A Green Amazon?
Amazon is following a new crowd: the environmental, eco-friendly, tree hugging crowd. Two months ago, they started a new shopping site called Vine.com that sells green products. “Products must fall into one of the following categories: they must be designed to remove toxins, energy-efficient, natural, organic, powered by renewable energy, reusable, made of sustainable materials or water-efficient.” In addition, Vine has a specific section on their website that sells products that come from a 100 miles radius of the buyer’s home, in an effort to help out local businesses. Consequently, this gives a completely new image to the world’s largest online retailer, who typically puts small stores out of business.
Reality lies in the fact that the world has become exponentially more environmentally aware. In the past decade, people have quadrupled their efforts to make this world “greener”. What does this mean for big companies such as Amazon? They need to make an even BIGGER effort to keep up with this hopefully non-ephemeral trend. In a certain sense, this resembles a cascade: Amazon is imitating the eco-friendly genre of other retailers and shoppers. Initially Amazon didn’t have any reason to support green or local products (they had no private or public information that suggested it was necessary). However, with more people becoming devastatingly aware that our earth is dying if we don’t take extreme and immediate steps towards the remedial of Mother Nature, Amazon rationally decided that there was a good reason to also take these similar steps (also a simple example of supply and demand).
Their new shopping website exemplifies the direct-benefit effect. By satisfying the desires and demands of the environmental crowd, as the name clearly states, Amazon directly benefits (their payoffs increase).
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source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/amazon-starts-a-shopping-site-for-the-environmental-crowd/