
Amazonia re-
mained the pristine emerald "Rainforest," whose unhappy flip
side oscillated be-
tween images of a savage—if often perversely fascinating—
tangle of vegetation
and a denuded hell. I capitalize "Rainforest" and its thorny flip
side, the "Jungle,"
to indicate a geographic entity that is also a particular
metaphoric space (a rain
forest is simply a wooded area that receives at least one hundred
inches of rainfall
per year; whereas a jungle is a similar, though always tropical,
space) . 1 While this
idea of a two-faced realm of nature has by no means vanished, it
has in many
cases morphed into a space with less effusive vegetation and a
wider variety of

people.
The following pages examine a number of varied narrative
forms that both
reflect and contribute to this shift in reference to Brazil, which
is home to by far
the largest area of the six-country (by some counts eight-
country) Amazon re-
gion. My examples include literary works (above all, the largely
urban novels of
one widely read contemporary Amazonian author),
advertisements for a variety
of Amazon-related products, and journalistic pieces that
describe either isolated
native groups or new scientific research that challenges once
extremely common
notions of a virgin forest. These expressions are not intended to
be seen as equal
in veracity or importance. In addition, most are not directly
connected—indeed,
I have chosen examples from different narrative genres
precisely because of
their heterogeneity. My point is that the ongoing changes in
representations of
the Amazon are in no way uniform but rather signal conflicting
perceptions. Al-
though others have suggested that images, particularly those of
nature, are never
I thank Julia Lourenço and William Gromer Smith for their
editorial help.
1. For further definition and a history of these terms see Slater
(1996,114-131).
Latin American Research Review, Vol. 50, No. 3. © 2015 by the

Latin American Studies Association.
4 Latín American Research Review
innocent, these pages underscore their uneasy interactions in the
specific case of
Amazonia—a region of vast importance to the world.2
The visions analyzed here are significant because of their role
in shaping poli-
cies that exert a major impact on people's lives. They are also
noteworthy because
of the ways in which newer representations often rework older
images for diverse
strategic ends. Finally, these visions' often competing
relationships to one another
suggest the complexity of a larger image-making process that
has generated an
ample scholarly bibliography focused on the Amazon and other
realms of tropi-
cal nature.3
I begin with a brief overview of representations of the region
that have recurred
over the last five centuries. Although most of these narrative
images were initially
utilized by newcomers to the region, they have mixed with, and
been transformed
by, various "insider" influences. Chief among the key themes
singled out for at-
tention are the Amazon as an earthly heaven or hell, as a font of
commodities, as a
Lost World, and as a domain of nature that is also a distinctly

human space. While
these images sometimes clash, they also partially intermingle.
This initial summary opens out into an examination of the roles
that these
key themes play in the passage from late twentieth-century
ideas of a luxuriant
though fragile Rainforest/Jungle to today's increasingly
common vision of a con-
siderably more populous and heterogeneous space. I first show
how the work of
the Amazon-born novelist Milton Hatoum challenges the
Rainforest idea even
as it incorporates portions of the time-honored conception of the
region as an
earthly heaven or hell. I next consider advertisements that
underscore the shift
from products with a direct Amazon connection (Rainforest
Crunch, for instance)
to others that suggest more attenuated, increasingly symbolic
relationships. 1 then
examine recent articles and electronic postings about Amazonia
as a Lost World
(today often not all that lost) that provoke increasingly
ambivalent feelings. The
concluding section highlights journalistic accounts of new
scientific research that
underscores the central role of human beings in shaping the land
around them.
The larger context for all of these representations is a
globalizing Brazil in which
rapid economic expansion under two Workers' Party regimes
from 2003 to the
present has intensified the long-standing battle between

development and envi-
ronmental preservation in the Amazon.
BACKGROUND TO THE PRESENT: A RAPID HISTORY OF
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE AMAZON
Today's images of Amazonia have partial roots in early colonial
chronicles that
flip between visions of the region as a paradise-like nature full
of marvels and an
earthly hell that punishes presumptuous intruders. Although the
authors seek
2. The ideological implications of nature imagery and the
identity of nature as a shifting cultural
construct are particularly clear in the work of Raymond
Williams ([1976] 1983,1980).
3. For some of the many scholarly analyses of visions of the
Amazon see Costa (2002), Gondim ([1994]
2007), González Echevarría ([1990] 1998), Hecht and Cockburn
(1990), Leão (2011), Pizarro (2012), Raffles
(2002), Sá (2004), and Slater (2002).
VISIONS OF THE AMAZON 5
to underscore the region's material promise, few resist
descriptions of its more
hostile features.
Friar Gaspar de Carvajal's 1542 account of the first voyage by
Europeans down
the length of what would become known as the Amazon River is
marked by dra-
matic swings in its depictions of the natural world (Carvajal
1934). On the one
hand, the Amazon of this initial chronicle is an astounding
paradise that pre-
pares the way for today's descriptions of abundance—40,000

plant species, 3,000
freshwater fish species, and more than 370 types of reptiles, and
so on (World
Wildlife Fund 2013a).4 On the other hand, the realm that he
portrays is a peril-
ous expanse that most contemporary readers would be quick to
call a Jungle.5
Although Carvajal extols the land's promise of those sorts of
riches dear to the
hearts of the expedition's royal patrons, his account is also full
of dangers.
Chief among these dangers are the fearsome natives who emerge
seemingly
from nowhere to attack the Spaniards before melting back into
the forest. These
natives' leaders are the warrior women whom Carvajal identifies
as the same Am-
azons described by the ancient Greeks. The friar's vision of
these women as an
amalgam of wealth (a classical attribution emphasized by late
medieval authors)
and bellicosity finds a perfect visual image in the arrow that one
of these remark-
ably rich figures shoots into his side.6
Tales of the Amazons give way over time to notions of a
fabulously abundant
nature that requires patient cataloging—and eventual European
use.7 While the
late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientific travelers

employ a more
impartial-sounding, fact-oriented approach than that of the
colonial chroniclers,
they continue to alternate between visions of the Amazon as a
heaven and a hell.
Although Henry Walter Bates's The Naturalist on the River
Amazons, for instance,
begins with a lyrical evocation of a particularly lush forest on
the outskirts of
Belém, the book goes on to describe more harrowing scenes,
such as that of the
leaf-cutter ants that cart off the hungry traveler's provisions
(Bates [1863] 2002).
Though in the end the ants are as fascinating to Bates as an
iridescent butterfly or
industrious spider, he takes a less forgiving view of the region's
human inhabit-
ants. It is these flawed humans whose actions destroy nature's
promise, just as
when the dazzling bower of his introduction gives way to far
less joyous city
streets.
Nature fights back in a host of later narratives—above all in the
novelas de la
selva (jungle novels) of the first part of the twentieth century, a
period that co-
incides with the peak and bitter aftermath of the Rubber Boom
(1850-1920)
(Weinstein 1983).8 Fictive portraits of a thorny hell abound in
classic texts such
4. These particular statistics come from World Wildlife Fund
but there are many similar sources.

5. For a discussion of the similarities and differences between
Rainforests and Jungles see Slater
(1996,114-131).
6. "If it had not been for [the thickness of] my clothes, that
would have been the end of me," he de-
clares (Carvajal 1934, 214).
7. For the commerce-driven underpinnings of this apparently
disinterested research see Pratt
(2007).
8. Actual dates of the Rubber Boom vary. For examples of
earlier novels that depict a fierce nature see
Gallegos (1929) and Mera ([1877] 2007).
6 Latin American Research Review
as Alberto Rangel's Inferno verde (Green Hell, 1927), Eustasio
Rivera's La vorágine
(The Vortex, 1924), and Portuguese novelist Ferreira de
Castro's A selva (The Jungle,
1930). The jungle as nightmare is also the central image in
openly documentary
works like US president Theodore Roosevelt's description of his
travels in search
of the "River of Doubt" (Roosevelt 1914). While essays by the
Brazilian writer
Euclides da Cunha transcend the usual binaries, images of
Amazonia as a heaven
and a hell still crop up in his work (Cunha [1905] 2003; Hecht
2013).
Euclides da Cunha's insistence on Brazil's uniqueness in
relation to Europe an-
ticipates the search for national identity that largely defines
Brazilian modernismo.

Interestingly enough, some of the most enduring masterpieces
of this highly im-
portant multi-arts movement of the 1920s—Mário de Andrade's
novel Macunaima
(1928), Raul Bopp's long poem Cobra Norato (1931), composer
Heitor Villa-Lobos's
haunting Bachianas brasileiras (1930-1945)—look to the
Amazon for inspiration.
These works convert what had been a terrifying chaos in the
jungle novels into
a wondrous tangle of mythic elements and fantastic flora and
fauna that confirm
Brazil's creative potential.
Modernismo's artistic force went hand in hand with a much
larger drive to
centralize and modernize Brazil obvious in the Getúlio Vargas
regime's construc-
tion of roads, factories, and a new, state-supported popular
music industry. This
same drive also underlay the Marcha para o Oeste (Westward
March) that sought
to open the country's center-west and northern regions to
development in the
1930s and 1940s. This campaign saw the Amazon as a stubborn
giant that must
be transformed into a wellspring of profitable resources and, as
such, an obvious
symbol of the nation's size and imperial aspirations.
Vargas's suicide in 1954 ushered in a democratic era that
collapsed in a US-
assisted military coup a decade later. As part of their model of
consumerist de-

velopment, the coup's leaders revived older notions of the
Amazon as a potential
land of plenty capable of solving the social problems that arose
in the Brazilian
south as increasingly powerful agro-industrial interests pushed
small farmers
off the land. However, depictions of the region as a promised
land or developers'
heaven soon collided with the obstacles to traditional farming
posed by an unfa-
miliar, seemingly hellish terrain.
The destruction unleashed by road and dam builders, cattle
ranches, loggers,
and miners during the 1960s struck the nascent US and
worldwide environmen-
talist movements of this period as a poster-ready assault on
nature. Images of the
Amazon as a virgin rain forest able to sustain endangered
animals and native cul-
tures find particularly vivid expression in the protests and
discussions surround-
ing the later United Nations-sponsored 1992 Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro.
The "counterfeit paradise" (archaeologist Betty Meggers's
[1966] term for a
land whose lush appearance is belied by meager soils that can
support only the
smallest of human populations) is also often a "Lost World"—
the title of a turn-of-

the-century novel by Conan Doyle (1912). This idea of tropical
nature as a refuge
resurfaces in Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes tropicjues (1955)
and Alejo Carpentier's
Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps) (1953), two influential
texts both published in the
wake of World War II. As time progressed, outsiders' nostalgia
for a seemingly
more harmonious and simpler world became more specifically
identified with the
VISIONS OF THE AMAZON 7
Amazon as a home for not only ancient species (Doyle's
dinosaurs) but above all
people who continue to live in a largely vanished harmony with
nature.
This idea of a Lost World reflects in part the new pressures on
indigenous
groups that had managed to withstand the onslaught of
colonialism. The trans-
formation of earlier ideas of the noble savage into the
contemporary Amazonian
Indian has much to do with a modern public's longing for a
purity equated with
a simpler way of life.9 Although this longing might reflect
genuine concern for
justice and a desire to help both the forest and its inhabitants, it
often blunts actual
indigenous voices and crucial differences among native groups.
The particulars of today's ongoing shift toward a vision of the
Amazon as a
home to considerably larger and more diverse populations

reflect the govern-
ment's attempts to balance—or at least appear to balance—
development and pres-
ervation as Brazil strives to stabilize and reignite the dramatic
economic expan-
sion that began to flag in 2012. A renewed push for agro-
industrial development
is readily visible in the Brazilian Congress's 2013 softening of
protective measures
established by the national Forest Code of 1965. At the same
time, the counter-
drive for preservation is particularly clear in a series of
continuing protests over
the construction of the giant Belo Monte Dam on the state of
Pará's Xingu River. A
number of these protests were timed to coincide with the United
Nations' Rio+20
Summit of June 2012—a critical revisiting of the discussions on
sustainable devel-
opment held in Rio two decades earlier.10 These debates are in
turn inseparable
from the larger questions regarding national priorities
(transportation, health,
and education) at the heart of the turbulent street protests
during the summer of
2013. While the bulk of these protests took place in Brazil's
large southern cities,
others erupted in various corners of its vast interior.
THE AMAZON AS HEAVEN AND AS HELL IN
CONTEMPORARY LITERARY TEXTS

Although the preceding summary seeks to emphasize
recurrences within rep-
resentations of the Amazon, these are not uniform. One need
only look at nov-
els about the region to see how much images may vary. Sima
(Amazonas [1857]
2003)—the first Brazilian novel to be set in the Amazon, for
example—resembles
the Northeast Brazilian writer José de Alencar's far more
famous O Guarani (1857)
and Iracema (1865) in its use of the same sorts of Romantic
vocabulary and for-
mulas. However, the Amazonian novel contains far fewer
descriptions of nature.
Instead, its author, Lourenço da Silva Araújo Amazonas,
concentrates upon the
conflict between white colonizers and native groups. In
addition, while Simá, like
Alencar's Iracema, meets a tragic end, she—unlike Iracema, the
virgin Indian
princess—is the product of a savage rape.
The obvious role of colonial oppressors in the disasters that
befall the Amazon
9. While the image of the noble savage is often associated with
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Romantic
primitivism, it is actually considerably older. For the issue of
nonmercenary attachment see Conklin
(1997, 2010).
10. The Forest Code of 1965 set aside a percentage of rural land
meant to be maintained permanently
as forest (the so-called Legal Reserves) and also defined
environmentally sensitive areas called Areas of
Permanent Protection on which vegetation was to be left intact

(World Wildlife Fund 2013b).
8 Latin American Research Review
in Simá make it very different not just from Alencar's work but
also from a later
wave of "jungle novels" in Brazil and other parts of Latin
America. While these
jungle novelists continue to influence writing about the Amazon
throughout
much of the twentieth century, a handful of Amazonian authors
from the 1930s
prove considerably more open to urban themes.11 One can also
find special cases
such as that of Dalcidio Jurandir (1909-1979), whose brand of
regionalism is more
rooted in a day-to-day experience of the interior than that of
most writers of his
period.12 Hints of a more concerted challenge to the nature-as-
heaven-or-hell
norm do begin to surface in the 1950s and 1960s with the
founding of the Clube da
Madrugada (Dawn Club) in Manaus by a group of authors open
to a greater range
of visions of the region.13 However, these writers enjoyed very
little extraregional
projection at a time in which Latin American writers as a whole
were gaining
national and international attention.
Most of the authors who produced work focused on the Amazon
or neighbor-
ing Orinoco during and soon after the major marketing and
publication phe-
nomenon of the 1960s and 1970s known as the Boom are
Spanish Americans

(Alejo Carpentier [1953] 1992; Mario Vargas Llosa 1965; Luís
Sepulveda 1989) with
little or no firsthand knowledge of the region.14 The most
notable exception to
this rule is Márcio Souza, a writer from the Brazilian Amazon
whose novels
began to be translated into English and other languages in the
1980s. Although
the first of these English-language translations—Mad Maria—
operates within a
familiar Jungle paradigm, the book is set apart by a sharp, often
sardonic vein
of social criticism that has come to distinguish the author's
writing as a whole
(Souza 1980)!5
Souza's departure from the forest norm in a number of his other
novels opens
the door for other visions of the Amazon, such as the emergence
of literature that
pictures the region as a home to cities and to immigrants from
distant lands, as
most clearly visible in the writings of Milton Hatoum. While
Hatoum's first book,
Relato de um certo Oriente, appeared in 1990, his real rise to
fame came with the
publication of Dois irmãos in 2000.16
Hatoum's Dois irmãos (The Brothers)—an account of an
ongoing battle between
twin brothers that recalls the tale of Jacob and Esau in the Old
Testament's book
of Genesis and also the celebrated Brazilian author Machado de
Assis's 1904 novel
11. Writers who diverge from the forest mold include Francisco
Gomes de Amorim, Abguar Bastos,
and Francisco Xavier Galvã, all located in Manaus.
12. For an introduction to the fiction of Dalcidio Jurandir see

Leite (2006).
13. Dawn Club writers include Luiz Bacellar, Arthur Engracio,
Benjamin Sanchez, and Astrid
Cabral.
14. The author of the considerably more recent El príncipe de
los caimanes (The Alligator Prince), Santiago
Roncagliolo ([2002] 2006), cheerfully calls attention to the fact
that he has never set foot in the Amazon.
15. Souza's nonfiction works on Amazonian history, film, and
writing also call attention to the ways
in which the region has always been more than a series of easy
formulas.
16. Dois irmãos is available in English as The Brothers, trans.
John Gledson (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2002). Hatoum has since published two other
novels in which cities continue to play an
important role. For a very long list of books, articles, and theses
relating to Dois irmãos and his other
work, see www.miltonhatoum.com.br.
V ISIO N S OF TH E A M A Z O N 9
Esaú e Jaco—offers a compelling family saga. The book's
gripping plot and psy-
chological immediacy explains much of its appeal to a general
reading public,
including students in high school and college literature classes.
Hatoum's success also stems from the insertion of the region
into a larger con-
text (Pellegrini 2004,121-138). Rather than the usual great
green appendage to the
rest of the country, the Amazon of Dois irmãos is—for better or
worse—an integral

part of that extremely complex whole that is Brazil. This story
of one Lebanese-
Brazilian family in the sprawling port city of Manaus takes
place primarily in the
years of the military dictatorship (1964-1985), whose effects,
while centered in the
urban south, were felt throughout the nation. The twin brothers
of the book's title
represent opposing aspects of a region and a nation that cannot
seem to achieve
fusion. Yaqub, the twin who abandons Manaus for São Paulo, is
all smoldering
rage and calculated intensity. In contrast, bohemian Omar pours
his apparently
limitless vitality into sex, booze, and ill-fated business deals
that decimate the
family's hard-won wealth.
The failure of head and heart to come together in both the
family and the na-
tion is nowhere clearer than in the novel's references to the
impending military
coup of 1964, in which the poet Laval—Omar's French
instructor at the federal
university—meets a violent death at the hands of government
soldiers. Yaqub's
ties to the military, his fondness for technology and cold-
blooded mathematical
precision, and his inability to forgive past wrongs push him to
embrace a brand
of progress that will snuff out all that was of value in an older
way of life. At the
same time, Omar's inability or outright refusal to embrace

ongoing changes in a
modernizing Amazon all but guarantees the scene of ruins with
which the book
begins and ends.
In his pivotal role as the family's lone survivor (the twins and
their sister have
no acknowledged heirs), the illegitimate narrator Nael emerges
as the living and
distinctly hybrid voice of today's Amazonia. Although neither
he nor the book's
readers learn for certain which twin is his father, the identity of
both his Indian
mother and his immigrant grandparents is sure. In this sense,
the book's answers
to the question of what constitutes a larger, specifically
Amazonian identity
within the present are very different from those implicit in a
number of earlier,
more nature-focused works about the region. Hatoum's vivid
descriptions of the
city of Manaus also distinguish the book from others set in rural
communities or
the forest, to which the narrator and his mother stage a brief and
not particularly
happy return on one occasion. A mix of cultures, the city exudes
a vital force that
makes it far more than a simple backdrop for the characters'
actions, converting it
instead into a kind of personage in its own right.
At the same time that the novel includes urban elements foreign
to the major-
ity of earlier writing about the Amazon, Hatoum does not
dispense entirely with
nature images. The description of the garden that begins the

book, for instance, is
a vegetal mirror of the heterogeneous society within which it is
located. However,
instead of the usual expanse of wild nature, this cultivated space
is home to a
host of trees that evoke the varied ancestry of Brazil and
Amazonia. While the an-
cient mango trees that appear in the first sentence are familiar
throughout much
ío Latin American Research Review
of Brazil, they are actually imports to the New World from
India and thus ulti-
mately no more native than the house's immigrant owners.
Likewise, at the same
time that the native rubber tree conjures up the uniquely
Amazonian history of
the Rubber Boom and bust, the palm trees over which it towers
evoke the waves
of Northeastern migrants who brought carnauba seedlings to the
Amazon. As a
result, the orchard that has borne fruit for over half a century is
a mélange that
provides protection from the sun, refuge from the busy street,
and the ingredients
for a hybrid diet. While the initial portrait of the abandoned
garden foreshadows
the book's familial tragedy, the larger theme of cultivated
spaces that revert to
jungle recurs in descriptions of the region (Leonardi 1999).
Hatoum's move to the Brazilian publishing capital of São Paulo
after many
decades in Manaus unquestionably augmented his already

considerable success.
His close ties to the cultural elite in the city where he had been
a university stu-
dent helped him to establish a strong literary presence once he
made the move.
Beyond these factors, the moment was almost certainly
propitious for the appear-
ance of an Amazonian-born author bent on asserting his own—
and the Ama-
zon's—larger Brazilian identity. Hatoum's repeated insistence
on not just the mul-
tistranded nature of Amazonia but also the more universal
aspects of the family
sagas that shape all of his novels make his populated world as
appealing in its
own way as the more widely known Rainforest or Jungle. At the
same time that
the writer's popularity has helped to disseminate his personal
vision, the increas-
ing circulation of larger ideas of a peopled Amazon within and
beyond Brazil
explains at least a portion of his books' success.
THE AMAZON AS A SOURCE OF MATERIAL AND
SYMBOLIC COMMODITIES
Like the image of the Amazon as both glorious Rainforest and
threatening
Jungle, the notion of the region as a locus of valuable
commodities is hardly new.
Indeed, the forest's splendor is often rooted in the promise of
riches whose precise
identity has changed considerably over time.

The old-as-Columbus notion of Latin American tropical forests
as a source of
valuable goods appears prominently in Carvajal. During much
of the Amazon's
early history, explorers were interested in a long list of regional
plant products,
including something as surprising to modern readers as
sarsaparilla. Different
periods in history saw treasure-hungry newcomers eager to lay
hands on hard-
woods, rubber, jute, and, increasingly, various plant extracts
with pharmaceutical
properties.
Environmentalist concerns for the future of the Amazon
routinely described
as a life-giving forest and home to a full fifth of the Earth's
freshwater triggered
an explosion of rain forest products aimed at a global market
from the 1980s on-
ward.17 Though this was not the first time that entrepreneurs
had set out to mar-
ket tropical forests as the source of healthful, vitality-inspiring
products (William
17. The 100 billion metric tons of carbon are said to be
equivalent to more than ten years' worth of
global fossil-fuel emissions.
VISIONS OF THE AMAZON IX
Beebe and Richard Evans Schultes did so in the 1920s and
1930s), the proliferation
of products aimed at a global market was definitely new.18 The
clear concern for

the well-being of the forest and its native peoples was now apt
to openly mingle
with a healthy dose of nostalgia and exoticism for a second
Eden often recast
as a more scientific-sounding "habitat." It is during this burst of
new-style eco-
commerce that the original two-word spelling of "rain forest"
(once primarily
a noun) shifts increasingly to the single word "rainforest"—a
primarily adjecti-
val form less cumbersome in references to a growing host of
cereals and sham-
poos. By 1990, seventeen US companies were churning out
twenty-one rain forest
products. Some seventy-five others were testing potential new
offerings, leading
sales of forest commodities to quadruple between 1990-1991
and 1991-1992. In
1992, Cultural Survival Enterprises sold an estimated 2.5
million dollars in forest
substances to twenty-six companies making nearly forty
different products (Clay
1992). A large number of these goods were either health and
beauty products or
snacks and juices that utilized nuts, herbs, and seeds harvested
by native groups,
whose direct association with these goods appealed to faraway
consumers.
Many of the possibilities and problems associated with these
products are en-
capsulated in the story of Ben and Jerry's Rainforest Crunch ice
cream. The flavor,

which first appeared in 1989, ceased production in the mid-
1990s amid numerous
problems with the suppliers' quality controls and growing
consumer doubts as
to whether the promised percentage of profits from sales was
really going toward
rain forest preservation (Santillano 2010; see also Welles 1998).
Traces of these
sorts of direct ties to the region and its inhabitants, on which
Rainforest Crunch
depended, nonetheless remain visible in a number of
contemporary products.
Some of these products rely on rain forest ingredients such as
the "natural
clay harvested from the banks of the Amazon River and
naturally baked by
the sun" in order to give buyers "a true Brazilian bronze
bombshell finish—all
while replenishing and rehydrating skin."19 A few also recall
earlier goods' activ-
ist dimension. For example, Sambazon—a brand name that
combines "samba"
with "Amazon"—stresses its commitment to "the sustainable
growth and har-
vesting of Amazon superfoods" as a way to also "create jobs
and help protect
the rainforest."20 The fact that the company's acai fruit
products are "sustainably
grown (certified USDA organic), wild-harvested, collected and
manufactured in
a Fair-Trade supply chain (certified by Eco-Cert) that supports
over 10,000 family

farmers and protects 1.6 million acres of Amazon Rainforest"
makes them not
just "supertasty" and "superhealthy" but also "supergood" in a
moral sense.
While companies such as Sambazon represent a new twist on the
socially
conscious past, a larger number of contemporary rain forest
enterprises em-
18. For an account of how the purveying of rain forest images
evolved into the hawking of actual rain
forest products see Enright (2012).
19. This product was advertised on the Sephora website as
"Tarte Amazonian Clay and annatto body
bronzer: shop body/Sephora/' www.sephora.com/amazonian-
clay-annatto-body-bronzer-P310017costa
(accessed February 25, 2013).
20. These products were advertised by Sambazon at
www.sambazon.com./meet-us/manifesto (ac-
cessed February 25,2013).
1 2 Latin American Research Review
phasize individual well-being over any sort of communal good,
such as envi-
ronmental preservation. Even Sambazon is quick to stress its
products' links to
Brazilians'—as opposed to native Amazonians'—"vibrant state
of soulful con-
tentment that comes from celebrating life to the utmost." The
company takes
care to underscore the country's "contagious zeal for an

existence that transcends
physical health and radiates from within," and its ads suggest
that drinking acai
juice is like imbibing an exotic energy that is not just
nutritionally beneficial but
actually capable of transforming its consumers from within.
Other rain forest enterprises have a far more symbolic
dimension. Today's In-
ternet is full of ads for rain forest learning modules and theme
park-like locations
aimed at schoolchildren and their parents. The Discover
Amazonia facility in
Motherwell, Scotland, for instance, bills itself as "Scotland's
largest indoor tropi-
cal rainforest" and "a unique place for fun and learning for all
ages."21 Described
on its website as "one of the Wonders of the World," the park is
essentially a col-
lection of exotic animals, including toucans, tarantulas, leaf-
cutter ants, and giant
millipedes. Although participants may well come away with a
new concern for
these creatures, the Amazon that they encounter is a largely
unbroken expanse of
highly iconic, decidedly flamboyant flora and fauna.
While some educational products retain a connection to actual
places and the
living beings that reside within them, others have very little to
do with geographic
entities. Good examples of the latter would be a number of the
baby toys, swings,

diaper bags, and plastic bathtubs produced by companies with
names such as
"King of the Jungle" and "Funfari." These goods—available
through Target, Wal-
mart, and various online vendors—feature "jungle" animals such
as lions and
monkeys. Other products, such as Rainforest Babies diapers in
shades of coconut,
butterfly (morpho blue), hemp, turtle, kiwi and ladybug, have
almost no connec-
tion to real-life forests.22
What is ultimately for sale in the case of the diapers has less to
do with the
forest proper than with a nostalgic conception of purity and
authenticity, coupled
with a wink to the abundant moisture that both babies and rain
forests are known
for producing. The deeper link between the diapers and the
forest lies in the fact
that the former are made of cloth as opposed to synthetic
fabrics, with hemp or
bamboo sometimes mixed in with organic cotton. The
supposedly "virgin" na-
ture of the jungle/forest is meant to evoke the innocence and
fragility of the in-
fants for whose bottoms the diapers are intended.
A yet more diffuse symbolic connection to rain forests can be
seen in Rain-
forest Apparel, a brand of outerwear sold by upscale retailers
such as Saks Fifth

Avenue, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus. Though founded in
1989 as an "eco-
conscious" venture, today's company has no direct link to
anything that grows
in a rain forest. Instead, it utilizes a number of synthetic (what
the company calls
"technical") fabrics including micro-suede tailored in largely
traditional styles
21. "Discover Amazonia: Scotland's Indoor Tropical Forest,"
http://www.discoveramazonia.co.uk
(accessed February 25, 2013).
22. Examples of these products are advertised by We Love
Diapers Inc. "Snap 'n' Wraps," https://
www.clothdiapersinc.com/proddetail.php?prod=SNW-001
(accessed March 6, 2013).
V ISIO N S OF TH E A M A Z O N 1 3
and earth tones. Ads in elite publications such as the New York
Times Magazine
feature models posed against a backdrop of wilderness-
suggestive settings ac-
companied by text stressing a "rugged elegance" that stands up
to the harshest
weather.
Descriptions of the apparel include other terms such as
"upscale/' "luxury/'
"sleek," and "sophisticated"—none of which are generally
associated with rain
forests (Sierra Trading Post 2013).23 Accompanying references
to "technical per-
formance" and "state-of-the-art technologies" suggest the rain

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