Here is a business idea. Raise some very large amount of capital and use it to launch a website — call it, say, cheaperthanAmazon.is — whose entire business consists of offering to customers products and services sold at Amazon.com for a price that is consistently exactly 5 percent less than you'd pay for the same product or service at Amazon.
Technology makes it not that hard to scrape prices from the Amazon website and dynamically adjust the prices on the same products at cheaperthanAmazon.is
In 2019, Amazon sold about $280.5 billion worth of products and services and reported net income of about $11.6 billion, which is a profit margin of about 4.1%. If you charged 5% less to customers than Amazon does, you'd still be nearly breaking even. You could cover the losses with whatever startup capital you raised for as long as it takes for either Walmart, Target, or Amazon itself to decide they'd like to purchase your business.
Maybe no one else sees this business opportunity, but Jeff Bezos himself is worried about it. That's at least how I interpreted the op-ed in the New York Times by Jay Carney, the "senior vice president for global corporate affairs" at Amazon. Carney calls for raising "the federal minimum wage to $15 from its current $7.25." Why $15? That's what Amazon has raised its starting wage to. Because some significant chunk of Amazon's costs are wages, requiring competitors to pay $15 rather than $7.25 makes it harder for someone to start cheaperthanAmazon.is to compete with Amazon on price.
Bezos knows that saving 5% can make a big difference to a customer, because Bezos built Amazon in part by saving customers the 5% or so they would have paid in sales and use tax if they bought an item at a local brick-and-mortar retailer rather than at Amazon, which for many years did not collect those taxes.
Let it be disclosed that I'm a generally happy Amazon customer, an author whose books are sold at Amazon, and even that this site is an Amazon affiliate that makes money when readers click on links to Amazon and purchase things. But I'd probably also be a happy customer of cheaperthanAmazon.is if the proprietor of such a site could reliably find a way to offer me Amazon-quality products and services at 5% less than Amazon's cost. If some of that cost savings comes from lower wages, I can live with it. I certainly don't want to outlaw it. Outlawing it doesn't help the potential employees of cheaperthanAmazon.is, and it doesn't help the potential customers of cheaperthanAmazon.is. It prevents cheaperthanAmazon.is from starting up and eventually becoming successful enough that its management can voluntarily choose to pay workers $15 an hour rather than be forced to do so by the government.
I've cheered Amazon on in the past when it has tried to ease federal regulations, as on testing of drones for package deliveries. Plenty of big companies have public policy agendas, and plenty of politicians in both parties think Amazon is too big and powerful already as it is. This is one of those many cases where stricter federal rules — in this case, more than doubling the federal minimum wage — would help the big guy.
