Really? That sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the only thing they do is provide book ordering services, but amazon does it better, should amazon really feel bad about that? When you successfully pass an interview and get a job offer, do you feel bad enough for those who didn’t do as well that you turn down the job offer?
EDIT: forgot to add, I suspect there are many things small bookstores could do in terms of building a local community (in-person and online) of people who love books, improving discovery options for new books from that community, that kind of thing. So maybe they should be doing that i.e. “do things that don’t scale” to try and delight their users more than amazon does, in a way where their lack of scale is an advantage?
I think some tried some things. Barnes and Nobles did some. The results weren't successful, and that was pretty discouraging to other book store owners.
As book store owner, I really think it's an irrational decision to invest heavily in fighting Amazon. You're chances of success are pretty slim.
As for big businesses ? Well, there's Walmart, Target.
In the end, the e-commerce industry is a place where most of the market share would be controlled by a few large companies. That was clear from the beginning.
""They haven't tried anything. Every business being beaten by Amazon""
This again, is glib.
To suggest that you somehow know all these vendors have 'not tried anything'.
How about lobbying government to subsidize their business like the US Government subsidizes delivery? Or the VAT tax breaks that Amazon gets? Or the fact that Amazon is dumping merchandise on the US by selling for negative margins, paid for by profits out of AWS?
A local bookstore has 6 staff. They have no power.
Amazon started off with 21 employees - do you think that’s a meaningfully different number? Amazon at that didn’t didn’t get any of the advantages you list. So do think it might be worth considering what they did differently at the beginning, when they were the tiny business, going up against huge and powerful companies like Barnes and Nobles?
This is a little glib. There's nothing most of these small business can do.