Amazon: It's not our job to worry about fears we're killing retailers and destroying jobs

Jeff Bezos

Amazon SVP Russell Grandinetti said it's for society and government to figure out how to deal with the company becoming a $178 billion disruptor in the retail sector.
"I don’t think it’s our job to do anything but try to be really good at what we do," he told The Sunday Times.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said a number of times that the company is ready for a debate about regulation.

Amazon is a $178 billion disruptor in the retail sector. Its sheer scale has marked it out as a target for US President Donald Trump, who reportedly obsesses over the company's impact on the US Postal Office, the amount of tax it pays, and the potential harm it is causing other retailers.

"Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost!" Trump tweeted in August last year.

But don't expect Amazon to start worrying about its impact anytime soon.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Russell Grandinetti, Amazon's senior vice president of international consumer, said his job is to focus on growth — and it's for others to figure out how to deal with the ripples Amazon creates in the marketplace.

"Companies have often invented technologies that have then required us to figure out how to reinvest the productivity improvements in new jobs and new ways," he said. "That’s an important societal thing to do, an important governmental thing to do. I don’t think it’s our job to do anything but try to be really good at what we do."

The Sunday Times said investors will "cheer" his relentless focus on revenue, but critics will worry "he is turning a blind eye to the disruption Amazon causes."

Grandinetti did, however, address concerns that Amazon is destroying jobs, by pointing to those it creates. He said: "We create lots of jobs not only in the company — 100,000 in the US last year alone, 5,000 in Britain — but also in the suppliers we serve."

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said a number of times that the company is ready for a debate about regulation.

"If you look at the big tech companies, they have gotten large enough that they are going to be inspected. It’s not personal," he said at an event in Germany in April.

The Amazon CEO said policing the power of online companies is "one of the great questions of our age" because as the internet has reached a level of maturity over the past decade "we haven’t learned as a civilization, as a human species, how to operate it yet."

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