To your first statement, is this even true of Amazon?
In the US, Amazon Prime has something like 80% penetration into households making >= $100k/year. This move into Whole Foods reaffirms this focus on high-income households, where convenience is often as large a factor as costs.
My hunch is that Amazon has been a massive positive in aggregate, but poor households have been negatively impacted by Amazon, taking into account loss of jobs, lowering of wages, and some positive lower costs for goods.
>but poor households have been negatively impacted by Amazon
Households where money is tight are sharing prime memberships among them and using that to undercut the cost of buying consumer goods locally. You can go into your local $typeofstore and get ripped off for a set of $releventproduct or you could buy something that came out of the same overseas factory with a different brand label on it and wait 50hr for a third of the price.
In the US, Amazon Prime has something like 80% penetration into households making >= $100k/year. This move into Whole Foods reaffirms this focus on high-income households, where convenience is often as large a factor as costs.
My hunch is that Amazon has been a massive positive in aggregate, but poor households have been negatively impacted by Amazon, taking into account loss of jobs, lowering of wages, and some positive lower costs for goods.