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Wall Street Journal Essay Yes, Amazon's Behind It

953 Words4 Pages

Businesses are continuously trying to come up with ways to make purchasing products easier and more appealing to consumers. With Millennials beginning to outnumber the amount of baby boomers, e-business is increasing rapidly. “Of the 310 million people making up the American population, 239 million use the Internet” (Business, 476). As time passes, less consumers are purchasing products directly from the store and are switching to online shopping, which is beginning to cause problems for suppliers, especially with the use of voice-search assistants such as Alexa. Wall Street Journal article, “The Next Big Threat to Consumer Brands (Yes, Amazon’s Behind It)” written by, Saabira Chaudhuri and Sharon Terlep, talks about the disadvantages suppliers …show more content…

I received the Amazon Alexa Dot for Christmas and have yet to use it for it’s intended purpose. Not only do I fear accidentally purchasing something I didn’t want, but I find it odd that a tiny piece of technology can figure out what I want based on my past internet searches. I don’t know if I agree with companies being able to use cookies either. “Essentially, a user may visit a Web site and unknowingly receive a small piece of software code called a cookie. This cookie can track where the user goes on the Internet and measure how long the user stays at any particular Web site” (Business, 476). The use of cookies feels like a complete invasion of privacy, and it freaks me out to see ads for things I looked at seconds ago on social media. I also find that Alexa has practically cheated the competition by not giving consumers multiple choices on what they want to purchase. In fact, over half of the time consumers use Alexa, it recommends an Amazon product. With the increase of consumers using voice-assistants like Alexa, I fear that Perfect (or pure) competition will be at stake for many kinds of products. “Perfect (or pure) competition is the market situation in which there are many buyers and sellers of a product, and no single buyer or seller is powerful enough to affect the price of that product” (Business, 22). I am too worrisome to be an advocate for voice-assistants. I would much rather make my own choices from a variety of products within a store, than have a device decide for

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