The problem with Amazon’s own brand of mince pies is that they are delicious. For years, the e-commerce giant has had its fingers in every pie – Amazon wind farms and an Amazon airline are no longer Amazon Blink’s thing. But now Jeff Bezos has his finger in the cake pie: For £2.04 ($2.50), UK Amazon customers can have six deep-filled “by Amazon” mince pies delivered to their door.
(For those unfamiliar, a mince pie is an individual Christmas treat with spiced fruit with no meat in it, no matter what that one American food blog said in 2019.)
And yes, the problem is that Amazon’s taste is great; they’re packed with orange zest, French brandy, port, and minced apple (thankfully no minced apple, though it’s only a matter of time). The dough is crumbly and sweet. The filling – rich and generous – has at least one thing in common with Amazon’s founder. And so with every bite it becomes harder to resist the gradual monopolization of the entire planet by a man who throws his head back when he laughs.
Photo: Amazon
In 2019, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren vowed to break up “big tech companies” that have “too much power over our economy, our society, our democracy, and our little Christmas treats.” (She may not have said the latter.) Concerns grew about Amazon manipulating search results to favor its own brands over competitors’ — a practice the company denied. Yet Amazon has apparently scaled back promotions of its private label products as a result.
Things were looking good for third-party sellers when, also in 2019, research by e-commerce analysts Marketplace Pulse found that “Amazon private label brands are nowhere near as successful as many claim.” The report found that only 1.7 percent of the top 500,000 search terms on Amazon lead a customer to click on an AmazonBasics branded product.
Except… two years later, in 2021, Amazon came out with its own mince pies. Does it matter that I don’t know who makes them – that their pretty purple box is ominously signed by an anonymous figure known only as “The Baker”? Unfortunately, no, because they taste better than the cakes offered by at least two major British supermarkets. With their simple, silver-foil-coated bottoms and sugar-coated tops, they could be the most disruptive tech product of the past decade.
How can mama’s home baking compete in such an environment? Customers seem to agree. Amazon’s mince pies have a rating of 4.4 out of 5 after 117 reviews; reviews indicate that someone named John and someone named Sandra continued to buy them well into January.
So is this it, the last nail in the coffin, the last time we try to resist our new insect overlords? Maybe not. While Amazon may have mastered the mincemeat and conquered Christmas, it may be too late. According to The Wall Street Journal, Amazopn began cutting back on its private label products this summer after poor sales. While it’s unclear whether Amazon’s food brands will also pull the lead, the company still controls just 2.4 percent of the U.S. grocery market, even after purchasing Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017.
Amazon Pieme maybe not enough to turn things around. If you told most Britons that Amazon had branched into the much-loved Christmas treat market and started making its own mince pies, they’d be baffled. In August, Amazon halted the rollout of physical Amazon Fresh stores in the UK after sales in its existing 19 stores fell below expectations.
Caveats: That may have something to do with the fact that I managed to grab my mince pies and walk out of the store without paying (thanks to sensors, this is how the high-tech store works) and without paying (this is not how the high-tech store works; my card payment failed, but I was not notified until later).
As lip-smacking, waist-pinching grandmas have long told us, there’s no such thing as a truly guilt-free mince pie. Buy Amazon’s and you might be supporting the company least in need of support in the entire world. But also – frankly, alas, Spirit-of-Christmas-Future-shakes-his-head-at-you-have a lovely time.
