The Evolution of Retail Arbitrage

Paris Marx is joined by Moira Weigel to discuss the third-party sellers who supply many of the goods sold through Amazon, how the company’s policy decisions reshape small businesses to act like mini-Amazons, and what that means for regulatory responses.

Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School, and a founding editor of Logic Magazine. Her most recent book is Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk about What They Do--And How They Do It, co-edited with Ben Tarnoff. Follow Moira on Twitter at @moiragweigel.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Moira recently wrote a report for Data & Society looking into Amazon’s “trickle-down monopoly,” and previously worked with Ava Kofman and Francis Tseng on research into white nationalist publishing on Amazon.
• Aiha Nguyen and Eve Zelickson wrote a report on how Ring doorbells are used to surveil delivery workers.
• Logic Magazine published an interview with an anonymous AWS engineer.
• In March 2020, an Amazon seller bought 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer and tried to price gouge.
• Marketplace Pulse found that Amazon fees for sellers now account for 51.8% of an average sale, rising from 35.2% in 2016.
• Amazon is now the third-largest digital advertising company after Google and Facebook.
• In January, John Herman wrote about the state of Amazon that touched on some of the Chinese brands.
• Amazon has been scaling back its private label business, in part due to regulatory fears.
• Books mentioned: Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization by Sarrah Kassem, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang, and The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy by Lin Zhang.

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