The Harvard Business Review has a great website, combining not only the articles from their magazine, but daily summaries of key articles, interesting statistics and a number of cool blogs ranging from “soft” HR issues to “hard” business articles. Frances Frei and Anne Morriss wrote a blog entry called, “Target and the Threat of Free Riders” that is pretty good. I know what you’re thinking — umm, doesn’t the heading for this blog entry say it’s about “publishing”? Yes, yes, it does. Because while Frei and Morriss are primarily talking about Target, the hidden subtext behind it is Amazon.

You might remember the big kerfuffle at Christmas time…Amazon released a new App that could scan bar codes, and they encouraged you while shopping in bricks and mortar stores to do some price comparisons. And then, *gasp*, buy from Amazon if the price was cheaper. They even had the audacity to offer initial discount coupons to those using the apps. The blogs exploded with stories of how Amazon was evil, how dare they do this, it was destroying the local infrastructure. They were essentially complaining that Amazon was being a “free rider” — the store chains have physical locations with large overhead costs they have to pay, and here Amazon was saying “go visit them, touch and feel your items in person, exploit their overhead, and then buy from us.”… Read the rest