Amazon.com’s Frustration-Free Packaging Shows The Beauty Of The Free Market

Sometimes companies do things that have no obvious direct benefit but do have an indirect benefit. One example is Amazon.com’s recent frustration-free packaging idea. They’re basically making the world better because of the indirect benefit to the company.

Amazon doesn’t have any obvious reason to make product packaging less frustrating. On the surface, it doesn’t seem that they make any money by doing it, but by making the online shopping experience even more appealing than it already is, customers are more likely to buy online. Plus, Amazon gets the positive press of being the driving force behind a project that makes the world a bit less frustrating. That’s the indirect, intangible benefit.

Another great example is Google. Google gets a huge percentage of the internet’s ad dollars, so it’s willing to do things that make the internet a better place, just for the indirect benefit of having more people shopping online. I’ve talked to people that work at Google, and they can attest that Google has done some pretty large projects with the only goal being “make the internet better”.

We generally think that it’s a bad thing when one company controls most of a market, but as these examples show, there are some advantages. The company has incentive to act on behalf of the interests of consumers. This is one of the unseen factors to the free market.