Amazon.com controversies

Amazon.com has drawn criticism from multiple sources, where the ethics of certain business practices and policies have been drawn into question. Amazon has faced numerous allegations of anti-competitive or monopolistic behavior, as well as criticisms of their treatment of workers and consumers. Concerns have frequently been raised regarding the availability or unavailability of products and services on Amazon platforms, as Amazon is considered a monopoly due to its size.

Anti-competitive practices

One-click patent

The company has been controversial for its alleged use of patents as a competitive hindrance. The " 1-Click patent" is perhaps the best-known example of this. Amazon's use of the 1-click patent against competitor Barnes & Noble's website led the Free Software Foundation to announce a boycott of Amazon in December 1999. The boycott was discontinued in September 2002. On February 22, 2000, the company was granted a patent covering an Internet-based customer referral system, or what is commonly called an "affiliate program". Industry leaders Tim O'Reilly and Charlie Jackson spoke out against the patent, and O'Reilly published an open letter to Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, protesting the 1-click patent and the affiliate program patent, and petitioning him to "avoid any attempts to limit the further development of Internet commerce". O'Reilly collected 10,000 signatures with this petition. Bezos responded with his own open letter. The protest ended with O'Reilly and Bezos visiting Washington, D.C., to lobby for patent reform. On February 25, 2003, the company was granted a patent titled "Method and system for conducting a discussion relating to an item on Internet discussion boards". On May 12, 2006, the USPTO ordered a re-examination of the "1-Click" patent, based on a request filed by actor Peter Calveley, who cited the prior art of an earlier e-commerce patent and the Digicash electronic cash system.

Canadian site

Amazon has a Canadian site in both English and French, but until a ruling in March 2010, was prevented from operating any headquarters, servers, fulfillment centers or call centers in Canada by that country's legal restrictions on foreign-owned booksellers. Instead, Amazon's Canadian site originates in the United States, and Amazon has an agreement with Canada Post to handle distribution within Canada and for the use of the Crown corporation's Mississauga, Ontario shipping facility. The launch of Amazon.ca generated controversy in Canada. In 2002, the Canadian Booksellers Association and Indigo Books and Music sought a court ruling that Amazon's partnership with Canada Post represented an attempt to circumvent Canadian law, but the litigation was dropped in 2004.

In January 2017, doormat products with the Indian flag on them went on sale on the Amazon Canada website. The use of the Indian flag in this way is considered offensive to the Indian community and in violation of the Flag code of India. The Minister of External Affairs of India, Sushma Swaraj, threatened a visa embargo for Amazon officials if Amazon did not tender an unconditional apology and withdraw all such products.

In January 2017, Amazon.ca was required by the Competition Bureau to pay a $1M penalty, plus $100,000 in costs, overpricing practices for failing to provide "truth in advertising" according to Josephine Palumbo, the deputy commissioner for deceptive marketing practices. This fine was levied because some products on Amazon.ca were shown with an artificially high "list price", making the lower selling price appear to be very attractive, producing an unfair competitive edge over other retailers. This is a frequent practice among some retailers and the fine was intended to "send a clear message o the industrythat unsubstantiated savings claims will not be tolerated". The Bureau also indicated that the company has made changes to ensure that regular prices are more accurately listed.

BookSurge

In March 2008, sales representatives of Amazon's BookSurge division started contacting publishers of print on demand (POD) titles to inform them that for Amazon to continue selling their POD books, they were required to sign agreements with Amazon's own BookSurge POD company. Publishers were told that eventually, the only POD titles that Amazon would be selling would be those printed by their own company, BookSurge. Some publishers felt that this ultimatum amounted to monopoly abuse, and questioned the ethics of the move and its legality under anti-trust law.

Direct selling

In 2008, Amazon UK came under criticism for attempting to prevent publishers from direct selling at discount from their own websites. Amazon's argument was that they should be able to pay the publishers based on the lower prices offered on their websites, rather than on the full recommended retail price (RRP).

Also in 2008, Amazon UK drew criticism in the British publishing community following their withdrawal from sale of key titles published by Hachette Livre UK. The withdrawal was possibly intended to put pressure on Hachette to provide levels of discount described by the trade as unreasonable. Curtis Brown's managing director Jonathan Lloyd opined that "publishers, authors, and agents are 100% behind achette Someone has to draw a line in the sand. Publishers have given 1% a year away to retailers, so where does it stop? Using authors as a financial football is disgraceful."

In August 2013, Amazon agreed to end its price parity policy for marketplace sellers in the European Union, in response to investigations by the UK Office of Fair Trade and Germany's Federal Cartel Office. It is not yet clear if this ruling applies to direct selling by publishers.

Amazon argued that the publishers offering lower prices for items on their own websites, Amazon is saying they should be able to give those publishers the money that they wish to have when selling items for a lower price on their own websites.

However, not many publishers are agreeing with this and they are still making discounts on their own websites because of what Amazon is trying to argue and trying to get the publishers what they would want when they would need it.

Price control

Following the announcement of the Apple iPad on January 27, 2010, Macmillan Publishers entered into a pricing dispute with Amazon regarding electronic publications. Macmillan asked Amazon to accept a new pricing scheme it had worked out with Apple, raising the price of e-books from $9.99 to $15. Amazon responded by pulling all Macmillan books, both electronic and physical, from their website (although affiliates selling the books were still listed). On January 31, 2010, Amazon "capitulated" to Macmillan's pricing request.

In 2014, Amazon and Hachette became involved in a dispute over agency pricing. Agency pricing is when the agent (such as Hachette) determines the price of a book; normally, however, Amazon dictates the discount level of a book. High-profile authors became involved; hundreds of writers, including Stephen King and John Grisham, signed a petition saying "We encourage Amazon in the strongest possible terms to stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business. None of us, neither readers nor authors, benefit when books are taken hostage." Author Ursula K. Le Guin commented on Amazon's practice of making Hachette books harder to buy on its site, stating "We're talking about censorship: deliberately making a book hard or impossible to get, 'disappearing' an author." Although her statement was met with some outrage and disbelief, Amazon's actions such as eliminating discounts, delaying the delivery time, and refusing pre-publication orders did make physical Hachette books harder to get. Plummeting sales of Hachette books on Amazon indicated that its policies likely succeeded in deterring customers.

On August 11, 2014, Amazon removed the option to preorder '' Captain America: The Winter Soldier'' in an effort to gain control over the online pricing of Disney films. Amazon has previously used similar tactics with Warner Bros. and Hachette Book Group. The conflict was resolved in late 2014 with neither having to concede anything. Then in February 2017, Amazon again began to block preorders of Disney films, just before '' Moana'' and ''Rogue One'' were due to be released to the home market.

The law firm Hagens Berman filed a lawsuit in district court in New York in January 2021, alleging that Amazon colluded with leading publishers to keep e-book prices artificially high. The state of Connecticut also announced it was investigating Amazon for potential anti-competitive behaviour in its sale of e-books.

Removal of competitors' products

On October 1, 2015, Amazon announced that Apple TV and Google Chromecast products were banned from sale on Amazon by all merchants, with no new listings allowed effective immediately, and all existing listings removed effective October 29, 2015. Amazon argued that this was to prevent "customer confusion", as these devices do not support the Amazon Prime Video ecosystem. This move was criticized, as commentators believed that it was meant primarily to suppress the sale of products deemed as competition to Amazon Fire TV products, given that Amazon itself had deliberately refused to offer software for its own streaming services on these devices, and the action contradicted the implication that Amazon was a general online retailer.

In May 2017, it was reported that Apple and Amazon were nearing an agreement to offer Prime Video on Apple TV, and allow the product to return to the retailer. Prime Video launched on Apple TV December 6, 2017, with Amazon beginning to sell the Apple TV product again shortly thereafter.

Amazon is known to remove products for trivial policy violations by third-party sellers that compete with Amazon's home-grown brands. To compete for product placement where Amazon's own brands are featured prominently, third-party sellers often need to resort to advertisement spends and list themselves with Amazon's expensive ''Prime'' program for which they are charged a premium on order fulfillment and returns, resulting in increased costs and lower profit margins.

Amazon has since suppressed other Google products, including Google Home (which competes with Amazon Echo), Pixel phones, and recent products of Google subsidiary Nest Labs (despite the Nest Learning Thermostat having integration support for Amazon's voice assistant platform Alexa). In retaliation, Google announced on December 6, 2017, that it would block YouTube from the Amazon Echo Show and Amazon Fire TV products. In December 2017, Amazon stated that it intended to start offering Chromecast again (which it would do a year later). Meanwhile, Nest stated that it would no longer offer any of its future stock to Amazon until it commits to offering its entire product line.

In April 2019, Amazon announced that it would add Chromecast support to the Prime Video mobile app and release its Android TV app more widely, while Google announced that it would, in return, restore access to YouTube on Fire TV (but not Echo Show). Prime Video for Chromecast and YouTube for Fire TV were both released July 9, 2019.

In December 2019, following the acquisition of Honey—a browser extension that automatically applies online coupons on online stores—by PayPal, the Amazon website began to display warnings advising users to uninstall the software, claiming it was a security risk.

Apple partnership

In November 2018, Amazon reached an agreement with Apple Inc. to sell selected products through the service, via the company, selected Apple Authorized Resellers, and vendors who meet specific criteria. As a result of this partnership, only Apple Authorized Resellers and vendors who purchase $2.5 million in refurbished stock from Apple every 90 days (via the Amazon Renewed program) may sell Apple products on the service. The partnership has faced criticism from independent resellers, who believe that this deal has restricted their ability to sell refurbished Apple products on Amazon at a low cost. In August 2019, ''The Verge'' reported that Amazon was being investigated by the FTC over the deal.

Marketplace participant and owner

Amazon has raised concerns by being both the owner of a dominant marketplace and a retail seller in that marketplace. Amazon uses the data it gets from the entire marketplace (data not available to other retailers in the marketplace) to determine what products would be advantageous to produce in-house, at what price point. The company markets products under AmazonBasics, Lark & Ro, and various other private-label brands. U.S. presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren has proposed, forcing Amazon to sell AmazonBasics and Whole Foods Market, where Amazon competes against other marketplace participants as a brick-and-mortar retailer.

Tim O'Reilly, comparing Ingram's business with Amazon's, noted that Amazon exclusive focus on just the customer debilitates the rest of the retail ecosystem, including sellers, manufacturers, and even its own employees, while Ingram seeks to innovate and build on behalf of all the stakeholders in the marketplace it operates in. O'Reilly adds that Amazon's ecosystem-crippling behaviour is driven by its insatiable need for growth at all costs.

Third-party sellers have long accused Amazon's rent-seeking behaviour like steadily increasing cost of doing business on their platform, abusing their dominant market position to manipulate pricing, copying popular products of third-party retailers, and unjustifiably promoting its own brands.

In October 2021, based on several leaked internal documents, Reuters reported that Amazon systematically harvested and studied data about their sellers' products' market performance, and used those data to identify lucrative markets and ultimately launch Amazon's replacement products in India. The data included information about returns, the sizing of clothing down to the neck circumference and sleeve length, and the volume of product views on their website. Rivals' market performance data are not available to Amazon's sellers. The strategy also involved tweaking the search results to favor Amazon's private-label products. The Solimo Strategy's impact had a reach well beyond India: hundreds of Solimo branded household items, from multivitamins to coffee pods, are available in the US. One of the victims of the Solimo Strategy is the clothing brand John Miller, owned by India's 'retail king' Kishore Biyani.

In October 2022, a £900 million class-action lawsuit was filed in the United Kingdom against Amazon, over a "Buy Box" feature on its website which "favours products sold by Amazon itself, or by retailers who pay Amazon for handling their logistics".

Antitrust complaints

The European Commission commenced an investigation in June 2015 regarding clauses in Amazon's e-book distribution agreements which potentially breached EU antitrust rules by making it harder for other e-book platforms to compete. This investigation was concluded in May 2017 when the Commission adopted a decision which rendered binding Amazon's commitments not to use or enforce these clauses.

In July 2019 and in November 2020, the European Commission opened two in-depth investigations into Amazon's use of marketplace seller data as well as possible preferential treatment of Amazon's own retail offers and those of marketplace sellers that use Amazon's logistics and delivery services. It charged that Amazon systematically relies on nonpublic data it gathers from third party sellers to unfairly compete against them, to the benefit of its own retail business, thus violating competition law in the European Economic Area. On June 11, 2020, the European Union announced that it will be pressing charges against Amazon over its treatment of third-party e-commerce sellers. The state of California opened an investigation around the same time.

In December 2019, the Competition Commission of India suspended an approval for the strategic takeover of Future Retail and levied a penalty of Rs 200 crores. The regulator discovered through internal emails of Amazon that it intended to acquire the company so that it can take advantage of foreign investment relaxations and not owing to its interest in the company. Amazon appealed this order in the Company tribunal. Later in March 2022, the CCI defended its order in court citing misrepresentation on the part of Amazon.

In July 2020, Amazon along with other tech giants Apple, Google and Meta was accused of maintaining harmful power and anti-competitive strategies to quash potential competitors in the market. The CEOs of respective firms appeared in a teleconference on July 29, 2020, before the lawmakers of the U.S. House Antitrust Subcommittee. In October 2020, the antitrust subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives released a report accusing Amazon of abusing a monopoly position in e-commerce to unfairly compete with sellers on its platform. In a March 2022 letter to bipartisan leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden's Justice Department endorsed legislation forbidding large digital platforms like Amazon from disadvantaging competitors' products and services against their own. "The usticeDepartment views the rise of dominant platforms as a presenting a threat to open markets and competition, with risks for consumers, businesses, innovation, resiliency, global competitiveness, and our democracy," says the letter.

California's Attorney General filed suit against Amazon in September 2022, following the investigation that began in 2020, alleging that its contracts with third-party sellers and wholesalers inflate prices and stifle competition. Specifically, that merchants are coerced into contracts that prevent them from offering their products elsewhere, on other websites, for lower prices.

Treatment of workers

Amazon has faced various critiques over the quality of its working environments and treatment of its workforce. A group known as The FACE (Former And Current Employees) of Amazon has regularly used social media to disseminate criticism of the company and allegations regarding negative work conditions.

Employee mismanagement

Amazon has been accused of mistakenly firing people on medical leave for no-shows, not fixing inaccuracy in their payroll systems resulting in a section of both its blue-collar and white-collar employees going under-paid for months, and violating employment laws by deliberately denying unpaid leaves.

There seems to be talks and discussions referring to how Amazon as a whole keeps mistreating or mismanaging the way the employees are being managed or treated at the company.

Amazon is firing those employees who are on medical leave when they are not able to show up due to those certain employees being on medical leave for a number of reasons, but Amazon still finds a way to get rid of those employees and it is not fair for the employees to have to go through this.

Amazon needs to change the way the employees are being managed and how to stop firing those employees if they are on medical leave. Once an employee is fired from Amazon due to them being on medical leave for the reasons they decide to not disclose to the company, the management at Amazon will have to make no other choice but to fire them.

Having employees being mistreated for such reasons is not what Amazon is known for, yet, the managing department at Amazon decides that it is okay to fire those employees or mismanage/mistreat those employees for what they have done within the company.

Opposition to trade unions

Amazon has opposed efforts by trade unions to organize in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In 2001, 850 employees in Seattle were laid off by Amazon after a unionization drive. The Washington Alliance of Technological Workers (WashTech) accused the company of violating union laws and claimed Amazon managers subjected them to intimidation and heavy propaganda. Amazon denied any link between the unionization effort and layoffs. Also in 2001, Amazon.co.uk hired a US management consultancy organization, The Burke Group, to assist in defeating a campaign by the Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU, now part of Unite the Union) to achieve recognition in the Milton Keynes distribution depot. It was alleged that the company victimized or sacked four union members during the 2001 recognition drive and held a series of captive meetings with employees.

An Amazon training video that was leaked in 2018 stated "We are not anti-union, but we are not neutral either. We do not believe unions are in the best interest of our customers or shareholders or most importantly, our associates." The video also encouraged to report "warning signs" of potential worker organization, which included workers using words like "living wage", employees "suddenly hanging out together" as well as workers showing "unusual interest in policies, benefits, employee lists, or other company information". In early 2020, Amazon internal documents were leaked, which said that Whole Foods was using a heat map to track which of its 510 stores had the highest levels of pro-union sentiment. Factors including racial diversity, proximity to other unions, poverty levels in the surrounding community and calls to the National Labor Relations Board were named as contributors to "unionization risk". Data collected in the heat map suggest that stores with low racial and ethnic diversity, especially those located in poor communities, are more likely to unionize. Amazon also had a job listing for an Intelligence Analyst, whose role it would be to identify and tackle threats to Amazon, which included unions and organised labour.

On 4 December 2020, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found that Amazon illegally fired two employees in retaliation for efforts to organize workers. In April 2021, after a majority of workers in Bessemer, Alabama voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the union asked for a hearing with the NLRB to determine whether the company created "an atmosphere of confusion, coercion and/or fear of reprisals" ahead of the union vote. The vote had been met with "anti-union" signs and mandatory "union education meetings" according to Amazon worker Jennifer Bates. During the voting, President Joe Biden made a speech acknowledging the organizing workers in Alabama and called for "no anti-union propaganda". This was followed by an increase of activity by public relations staff on Twitter, reportedly at the personal direction of Jeff Bezos. The tone used by some of the posts led one Amazon engineer to initially suspect that the accounts had been hacked. Some of the criticism of unions came from generic recently created accounts rather than known Amazon personalities. One account, which was quickly banned, had attempted to use the likeness of YouTube star Tyler Toney from Dude Perfect. In April 2021, ''The Intercept'' reported on Amazon's planned internal messaging app that would ban words like "union", "living wage", "freedom", "pay raise" or "restrooms".

In April 2022, Amazon workers in Staten Island voted to form Amazon Labor Union, the company's first legally recognized union. In August 2022, workers in an Albany, New York, location filed a petition for an election in an attempt to become what would be the fourth unionized warehouse at the time.

Wages

Throughout the summer of 2018, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders criticized Amazon's wages and working conditions in a series of YouTube videos and media appearances. He also pointed to the fact that Amazon had paid no federal income tax in the previous year. Sanders solicited stories from Amazon warehouse workers who felt exploited by the company. One such story, by James Bloodworth, described the environment as akin to "a low-security prison" and stated that the company's culture used an Orwellian newspeak. These reports cited a finding by New Food Economy that one third of fulfilment center workers in Arizona were on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Responses by Amazon included incentives for employees to tweet positive stories and a statement which called the salary figures used by Sanders "inaccurate and misleading". The statement also charged that it was inappropriate for him to refer to SNAP as "food stamps". On September 5, 2018, Sanders along with Ro Khanna introduced the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act aimed at Amazon and other alleged beneficiaries of corporate welfare such as Walmart, McDonald's and Uber. Among the bill's supporters were Tucker Carlson of Fox News and Matt Taibbi who criticized himself and other journalists for not covering Amazon's contribution to wealth inequality earlier.

On October 2, 2018, Amazon announced that its minimum wage for all American employees would be raised to $15 per hour. Sanders congratulated the company for making this decision.

Worker conditions

Former employees, current employees, the media, and politicians have criticized Amazon for poor working conditions at the company. In 2011, it was publicized that workers had to carry out tasks in heat at the Breinigsville, Pennsylvania warehouse. As a result of these conditions, employees became extremely uncomfortable and suffered from dehydration and collapse. Loading-bay doors were not opened to allow in fresh air because of concerns over theft. Amazon's initial response was to pay for an ambulance to sit outside on call to cart away overheated employees. The company eventually installed air conditioning at the warehouse.

Some workers, "pickers", who travel the building with a trolley and a handheld scanner "picking" customer orders, can walk up to during their workday and if they fall behind on their targets, they can be reprimanded. The handheld scanners give real-time information to the employee on how quickly or slowly they are working; the scanners also serve to allow Team Leads and Area Managers to track the specific locations of employees and how much "idle time" they gain when not working.

In a German television report broadcast in February 2013, journalists Diana Löbl and Peter Onneken conducted a covert investigation at the distribution center of Amazon in the town of Bad Hersfeld in the German state of Hessen. The report highlights the behavior of some of the security guards, themselves being employed by a third-party company, who apparently either had a neo-Nazi background or deliberately dressed in neo-Nazi apparel and who were intimidating foreign and temporary female workers at its distribution centers. The third-party security company involved was delisted by Amazon as a business contact shortly after that report.

In March 2015, it was reported in ''The Verge'' that Amazon would be removing non-compete clauses of 18 months in length from its US employment contracts for hourly-paid workers, after criticism that it was acting unreasonably in preventing such employees from finding other work. Even short-term temporary workers have to sign contracts that prohibit them from working at any company where they would "directly or indirectly" support any good or service that competes with those they helped support at Amazon, for 18 months after leaving Amazon, even if they are fired or made redundant.

A 2015 front-page article in ''The New York Times'' profiled several former Amazon employees who together described a "bruising" workplace culture in which workers with illness or other personal crises were pushed out or unfairly evaluated. Bezos responded by writing a Sunday memo to employees, in which he disputed the ''Times''s account of "shockingly callous management practices" that he said would never be tolerated at the company.

To boost employee morale, on November 2, 2015, Amazon announced that it would be extending six weeks of paid leave for new mothers and fathers. This change includes birth parents and adoptive parents and can be applied in conjunction with existing maternity leave and medical leave for new mothers.

In mid-2018, investigations by journalists and media outlets such as ''The Guardian'' reported poor working conditions at Amazon's fulfillment centers. Later in 2018, another article exposed poor working conditions for Amazon's delivery drivers. In response to criticism that Amazon does not pay its workers a livable wage, Jeff Bezos announced beginning November 1, 2018, all US and UK Amazon employees will earn a $15 an hour minimum wage. Amazon will also lobby to make $15 an hour the federal minimum wage. At the same time, Amazon also eliminated stock awards and bonuses for hourly employees.

A September 11, 2018, article exposed poor working conditions for Amazon's delivery drivers, describing a variety of alleged abuses, including missing wages, lack of overtime pay, favoritism, intimidation, and time constraints that forced them to drive at dangerous speeds and skip meals and bathroom breaks. Amazon uses Netradyne artificial intelligence cameras in some partner vans to monitor safety incidents and driver behaviour, drawing criticism from some drivers.

On Black Friday 2018, Amazon warehouse workers in several European countries, including Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, went on strike to protest inhumane working conditions and low pay.

''The Daily Beast'' reported in March 2019 that emergency services responded to 189 calls from 46 Amazon warehouses in 17 states between the years 2013 and 2018, all relating to suicidal employees. The workers attributed their mental breakdowns to employer-imposed social isolation, aggressive surveillance, and the hurried and dangerous working conditions at these fulfillment centers. One former employee told ''The Daily Beast'' "It's this isolating colony of hell where people having breakdowns is a regular occurrence."

On July 15, 2019, during the onset of Amazon's Prime Day sale event, Amazon employees working in the United States and Germany went on strike in protest of unfair wages and poor working conditions.

In August 2019, the BBC
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