New Jersey filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. The complaint says Amazon's third-party delivery model creates lower wages and unfair working conditions. The state also claims it kills competition.
Amazon built a business model where it doesn't employ the people who deliver your packages. Contractors do. Those contractors compete for Amazon's business by cutting costs. Cutting costs means paying drivers less. Paying drivers less means the guy bringing you toilet paper at 9 PM works three jobs and pisses in a bottle. New Jersey looked at this system and thought, "Hey, that might be illegal monopoly behavior."
The lawsuit argues Amazon wields too much power over these contractors. When one company controls that much of the delivery market, contractors can't say no. They take whatever terms Amazon offers. Amazon offers bad terms. The terms are bad because Amazon can make them bad. That's what happens when you're the only game in town.
This is antitrust law doing what antitrust law does. It shows up decades late. It files paperwork. It alleges harm that everyone already knew about. Consumer advocacy groups have been screaming about delivery conditions since 2019. Journalists wrote ten thousand words about piss bottles in vans. Drivers posted videos. New Jersey read all that and said, "We should look into this."
The case will take years. Amazon will deploy lawyers who bill $1,200 an hour. New Jersey will deploy lawyers who make $120,000 a year. During discovery, Amazon will produce 4 million pages of documents, most of them irrelevant. A judge will read none of them. The case will settle or drag on until everyone involved retires.
None of this matters to your portfolio. Amazon stock doesn't care about one state filing one lawsuit. The market priced in regulatory risk the day Amazon got big enough to regulate. If you're trading AMZN on this news, you're the reason your family stopped inviting you to Thanksgiving.
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