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Articles and their sources for persuasive speech
1.The EMPIRE of Everything. (cover story)
Images
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
Images:
· 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:
AMAZON.COM Inc. DUNS Number: 884745530 Ticker: AMZN 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
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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:
AMAZON.COM Inc. DUNS Number: 884745530 Ticker: AMZN
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
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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)
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
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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 forest's links to
science and technology while justifying references to the clothing as simultane-
ously "contemporary" and "timeless." The apparel's "world class charm" cements
its appeal to the consumer for whom the rain forest has become less a place than
a state of mind and an immediate and secure relationship to nature that individu-
als with a credit card can access regardless of their physical location.
THE AM AZON AS A LOST WORLD
To the extent that Rainforest coats and jackets invoke a space apart wherein
select people remain free to commune with a primeval nature, ads for them bear
some resemblance to the Amazonian Lost World of which reports regularly sur-
face in newspaper, TV, and Internet accounts.24 This world is not a specific article
of commerce like a diaper or juice carton but rather a geographical place distin-
guished by its remoteness and long-isolated, even "Stone Age" natives. The ever-
shifting location of this Lost World, however, makes clear that it is much more
than a point upon a map.
The Lost World's fluidity suggests its partial roots in much earlier accounts of
the fabulously wealthy hidden kingdom of El Dorado, whose king, the Golden
One, is rich enough to coat his body each day in a glittering powder that his atten-
dants wash off every evening. While the original El Dorado is centered first and
foremost upon a shimmering commodity, it is also a dream of plenty that finds
its way into the present. Today's Lost World resembles this second El Dorado in
its promise of a potential harmony between human beings and nature. Although
this yearning is as old as the human journey out of Eden, it resurfaces with new
intensity in a globalizing present characterized by far-ranging environmental
and cultural loss. A figurative gold mine for journalists eager to drum up busi-
ness, these contemporary Lost Worlds are above all images of a rare and therefore
precious harmony that harried moderns yearn to think may still exist within the
present.
The aura of deep desire that surrounds updated versions of an elusive kingdom
is particularly obvious in an ongoing parade of stories concerning long-hidden
indigenous tribes reputed to have escaped the ravages of colonization. These ini-
tially confident reports almost always end in disappointment as the group's ex-
23. "Rainforest Clothing," Sierra Trading Post, http://www.sierratradingpost.com/rainforest~b
-18046/ (accessed September 21,2013).
24. For a discussion of how this ancient trope, which almost certainly represents a mingling of Euro-
pean and native sources, keeps reappearing in the present see Slater (2002, 29-53).
14 Latin American Research Review
istence turns out to have been previously recorded or its appearance is shown to
have been staged by outsiders eager to spur international interest in its plight.
Until recently, the idea that there might still be native groups within the Ama-
zon that had never had the slightest contact with modern society remained wide-
spread among a general reading public. One particularly noteworthy example
involved a so-called Lost Tribe said to have been sighted for the very first time
on the Brazilian border near Peru. Pictures of the group, "skin painted bright red,
heads partially shaved, arrows drawn back in the longbows and aimed square
at the aircraft buzzing overhead," quickly found their way into newspapers, the
Internet, and evening news broadcasts (Hanlon 2008).25 The subsequent revela-
tion that the photographer, an employee of the Brazilian government's National
Indian Foundation, FUNAI, had purposefully brushed over the agency's prior
knowledge of the group, infuriated journalists who felt duped into believing that
the group was previously unknown. While the employee in question seems not
to have lied so much as exploited conflicting understandings of the term "uncon-
tacted," an avalanche of negative reactions on reader blogs suggested not just an-
ger but profound disappointment with the "hoax" (Radford 2008; see also China
View 2008).
Repeated letdowns have not kept new reports from surfacing (Holmes 2013). A
number of these more recent articles, however, reveal a growing if often grudging
acceptance of most contemporary native people's sporadic, often indirect contacts
with the outside world.
Descriptions of two separate, once-secluded Amazonian tribes that found their
way onto the Internet in August 2013 offer an excellent example of this movement
toward a less sharply delineated Lost World. The first article, "Peru: Alarm over
Appearance of Isolated Mashco-Piro Tribe," bears the subtitle "Authorities Per-
plexed As More Than 100 Members of Clan That Has Almost No Contact with
Outsiders Threaten to Cross River" (my italics) (Guardian 2013).26 The report, which
resembles many others in its reliance on the same Associated Press sources, de-
scribes how a small group of Peruvian natives on a river near the Brazilian border
who have "long lived in voluntary isolation" have just sought contact with outsid-
ers for the second time since 2011.
The report is noteworthy for its insistence on the pressing problems in the
Mashco-Piro's traditional lands in the Eastern Andes, which appear to have
pushed the group beyond its traditional boundaries. These problems include
long-standing interference by miners, loggers, and oil and gas prospectors, and
a growing number of drug smugglers. Although drug trafficking is hardly new
within the region, the growing emphasis on traffickers in this and similar articles
provides an important link between the residents of the remote rain forest and the
inhabitants of the Brazilian cities often described as "urban jungles."
Another, yet more noteworthy feature is the sense of alarm that the group's
appearance triggers in its neighbors. The residents of nearby Monte Salvado are
said to have "feared for their lives" in the face of the Mashco-Piro's supposed pro-
25. For a full account of this news event and how it was reported see Slater (2010).
26. See also Radford (2008) and China View (2008).
VISIONS OF THE AMAZON 1 5
clivity toward kidnapping other tribes' women and children and turning upon
former friends. Although the article mentions the Peruvian government's concern
for the safety of a group whose "immune systems are highly vulnerable to germs
other humans carry/' it devotes far more attention to the "threatening behavior"
that leads local officials to push the natives back into their own lands when they
attempt to cross the Pedras River. This emphasis suggests that while the Lost
World elicits sympathy so long as its representatives remain within its borders, its
intrusion on the modern world is thoroughly unwelcome.
This interpretation is borne out by my second example—an approximately
ninety-second video of the Kawahiva people walking through their forest home
in "the Brazilian Amazon." Released by FUNAI two days after the appearance of
the Mashco-Piro article, the video shows a small group of men with bows and ar-
rows and two women, one of whom transports a child on her back.
The so-called Internet debut of the Kawahiva presents a number of instructive
contrasts to news reports on the Mashco-Piro.27 First, although reporters describe
both groups as "isolated," the Kawahiva are considerably more "reclusive." They
are unexpectedly "caught" or "captured" on film by a "crew" that turns out to
be a lone FUNAI employee who has set out to "monitor and protect" the tribe—
supposedly without coming into direct contact with them.28 The natives them-
selves are described as "trekking" through the "heart of the forest" in the state of
Mato Grosso (technically not part of the Amazon), where their 411,848-square-acre
reservation lies (Fox News Latino 2013). Apparently "nomadic," they are heard
conversing in their native language by unidentified outsiders about where they
will spend the night. While the men carry weapons, they are said to "don" rather
than "wield" these in any kind of menacing manner. When one of the women
notices the crew she cries out in fear, causing the whole group to scurry off into
the woods. Although the Kawahiva face many of the same threats from loggers
and farmers as do the Mashco-Piro, the thick vegetation that appears on the video
is clearly rich in the sort of animal and plant life that signals the Rainforest. As
a result, in contrast to the Mashco-Piro, whose uninvited foray into civilization
causes them to be seen as threatening intruders, the Kawahiva are portrayed as
suitably retiring residents of a world apart.
The footage's grainy, unprofessional quality further enhances the aura of pri-
mordial authenticity created by the naked natives. If viewers cannot have the
thrill of witnessing a totally uncontacted people, they can at least take satisfaction
in their encounter with a real live "Amazonian tribe in Brazil caught on camera
for the first time" (Daily Mail 2013). The tribe's "nomadic" status and its lack of
interest in contact with the outside world further suggest the distance between
its members and fascinated viewers. These features also reconfirm the relative
intactness of their rain forest realm. For at least a moment, this green world ap-
pears capable of coexisting with a technology that seems not to create ill effects
for anyone.
This "rare footage" nonetheless leaves the observer with several nagging ques-
27. The video and other images are available from O Globo (2013).
28. One of the many articles that make reference to a "jungle" is the Daily Mail (2013).
i6 Latin American Research Review
tions. Why, for instance, if the tape was made in 2011, did FUNAI wait two years
to release it? Is the appearance of the video close on the heels of the Mashco-Piro
story mere coincidence or should its release be seen as an attempt to temper the
first report's negative vision of native peoples? What seems beyond doubt here is
the ongoing evolution of representations of the Lost World in which "isolation" has
become an ever more relative concept. While elements of today's reports continue
to recall older representations of a realm of nature wholly apart from civilization,
there are also unmistakable traces of the increasingly immediate effects of eco-
nomic developments coupled with an ever more far-reaching media presence.
THE AMAZON AS A REALM OF NATURE AND A PEOPLED UNIVERSE
The notion of the Amazon as an El Dorado and/or Lost World is difficult if not
impossible to separate entirely from larger conceptions of the region as a peopled
universe. While the idea of the Amazon as a home to humans is not new, we have
seen how the identity of these residents has varied over time. Carvajal's Ama-
zons, for instance, stand apart from the supposedly lazy natives described by
nineteenth-century scientific travelers. These flawed natives, in turn, provide a
contrast to the late twentieth-century indigenous groups cast in the role of rain
forest protectors. Today, not only are the region's residents seen as more numerous
and varied, but there has been an important reevaluation of the region's past.
Recent shifts in terms of overriding visions have much to do with contempo-
rary scientific research that has sharply challenged the idea of the Amazon as a
counterfeit paradise. Some of the key studies triggering the movement away from
older notions of the region as a place of fragile soils unable to sustain complex
civilizations show how forests devastated by logging and clear-cutting may re-
spond with surprisingly robust secondary growth. Discoveries of large amounts
of extremely fertile anthropogenic or human-modified soil known as terra preta or
"black earth" have similarly fueled contemporary ideas of an Amazon far more
advanced and heavily populated than scientists had assumed only a decade ear-
lier. So have sightings via Google Earth of geometrically patterned earthworks
known as "geoglyphs" in the transitional area between the Andes and the Ama-
zonian lowlands.
At the same time that these findings have prompted a barrage of further stud-
ies by archaeologists, geologists, paleontologists, and soil scientists, they have
found their way into reports in mainstream media. One excellent example of these
articles written for a more general public is a Neiv York Times report titled "New
Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rain Forests" in 2009 (Rosenthal 2009). The author
notes that "about 38 million acres of original rain forest are being cut down every
year, but in 2005, according to the most recent 'State of the World's Forests Report'
by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, there were an esti-
mated 2.1 billion acres of potential replacement forest growing in the tropics—an
area almost as large as the United States." She then goes on to note that the "new"
forest included "secondary forest on former farmland and so-called degraded
forest—land that has been partly logged or destroyed by natural disasters like
fires and then left to nature" (Rosenthal 2009).
VISIONS OF THE AMAZON 1 7
The discovery of large quantities of terra preta throughout much of the western
Amazon has prompted an even larger number of articles in publications oriented
toward lay readers. These articles generally begin by defining terra preta—a mix
of humus, pieces of unfired clay pottery, charcoal-like carbon known as bio-
char, and organic materials including fish and animal bones along with human
manure—as the most concentrated form of several sorts of soil known as Ama-
zonian dark earth or terra preta do índio. Found throughout much of the Amazon,
including contemporary cities, this exceptionally fertile mixture signals an inten-
sive human presence over time. It also leaves no doubt about the sizable degree to
which humans have transformed a supposedly virgin land.29
While the majority of these journalistic pieces repeat and sometimes enlarge
upon the same facts, their authors adopt a range of perspectives. Some writers use
no-nonsense titles such as "Scientists Focus on Making Better Soil to Help with
Food Concerns" as a lead-in to strictly factual descriptions of the many benefits
of terra preta (Bennett 2008). They are likely to recount how this rich organic
mix enhances the retention of water and nutrients while decreasing the need for
fertilizer and encouraging microbial growth. A number of authors also trace the
dynamics of the soil's ability to bolster carbon sequestration in a neutral manner
(Pessoa Júnior 2012).
Other articles, in contrast, adopt a decidedly more euphoric tone. "Terra Preta:
Magic Soil of the Lost Amazon," for example, describes a kind of agricultural al-
chemy in which previously unproductive soils become a "microbial reef" that can
increase crop yields by as much as a whopping 800 percent (Balliet 2007). These
same newly fertile soils are often able to sequester carbon at such a high rate
that "in the near future, farming with this technique could be eligible for lucra-
tive carbon credits." "Perhaps most amazing," the author exclaims, "the incred-
ible properties of terra preta are not denied by myopic academics. In fact, almost
everything we know about terra preta is coming from university populations!"
Expanses of this still-fertile soil sometimes trigger direct comparisons to a
modern El Dorado. In articles such as "Terra preta: Unearthing an Agricultural
Goldmine," for instance, the author describes the soil as providing a potential an-
swer to all sorts of problems, even serving as "a major tool against global warm-
ing" (Bennett 2005). Another report titled "Amazonian Terra Preta Can Transform
Poor Soil into Fertile" begins with the declaration that "the search for El Dorado
in the Amazonian rainforest might not have yielded pots of gold, but it has led
to the unearthing of a different type of gold mine; some of the globe's richest soil
that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground" (Science Daily 2006).
While part of terra preta's appeal to contemporary newspaper reporters lies
in its myriad of potential uses, part also owes to its antiquity. At the same time
that the soil remains a scientific puzzle on which industries as well as academic
researchers are now working, it also takes the form of a gift from the past. The
fact that these soils may remain fertile for many centuries (some samples date
back as much as two thousand years) makes them bridges to a Lost World that has
29. Examples of scholarly articles include Pessoa Júnior et al. (2012) and Lehmann et al. (2003). For
more journalistic approach see Science Daily (2006).
i8 Latin American Research Review
left few other clues. This almost mystic link to civilizations that have vanished
compounds terra preta's indisputable practical benefits to contemporary humans
(Bennett 2005). The articles speak not just to distinctly material concerns such as
carbon overload and global warming but also to the sorts of more symbolic yearn-
ings for continuity and redemption discussed in the preceding pages.
The third Amazon-related scientific discovery that has generated widespread
coverage in the mass media concerns newly discovered geoglyphs in the form
of circles, squares, and other geometric shapes, some of which date back at least
two thousand years and which scientists increasingly regard as ritual sites where
different peoples may have come together at particular ceremonial moments.
Massive human-made earthworks lie primarily in the transitional area between
the Andes and the Amazon, including parts of Bolivia, Peru, and the Brazilian
states of Acre, Mato Grosso, Amazonas, and Rondônia. They are most common
on interfluvial uplands, where researchers have used tools from archaeology, ar-
chaeobotany, paleoecology, soil science, and aerial imagery to locate at least three
hundred constructions-a number that continues to grow as research proceeds.30
Although scholars remain unsure of the earthworks' original purpose, their size
(often as big as two or three football fields) and varying distance from population
centers have fostered conjectures regarding their ceremonial use—as opposed to
primarily residential or defensive uses. The fact that composite and rectangular
structures increasingly replace circular earthworks as one proceeds northward
raises additional questions about the builders' identity as well as the cultural
significance of their creations. So does the presence of embanked roads in sites
boasting multiple geoglyphs.31
These and other unanswered questions have prompted descriptions of the geo-
glyphs as part of a Lost World. "Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest
to Amazon's Lost World," proclaims one article (Romero 2012). The vast amount
of labor necessary to construct ditches averaging thirty-five feet across and three
to ten feet deep has also led some reporters to treat the enigmatic earthworks as
one part of "a real-life El Dorado in Amazonia" (Pyne 2010). As reconfirmations
of the Amazon's identity as "an unknown quantity," the geoglyphs reinvest the
region with an aura of mystery even as intense development makes life in these
still relatively remote areas increasingly similar to that in the rest of Brazil.
Ironically, the more deforestation continues to reveal a world previously con-
cealed by vegetation, the more enigmatic the region as a whole appears. More-
over, at the same time that the geoglyphs create a wealth of new questions, they,
like the reports on secondary forest regeneration and the ongoing discoveries of
terra preta, leave little doubt that large and complex societies once existed within
portions of the pre-Columbian Amazon. A number of journalists go further in
dismissing many earlier visions of a virgin rain forest as severely flawed. "The
bottom line for mainstream archaeological interpretation of the history of the
Amazon was based on the assumption that the area was a 'counterfeit paradise'
30. The environmental ramifications of these earthworks, often constructed in what was then savan-
nah, is also receiving intense scientific scrutiny. See Carson et al. (2014).
31. For scientific research on the geoglyphs see Pãrsinnen et al. (2003,97-113).
VISIONS OF THE AMAZON 1 9
with all of its nutrients locked into its canopy, leaving soils poor, acidic and toxic,"
one author explains (Balliet 2007). "Caught in a 'believing is seeing' syndrome,"
he continues, "archaeologists assumed that because typical Amazonian soils were
thin and infertile, large populations could never have existed there. Accepting this
assumption, they saw no point in looking for evidence of settlement" (Balliet 2007; my
italics).32
The ramifications of these new scientific discoveries for Amazonian history
are spelled out in a number of the geoglyph reports. "Instead of being pristine
forests, barely inhabited by people, parts of the Amazon may have been home for
centuries to large populations numbering well into the thousands," the New York
Times "Lost World" article suggests (Romero 2012). The piece then goes on to ex-
plain that long periods of human habitation may have resulted in a considerably
smaller preconquest forest than that which exists today. "Such revelations," the
article quotes one reluctant scientist as saying, "do not fit comfortably into today's
politically charged debate over razing parts of the forests, with some environmen-
talists opposed to allowing any large-scale agriculture, like cattle ranching and
soybean cultivation, to advance further into Amazonia" (Romero 2012).
The authors of a number of these reports on both terra preta and the geo-
glyphs do their best to explain why such central facets of the Amazonian land-
scape should only now be attracting large amounts of scientific attention. Several
point out that terra preta was studied as early as the 1870s by Cornell University
professor Charles Hartt. Others cite Brazilian researchers Ondemar Dias and Al-
ceu Ranzi's initial sightings of the geoglyphs a full century later, noting that the
still-thick forest cover made the extent and true significance of these earthworks
difficult to grasp in an era before satellite imaging. Only with the massive clear-
cutting that has taken place in southwest Amazonia and the advent of new tech-
nologies have a portion of these ancient constructions come into fuller view.
VISIONS OF THE AMAZON TODAY
These factors (clear-cutting, Google Earth) explain to some degree why scien-
tists did not previously take notice of what geoglyph researchers such as Denise
Schaan, an archaeologist at the Federal University of Pará, may now describe as
"one of the most important discoveries of our time" (Romero 2012). However, this
striking oversight clearly owes at least as much to the power of representations
as it does to questions of technology. The relatively scant attention paid to insis-
tences by a few scholars on the presence of sizable human settlements that regu-
larly modified the forest (Sauer 1957; Denevan 1992) suggests that something more
than simply heavy vegetation sustained the then-prevalent view of the rain forest
as a fragile realm of nature.
This article has stressed the ongoing strength of time-honored images of the
Amazon together with the heterogeneous and uneven quality of the profound
changes in representation that are presently occurring. My point is not that
32. Striking images of some of these earthworks by Ricardo Azoury appear at www.ricardoazoury
.com/videos/html (accessed March 2, 2015).
20 Latin American Research Review
today's politicians sit around reading novels about an urban Amazonia or that
scientific researchers endorse the views of journalists who conjure up no-longer-
quite-so-lost worlds for readers hooked on Sambazon juice. Instead I have argued
that change in representations consists of a series of convergences that are rarely
smooth. While there is no doubt that images of the Amazon are shifting, the tran-
sition from the Rainforest to other visions of the region—including other rain
forests—is decidedly partial and complex. Moreover, different groups and indi-
viduals clearly employ visions of a peopled universe for their own strategic ends.
The ongoing use of such representations is not a bad thing; we humans routinely
think in images that can be harnessed for beneficial as well as detrimental ends.
The Amazon's long-standing, often deeply emotional associations with nature,
however, make it particularly important for us to remain conscious of these rep-
resentations' tenacious presence in our own and others' heads.
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