Everything new is old again

How the internet's business cycle kills everything we love in the same way over and over

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And now: Amazon.

The internet is good for three things:

1. communicating with people

2. consuming content

3. buying stuff

Since I spend most of my days “on the internet,” these things are what the entire human experience often seems to come down to. At any one time, I have only these three choices. And as the internet has matured, a shitty pattern has emerged.

At first, things are amazing. Then they level off, lose a little of the luster, get a bit stale. Then shit gets real. 

Meanwhile, the business success of companies that make it through all three phases are inversely related to the experience of their service. 

My margin, your profit

Jeff Bezos is famous for the apocryphal quote, “Your margin is my opportunity.”

The Business Quote Appreciator explanation of this is straightforward. Amazon’s competitors made money doing a basic thing: buying goods at cost and selling them for more than that.

Stripping away a whole bunch of particulars, Bezos and Amazon undercut these competitors on price (their margin), made it up in volume, and now can raise prices themselves. First, Bezos went after the book business, then eventually took on all of retail, cloud computing, original content, and so on.

And now this is happening.

I remember the first time a friend of mine got an Amazon gift card for Christmas in high school and I asked, with confusion, why anyone would want that. “You can get anything on Amazon,” he replied. It had never occurred to me that this could be true. This was probably 2005 or 2006. 

In college, I bought most all of my books on Amazon instead of the campus bookstore. (The perks of being an English major.) Like many millennials my age, this is my formative experience with Bezos’ empire. Then the regular rhythm of realizing some household essential was out of stock, being recommended some book, or wanting new headphones brought me back a couple times a month.

At first, buying stuff on Amazon was amazing. Things arrived fast. Everything seemed cheaper. The site eliminated a scarcity that in the late-aughts still felt like a real thing.

Then, shopping on Amazon became a matter-of-course experience. Fast, cheap, a click away.

And now, it sucks. 

It turns out my (our) enjoyable experience shopping on Amazon was actually the margin.

Can Duruk writes this week about how the experience of buying stuff on Amazon has gotten worse over time.

Every single Amazon purchase now is an ordeal, that makes me feel like I am buying tickets on Expedia in 1999. Every tab on for a product on Amazon has to be paired with various other review sites like Wirecutter and Reddit. There are extensions, ranging from Honey for coupons to Fakespot, to…spot fakes. How insane is that?

Like most people who buy things on Amazon, I’ve long internalized and normalized this pain. The fact that a shopping website is so bad at spotting fakes on its platform, or that its marquee feature, reviews, are so gamed, barely even registers anymore. We think this is normal, but it is not. 

There are now several cottage industries which have been built around trying to make this experience not quite as bad. And then these structures inevitably fail, too.

For the first time maybe ever, this week I happened to actually read the Amazon email I get about my quarterly delivery of razorblades, my only subscribed-to item on Amazon.

Because I am an idiot, it never occurred to me that an item I had subscribed to would be subject to significant price changes each quarter. I was wrong.

Myles Udland @MylesUdland

Another fantastic experience on Amazon dot com

When I first subscribed to these blades in October 2017, they cost me $30.97; now I’m paying over $40. The cost of each subscription has, over the last few years, floated in a range of a couple dollars per order. This was all news to me. And only news because I happened to read an email from Amazon I never open.

Now, it is on me as a consumer to pay attention to what I pay for stuff. The economic bargain we’ve all made with the internet — even if no one asked us if this is what we wanted! — is that buying just about anything is easier than you could have ever possibly have imagined, but if you don’t pay attention you might get ripped off. 

Here, in contrast, is a chart of Amazon’s annual operating income.

And please do not email me to say, “This is only because of AWS, sir!”

From the 10-K:

Everything was amazing and now it sucks

The Pinkerian response to this critique of Amazon is that getting ripped off was, for most of human history, a matter of course. And this was often an even more acute disenfranchising experience if you were a minority. And too often this is still true.

The broad leveling of the field for consumers across the board is — in contrast to specific perceptions that buying stuff online is bad — actually good. By almost any broad measure of health, per capita wealth, relative safety and so on it is the best time in human history to be alive. Online shopping is a part of this narrative, if perhaps the shallowest.

“Everything is amazing but nobody is happy” was the pop philosophical way to frame the lived experience of a post-crisis world in which millions of people no longer had jobs but the iPhone exists.

But the local experience of buying individual items online is now definitely bad. Lots of local experiences doing things online are definitely bad. The degradation of the online experience is a pattern we see repeated across the web’s three main areas. In many ways, the internet is the lone holdout in the march of human progress. Which is weird, because it’s also the newest thing we’ve got.

Facebook, for example, used to be good. 

Starting a Facebook page, connecting with kids who go to other high schools that didn’t really go on AIM as much anymore, getting in trouble at school because a picture of you at a party was posted in a Facebook group are all incredible experiences that illuminated, in their own way, what the rest of my life was going to be like. 

Slowly but surely, things on Facebook got worse. Profile protectionism increased as we aged through college and started to worry if what we posted on Facebook would hold us back from getting an internship, or a job, or into grad school. And so Facebook got more sterile. 

At the same time, however, the service itself was maturing. The News Feed was introduced during my freshman year of college. The same month I graduated, the company went public. As my own experience with Facebook started to reach a plateau, the world’s experience with Facebook was accelerating. 

When I was a junior and senior in college worrying about the purity of my profile and trying to lock down my digital self, Boomers and politicians were discovering Facebook en masse. In just a few short years, foreign interference on this same network would play a role in a disorienting election nobody was prepared for. By the end of 2016, no one was arguing that Facebook was good. The situation has not improved since. 

Everything might’ve been amazing but now it definitely sucks.

At least it seems that way online. And it’s unclear if this is uniquely so.

The customer is always wrong

A few weeks back, I wrote that content on the internet seems to have a self-regulating mechanism that evergreens everything. Content on the internet wants to be timeless, anonymous, replicable. It’s better for the content business if the content your outlet is producing is indistinguishable from all the other content.

The better for readers and viewers not to notice or care.

In many ways, this is the logical endpoint of a world that began as exciting, then got flat, and now is just bad. And this pattern seems to me, at least, to be a phenomenon specific to the internet. Or is at least incubated and favored by the internet.

There’s something about the timeless, placeless nature of the web itself that creates unavoidably vicious cycles in which any business can’t help but become the worst version of itself in short order. 

Perhaps it is because the scale opportunities presented by the internet makes middle-grounding an untenable position for most businesses. The answer an internet-based business will have to the question of being too large or too small is often: just keep growing.

The same answers thus offer the same solutions and the same outcomes. Bad customer service, lazy repurposed content, hellscape social networks are different ways to say the same thing. 

Part of me firmly believes that there is something specific to the web-based life I and so many others live that leaves us holding this bag, this way. And if we’re going to keep living our lives online we’re going to keep being subjected to these same corporate punishments, again and again forever. 

But this might just be true for everything. Which brings to mind my worst customer service experience of all time.

This happened, as things do, at a Chase branch. 

I am a Chase customer. My landlord is a Chase customer. I wanted to send her money through Chase. When I asked a Chase branch worker how to do this, the answer was, “Wire the money for a $25 fee.” (There is a workaround that costs no money. This is what I do. But bear with the story.) 

I then got to talk to the banking world’s latest and greatest invention: a Chase Private Client Associate. This person told me that if I were a Chase Private Client I could send money for free. Since I do not have that much money, I am not a Chase Private Client. After checking, the Associate informed me that I am not, in fact, eligible to be a Chase Private Client. Which I knew.

Before leaving, I asked how it’s possible that Chase could only transfer money between two of its customers for $25 a pop, and the Associate told me, “You’ve got to understand: we have to make money somehow.” 

What a world.

Now, obviously, this did not happen online. But really, isn’t it just the same thing?

At first, banking was good. Then it was a neutral experience. And now it is bad. The reason offered by the bank’s most powerless liaison is: how else would we make money?

And so the only solution, it seems, is to screw your customers in order to make money. It’s not personal, just strictly business. An old truth waiting to be re-discovered online.