Amazon has revolutionized the e-commerce industry and has caused
many negative and positive impacts for customers. Amazon is rising
the ranks for highly profitable businesses and many companies are
trying to recreate the success. Consumers have fallen in love with
Amazon's vast catalog of items you can buy from, the fact that you
can get next-day shipping with Amazon Prime, and package tracking
options during transit. We’ve seen retail companies like Walmart and
Target try to compete with Amazon by introducing similar features.
For example, introducing ship-to-store options, online grocery
pickup, current-day delivery services, and more to try and compete
with Amazon. These are positive things for consumers because
competition is what makes businesses strive to be better for
consumers. All of these options help the consumers get the items
they want faster and with little effort. However, this has to lead to
some negative impacts for consumers as well. For example,
companies give little attention to problems with non-online services,
the online services provided can be hard to understand for older
consumers, and bugs with the online services can cause many
problems and mistakes.
In my opinion, the majority of the ethical concerns regarding current
business practices are due to different demands from consumers.
Poor employee treatment can be reduced down to the amount of
stress businesses put on their employees to meet the increasing
demands of consumers and short timelines. Furthermore, increasing
the number of deliveries and vehicles used by the companies will
have a negative impact on the environment. Also, all of the
cardboard and plastic used to ship the products affect the
environment negatively as well. Finally, a decrease in local
storefronts is caused by consumers not wanting to leave their house
to get the items they want. It's smarter and cheaper for most
companies to focus more on shipping to earn more revenue. If
consumer needs weren’t so focused on fast and online buying
methods a lot of these ethical concerns at the least would be heavily
reduced and companies need to find a healthy balance.
