Article of the Day

Reading up on my boss Jeff Bezos today, I came across this:

"A difference between A&P’s position then and Amazon’s now involves politics. At the cusp of the Great Depression, corner grocers and independent food wholesalers still had considerable political power in both of the major parties. In President Franklin Roosevelt, they also had a powerful defender. Roosevelt understood how A&P’s efficiencies and low prices made food accessible to impoverished Americans. Yet he was also concerned that A&P’s ravenous growth might cause hundreds or thousands of small merchants to fail, exacerbating the nation’s jobs crisis. Roosevelt therefore oversaw a divided approach that used regulation to assure small grocers of some price stability while also enabling A&P to sell low-cost food, although not as freely as it would have without regulation."

And...

"From the Reagan presidency onward, the right succeeded remarkably. Large corporations perfected their lobbying power in Washington while small businesses like bookstores and corner grocers watched their political influence and their hold on the American imagination fade. The United States today presents a more bifurcated economic landscape of empowered, atomized, fickle, screen-tapping consumers and the globalized, often highly profitable corporations that aspire to serve them."

Read the rest of it here.


TS