Is the Amazon Price-Check App an attack on small business?

Small businesses may feel attacked or at least at a loss for how to compete against the app, but I don't think it's Amazon's direct intent. They've achieved the success they have in large part because of their ability to respond to customers' needs, and this is one more example of that.

When price is the only factor, small businesses will often struggle to compete; but I'm a firm believer that there are large portions of the market that include other criteria in their decisions. Small businesses need to focus on discovering those other factors and being innovative in those areas so they can win and keep their customer base.

The question is a bit pejorative as framed and is along the lines of "Should journalists stop being liberal?" or "Do conservatives hate the poor and needy?" that typifies so much writing these days. I sincerely doubt that the folks at Amazon that came up with the concept deliberately had a design bullet that called for an assault on small business. Ironically, Amazon has probably done more to give many small businesses a "store front" than anything else out there. We tend to think of them as this big monolith but even a shallow dive into what they are doing reveals that they are just a huge marketing and distribution outfit. MOST of what they sell is produced by small businesses. It's rather like folks taking a shot at Apple for being "big" when in truth they've done more to foster small businesses than anyone else in a long time. Every Apple developer with apps in the app store is a small businessman. Every author of a book is a small businessman. In truth, Amazon provides an easy way for suppliers of goods to get them to the market in the same way that Apple provides an easy way for me to get my app creations to the market. I read recently that there are something like 1.4 Android developers for every Apple developer but that the Apple developers were NINE times more likely to actually make money from their creations. The App Store is the difference. I suspect that it the numbers were examined, you'd find that Amazon, like Apple has probably done more to FOSTER small business success than anything else on the web since PayPal.

Why is it that when someone really succeeds in this country we have to find some evil in it? Yes, Internet sales and information at your fingertips may force conventional "brick and mortar" businesses and storefronts to become more competitive and perhaps find new ways to serve that simply can't be done "on-line" but that isn't hard and in the end it's a good thing for all of us. Amazon has succeeded but far from being at the expense of small business, I'd argue that they've FOSTERED small business. Think of it this way, without those myriad suppliers big and small, there wouldn't BE an Amazon.