President Trump has been voicing concerns about Amazon for quite some time – even before he was elected – however, these concerns have taken center stage recently. CBS News recently did some digging and found out that his campaign spent around $158,000 on Amazon for office supplies throughout the election, and even continued using Amazon for supplies after taking office last year, spending $2,000 in 2017.
The President has been criticizing Amazon for a number of things, though the most popular have been the fact that Amazon doesn’t pay taxes, and that it is costing the US Postal Service millions of dollars. According to reports, the USPS is losing an average of $1.50 per package it delivers for Amazon. Now those numbers come from analysts that are doing research on Amazon and the USPS, this is not coming from Amazon nor the US Postal Service itself. And as many other analysts and commentators have stated, it’s hard to believe that the US Postal Service would enter into an agreement on which it would be losing money. Now the Postal Service has been losing money for 11 straight years now. This is not solely due to Amazon, but due to the fact that more and more people are moving towards email and away from standard mail. While the US Postal Service has been delivering more packages as of late – and even introduced Sunday delivery – it still hasn’t turned a profit in over a decade.
This appears to be a bit hypocritical for the President, given that his campaign and administration have been spending money on Amazon. But The White House is insisting that Trump’s stance on Amazon is policy related. And given the fact that Trump was/is a business man, it makes sense that he’s focusing in on the numbers of shipping packages through the post office. Of course, Trump isn’t a fan of Jeff Bezos‘ other property, The Washington Post, which routinely posts stories about the President, that the President does not like. And this could be seen as a personal attack on Bezos. It’ll be interesting to see where this leads in the coming weeks, as the President continues to voice concerns about Amazon on Twitter.