Amazon is a disaster waiting to happen.

Reporter George Packer, whose previous experience was with military bureaucracy, found that Amazon was even more secretive.  He wrote a recent article inhttp://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/17/140217fa_fact_packer?currentPage=1 in the New Yorker about Amazon.

He's followed that up with comments about how he believes that a secretive organization will eventually be blindsided by outside events, that it will become a group-think organization. 

Which goes along with my contention that Amazon is a disaster waiting to happen. 

Their basic strategy seems to be to grow, grow, grow -- without making profits in the meantime, with the ultimate goal of being able to recoup their money at the end. 

To me, that's a dangerous game.

I'm no Amazon.  I'm just little guy -- but I had about five years in Central Oregon to be the only sport card dealer.  My sales grew exponentially.  I wasn't making any profits, but boy was I raking in the dough -- which went right back out again.

Then the chainstores got ahold of the product, and started selling it for cost, and the wild ride was over.

I had made no money during the ever increasing sales, and then I started losing money.

It made no sense -- the card companies were committing suicide.  Why would they do that?

But that's what I learned.  Corporations think in the short term, and they commit suicide on a regular basis.  They aren't smarter than we are, just bigger.  I was nimble enough to change course and recover.  Most card shops and distributors and manufacturers weren't.