Amazon Flexed: Delivering Smiles (and Exploitation)

Amazon’s exterior portrays the image of a quintessential company in contemporary society that emerging businesses should aspire to be like. Bringing in $232.9 billion in revenue last year (Fiegerman, 2019) and having a total of 647,500 employees, it is clear that Amazon is a domineering force in the retail market. This critical reflection explores Amazon’s business practices using Fordist and Post-Fordist theory and aims to analyse how this ever-growing company reflects key sociological changes within society and is thus standout model of informational capitalism. However, while Amazon are a company that have capitalised on the use of information in this era portraying themselves as model of contemporary success, this critical reflection explores their use of information for surveillance, the exploitation of their workers and their dominance of consumerism for profit, all of which highlights that under closer inspection, Amazon is a company that generates huge profits through the hyper exploitation of its workforce.