Amazon says it’s for others to worry about the disruption it causes

Amazon CEO Jeff
Bezos.
Reuters

• Amazon SVP Russell Grandinetti said it’s for society
  and government to figure out how to deal with the company
  becoming a $178 billion disruptor in the retail
  sector.
• “I don’t think it’s our job to do anything but try to
  be really good at what we do,” he told The Sunday
  Times.
• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said a number of times that
  the company is ready for a debate about regulation.

Amazon is a $178 billion disruptor in the retail sector. Its
sheer scale has marked it out as a target for US President Donald
Trump, who reportedly obsesses over
the company’s impact on the US Postal Office, the amount of tax
it pays, and the potential harm it is causing other retailers.

“Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns,
cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs
being lost!” Trump tweeted in August last
year.

But don’t expect Amazon to start worrying about its impact
anytime soon.

In an interview with The Sunday
Times, Russell Grandinetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of
international consumer, said his job is to focus on growth — and
it’s for others to figure out how to deal with the ripples Amazon
creates in the marketplace.

“Companies have often invented technologies that have then
required us to figure out how to reinvest the productivity
improvements in new jobs and new ways,” he said. “That’s an
important societal thing to do, an important governmental thing
to do. I don’t think it’s our job to do anything but try to be
really good at what we do.”

The Sunday Times said investors will “cheer” his relentless focus
on revenue, but critics will worry “he is turning a blind eye to
the disruption Amazon causes.”

Grandinetti did, however, address concerns that Amazon is
destroying jobs, by pointing to those it creates. He said: “We
create lots of jobs not only in the company — 100,000 in the US
last year alone, 5,000 in Britain — but also in the suppliers we
serve.”

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said a number of times that the company
is ready for a debate about regulation.

“If you look at the big tech companies, they have gotten large
enough that they are going to be inspected. It’s not personal,”
he said at an event in Germany in
April.

The Amazon CEO said policing the power of online companies is
“one of the great questions of our age” because as the internet
has reached a level of maturity over the past decade “we haven’t
learned as a civilization, as a human species, how to operate it
yet.”