Amazon and the Op Eds in Newspapers

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Rhetorical Analysis Essay

The argument of the three op-eds is that e-commerce has changed the way we live and shop. However, not all the articles agree on the effect of e-commerce. They range in terms of how retail has changed and what’s on the horizon. Amy Koss writing for the LA Times likens Amazon.com to Satan. The Editorial Board of the New York Times takes a more measured approach but still puts forward a doom-and-gloom perspective. Daniel Freedman of the Wall Street Journal is the only one of the three to recognize that Amazon has not killed off the human desire for contact and sociality and that retail is not dead but only changing the way it thinks of itself and the manner in which it caters to consumers: retail is no longer just about offering a product but rather about offering an experience—something that cannot be purchased online. This paper will perform a rhetorical analysis of the three op-eds to show how they differ and which is the most effective.

Koss and the LA Times

The tone of Koss’s piece is gothic and romantic. It begins by describing a mall as a deserted structure like an old ruined castle where “lost souls” wander and over which Satan (Amazon) has cast his pall. The evidence that Koss presents is entirely anecdotal—all of it is witnessed first-hand. She provides no hyperlinks to other web pages or sources of information to support her claims. She is simply telling what she sees and how she perceives it. She tells of visiting the mall, seeing all the closed shops, and talking briefly to a sales woman who sales that everything must go because they too are closing soon. The metaphor that Koss employs is that Amazon is the Devil that has given people everything they want with just the click of a button: the price is that retailers are dying. Book sellers are losing hope. Everyone is shopping online and losing their humanity. The author does not supply much ethos but instead jumps into pathos and uses imagery to appeal to the reader’s emotions. The trick does not always work and the piece sometimes stumbles into bathos as she returns to the theme of Amazon being Satan and the e-commerce shopper being in the grip of the devil.

The central argument of the op-ed is that Amazon is bad because it has ruined malls, driving book sellers and other retailers out of business, and assumed near total control over people’s shopping habits through the use of “Big Data” (Koss).

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It sees and knows all and anticipates every consumer’s next move. The argument is couched in Koss’s narrative of visiting the mall and talking to book sellers. Their experiences are used to support her own. She provides background information along the way when it is needed to help her flesh out a point. The argument is not so much proven as reiterated, like a theme, in variations throughout the piece. It is assumed that the reader of the piece will be sympathetic to what Koss is describing—but Koss’s take is somewhat glib and superficial: it is too easy to describe Amazon as Satan, and a thinking person will not subscribe to Koss’s depiction. Koss uses colloquialisms like “we recite the roll of the dead” when describing the long list of retailers that have expired. But her use of terms like “sinister,” “hell,” “lost souls,” “Satan,” and “the damned” just indicates that she is looking to make more of a dramatic or visceral effect than a literal or logical one. The op-ed is written like an essay and contains no bullet points.

The Editorial Board of the New York Times

The tone of the New York Times piece is less dramatic and more informational, though it also adopts a pessimistic tone to convey the urgency of the situation—namely that the new President (Trump) must do something to save workers from Amazon’s takeover. The narrative is evidential, meaning that every claim or statement is supported by a fact—and the facts are given via hyperlinks, so the reader can click on the link and see where the authors of the op-ed have gotten their information. It is a very useful way to convey ethos: the authors’ assert their credibility by supplying so many links that surely the reader will agree that the piece is well-researched and full of facts that cannot be dismissed or argued.

The authors do not make use of metaphor except when they state that today’s workers need a “strong safety net” (Editorial Board)—they are referring to government assistance to keep them afloat during hard times as they look for new work, having lost their retail space jobs to e-commerce businesses. The article uses ethos to command its own….....

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"Amazon And The Op Eds In Newspapers" (2017, September 26) Retrieved July 2, 2025, from
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