DOMINIC LAWSON: Jeff Bezos is no saint, but could Amazon shops actually save our High Streets? 

How would you like a High Street store where you could put all your items in your bag and then take them away without having to queue up to pay?

This is not legalised shoplifting but an innovation by Amazon, which, it was revealed yesterday, will soon be coming to the UK. 

This new chain of shops will do away with cashiers and tills altogether.

Instead, customers will download an app called Amazon Go on to their smartphones, which will gain them entry to the stores and record their purchases via sensors. 

They will then be billed electronically, and sent receipts via email.

This is simultaneously extraordinary and predictable — the latter because Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos is focused with maniacal intensity on customer convenience; the former because everyone thought the whole point of his business was that it is an online venture, avoiding the overheads of the High Street.

Magnitude

I had lunch with Bezos when he made his first promotional trip to London in the late 1990s. 

Born to a 17-year-old high school student in 1964, he had founded Amazon in a garage in 1994, and I was one of two journalists invited to break bread with him while he explained his strategy.

I, at least, completely failed to grasp the magnitude of his ambitions (like the fund managers who, in his first capital-raising exercises, would ask Bezos: ‘What is the internet?’). 

All I now recall is his extraordinary intensity, vented in an explosive laugh, which sounded more like a seal barking than anything else.

He’s in a position to laugh now, having become, through his 11 per cent stake in Amazon, the world’s richest man. 

This, naturally, makes him unpopular, as well as admired. There have been a number of stories in recent weeks with headlines such as, ‘Amazon’s boss has earned $24 billion (£19 billion) during the Covid crisis’.

What that actually means is the value of his shares has gone up by that amount, as online purchases have soared during lockdowns in countries around the world, including the UK. 

But the many pension funds that invest in the stock will have gained proportionately (since 89 per cent of the business is not owned by Bezos).

They include the Church of England pension fund. I mention this only because in 2018, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, delivered a speech at the annual Trades Union Congress in which he declared: ‘When vast companies like Amazon and other online traders . . . can get away with paying almost nothing in tax, there is something wrong . . . They don’t pay a real living wage, so the taxpayer must support their workers with benefits.’

What the Archbishop somehow forgot to mention was that the Church Commissioners have Amazon among their top 20 global equity investments.

And, as the Rev Ray Anglesea, who worked on a zero-hours contract in a cathedral bookshop, wrote in a letter to the Times: ‘What the Most Rev Justin Welby did not disclose was how many of his cathedrals are zero contract hour employers and how many cathedral employees have no job certainty, no sick or holiday pay, and no maternity cover.’

Further update: in April, Amazon bumped up its starting rate for London-based employees to £12.50 an hour, and for those in less expensive parts of the country to £11.50 an hour (the Government’s National Living Wage for those aged 25 and over is £8.72 an hour). 

It also took on thousands of new employees to meet the surge in demand for its services during lockdown.

It is worth pausing to consider just how much more intolerable the lockdown would have been — and how much more damaging to jobs and the economy — if it had occurred in the age before online trade, pioneered by Amazon, became part of our lives.

Successful

Obviously, there is an issue about the tax Amazon pays (or doesn’t pay) relative to High Street retailers. 

Last year, Amazon UK paid £63.4 million in business rates, about £40 million less than Next, the fashion chain with sales about half those of Amazon in this country.

The bosses of big traditional retailers, such as Tesco’s Dave Lewis and Sports Direct’s Mike Ashley, have called for an online sales tax to — as they see it — make the competition ‘fairer’.

In fact, the Government is committed to a new tax on online businesses, ostensibly to indeed make things ‘fairer’. That’s fine, so long as everyone realises that the sums will, ultimately, come out of the pockets of consumers. Also, bear in mind that corporate taxes are charged on profits, not turnover, and Amazon’s business model has always been to operate at the very finest of margins (which is what makes it such a terrifying competitor — as well as beloved of consumers).

I am not saying that Bezos is a saint. Ex-employees talk of how, if they failed to meet his standards, he would say things such as, ‘Are you lazy, or just incompetent?’ and, ‘I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?’

But his rage at their expense is dedicated to the consumer. It is that, and not monopoly might, which makes Amazon so successful. 

The fact that it is about to apply the same formula to our High Streets is only to be welcomed. 

Bible lesson bovine Barry should heed  

If there were a competition to find the most ludicrous member of the House of Commons, surely the short-odds favourite would be Barry Sheerman, the Labour MP for Huddersfield.

He has certainly had a long time to perfect the art of his idiocy: Sheerman has been in the Commons for more than 40 years and will be 80 in a fortnight.

This weekend, he made his latest bid to win my imaginary contest outright with a couple of tweets on the list of new peers: ‘Apparently there has been a bit of a run on silver shekels! . . . Apparently Richard Desmond and Philip Green were on the original list for seats in the House of Lords!’

As the Campaign Against Antisemitism immediately pointed out: ‘Barry Sheerman’s first reaction on hearing that two prominent Jewish businessmen supposedly missed out on peerages is to think about ‘silver shekels’, alluding in one fell swoop to both classic and modern anti-Semitic tropes about Jews corrupting politics with money and being more loyal to Israel [the shekel is the Israeli currency] than their own countries.’

Sheerman then withdrew his tweets, claiming: ‘My attempt at irony talking about 30 pieces of silver has been misinterpreted by some comments . . . serves me right for re-reading the entire Bible in the lockdown!’ 

If he had actually done so with any degree of attention, he would have known there is no reference to shekels in the ’30 pieces of silver’, and that the ‘Judas’ story is about betrayal, not donations.

Sheerman’s subsequent protest that he has ‘fought anti-Semitism all my political life’ only makes his earlier outburst all the more evidence of his implacable ignorance.

Funnily enough, he is openly contemptuous of those he deems less educated than himself (he was a university lecturer in economics before he became an MP in 1979). 

Perhaps the Commons’ most intractable critic of the UK’s departure from the EU, in 2017 he sneered: ‘The truth is that when you look at who voted to remain, most of them were the better educated people in our country.’

And less than a fortnight ago, he was still tweeting that ‘the decision to leave the EU can no longer be regarded as valid or legitimate. We must delay our departure and hold a fresh referendum’. Bovine Barry is the last man in the country not to have got the message.

This sadly compulsive tweeter should act upon another passage from the Bible he claims to have re-read in full: ‘Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues.’