Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives, and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

The dudebro book of 2020. Some of the writing seemed amateurish and awkward, but it’s nothing a glib narrator can’t handle, because let’s face it: this is a book for businessmen to listen to while traveling. Excessive and tiresome repetition of the phrase “AI-driven flywheel” plagues the narrative.

I wasn’t sure at first what the book was trying to be. A guide to getting rich like Bezos/competing with Amazon? An exposé? “Bezonomics” is a basic guide to what Amazon is up to (a lot); a report of what customers, third-party sellers, employees, business rivals, and politicians say about Amazon; and a treatise on Dumaine’s confidence that Amazon will just keep “disrupting” stuff until they take over every retail sector—but didn’t we think that same thing about Walmart in the ‘90s?

Come on. Amazon is going to keep “spinning its flywheel” faster and faster until I’m banking with Amazon, asking Alexa to connect me with my doctor, and trusting Alexa and various robots to send me edible bananas? I think the very idea is bananas. Also, I have been ordering books from Amazon for 20 years, and its omniscient AI is trying to sell me books on John Adams today, because I bought my son textbooks related to politics seven years ago.

The Internet of Things might turn out to be a passing fad, when people come to regret paying $50 for a light bulb and decide they don’t have the financial resources for a deluge of internet-connected “smart” stuff. The larger fad in society is to disconnect, to limit screen time, and to engage in unplugged experiences with people and in nature.

I enjoyed the parts about businesses that are thriving by creating a special customer experience online and in-store that Amazon can’t match, to which Dumaine should have devoted more pages. Maybe the part about Bezos being a space lunatic could have been edited out to make room for more examples of other outlier business success. Trader Joe’s has nothing to fear from Amazon’s Whole Foods acquisition despite knowing nothing about customers except what they buy. Why and how?

The subtitle led me to expect more specifics about business strategies. How are the world’s best companies learning anything from Bezonomics? Unless by “best” Dumaine means the biggest companies, such as Walmart, I didn’t glean many specifics. Pour billions into sophisticated algorithms and hope they work? Perhaps all of the algorithms that work best are the ones that are more than a decade old (make suggestions related to past purchases) and Amazon, Walmart and other behemoths should quit wasting their money and focus on customer service, quality product curation, and nicer design. My favorite online retailer, Sephora, is mentioned in the book, and they offer a special shipping plan to their Insiders. If Sephora were a wreck like Amazon, I, an Insider, would not have bothered with it.

Dumaine gives ample and fair coverage to privacy and sociopolitical concerns, and even talks about the ecological impacts of mammoth online retailers running giant server farms. Dumaine asks whether Amazon should be broken up, as two Democratic Presidential candidates have called for, and intelligently covers both sides of the debate. The book would have been incomplete without this discussion.

I received an advanced readers copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley and was encouraged to submit an honest review.