[CrackerNews]

That leads to the cost of cleaning up after the customer to make sure they can buy what they need.

Before Amazon, there were the club warehouse retail models like Costco where the frontend experience was cut down and the backend infrastructure scaled up. This all led to cost savings passed onto the customer.

Amazon seems like the next step where the last mile delivery infrastructure was expanded and the retail frontend was replaced by a website. Instead of millions of frontend retail workers, it's software knowledge workers with an accompanying expansion of the backend retail workers.

Now, the software knowledge workers are eating backend retail.