Amazon's 1.7 Million Free Bananas 'Disrupting' Local Fruit Economy (consumerist.com)

Amazon has transformed businesses including retailing, filmmaking and data storage. But no one anticipated the bananas. It started with a brainstorm from founder and CEO Jeff Bezos that Amazon should offer everyone near its headquarters -- not just employees -- healthy, eco-friendly snacks as a public service. After considering oranges, Amazon picked bananas, and opened its first Community Banana Stand in late 2015. However, not everyone is pleased with the ecommerce giant's effort. From a report: Although there is no money in Amazon's community banana stands -- where the company has been offering free fruit to both workers and locals in Seattle since 2015 -- the tech giant's largesse is changing the banana landscape for some nearby businesses. [...] Thus far, the company says it's handed out more than 1.7 million free banana, reports The Wall Street Journal. But while many folks are fans of the free bananas, others say it's changing banana consumption in the community: Some workers say it's harder to find bananas at local grocery stores, while nearby eateries have also stopped selling as many banana as they used to.

Comments

Re:the "why we can't have nice things" department

[kangsterizer]

The problem is that it kills competition with an unfair advantage, even thus in this case this is clearly not Amazon's main reason for doing this (unless they're playing 6D evil chess). This is similar to the monopoly problem.
Step 1: provide service for free, pay users to use it, because you've more money and resources than many countries.
Step 2: wait until all smaller competing businesses collapse as they cannot keep up with you paying people to get free stuff.
Step 3: change the service price to now cost 100x more than during the step 1 period.

Imagine if Amazon did this for all fresh products all the time, then directed people to their Amazon Fresh Prime after all competition collapsed?