Emailed on June 28th, 2019 in The Friday Forward

While I'm not going to turn this newsletter into a political piece (wouldn't that be fun though!?), I will offer a bit of news that you can take or leave in your political dealings.

Less than a decade after Amazon broke into the logistics industry, it has become its own biggest shipper.

Researchers found that nearly half (48%) of Amazon packages are delivered by the company itself.

That's a dramatic shift from two years ago, when the Postal Service delivered more than 60% of Amazon parcels, and Amazon just around 15%.

"Amazon is about 40% of all e-commerce. If they're handling half of their own shipments, that's 20% of the whole market," Alex Pellas, a logistics expert at market research firm Rakuten Intelligence, says. "That's huge."

"We're now talking about a retailer that will control the entire process" from manufacturing to delivery, says Mark Rosenbaum, a professor at the University of South Carolina.

Hot take: Antitrust laws were first put in place to protect the consumer. Given it takes Amazon an average of 3.2 days to deliver a parcel after a shopper clicks "buy," per Rakuten Intelligence, and all other e-commerce companies the average time is 6 days, breaking up the beast may end up hurting consumers.

But the story for retailers and shippers... that's a bit different.