Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Does Amazon want to play us for fools?

Now, we need to talk about that Amazon announcement yesterday.

These guys have taken us for fools in this country. They've looked at us in New Zealand and they've gone, let's take these guys for fools.

That $7.5 billion wasn't new, it was already announced by Jacinda 4 years ago. It's not even actually a convincing number, because it looks like what they've done here is included their power bills.

Now power bills are not an investment, they're an operating cost. The 1000 jobs that Amazon now tells us that they're supporting also looks questionable.

It looks like they've included people who already work in the electricity sector - and some say the real number is more likely a few dozen jobs.

Amazon's not building anything. All the data centres they tell us are now live, have actually been built by other companies, which means that you could argue that they haven't actually added anything material to the New Zealand economy.

Because if they didn't use those existing data centres, someone else would just be using those existing data centres. 

In fact, you could argue that Amazon running those data centres is actually not the best outcome for New Zealand, because Amazon does not pay tax on all of their revenue here, which means if another local company used those data centres and paid full tax like they do, we'd all be better off.

We'd be better off than Amazon using the centres and then sending hundreds of millions of dollars overseas like Google and Facebook do.

Now, being critical of that announcement by Amazon yesterday is not the same as being ungrateful for the good that they're doing.

I think you should interrogate an announcement just a little bit more than simply taking it at face value, because that is what Amazon wants you to do.

They want to play us for fools. They want to make us believe that they're doing good when what they're actually doing is just making money off us.

And that's fair. I don't mind them making money off us, they're a business, we're customers, but let's see it for what it is.

Let's not be grateful for them doing business.

I still like Amazon's product, but to be honest with you, I like it a little bit less than I did yesterday when they assumed that this country was full of stupid people who would just simply believe anything.

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