You did the right thing this morning.

Instead of the one-click default to your laptop’s last opened tab, you opened Etsy and bought a ceramic mug from a maker you’d been following on Instagram. Yesterday, your sister’s birthday gift came from a Shopify store run by a kitchenware designer in Sacramento, California. You felt something when you clicked “buy,” a small, warm, fuzzy feeling. Not Amazon. Not a giant. Someone real.

The package will arrive on time, in unmarked brown cardboard, in two days.

It will arrive that way because Amazon delivered it.

On May 4, 2026, Amazon announced the launch of Amazon Supply Chain Services. It opens Amazon’s warehouses, trucks and delivery network – built over decades to ship products from its own website – to outside companies of any size. Procter & Gamble, 3M, Lands’ End and American Eagle are among the first customers. The headlines framed it as a logistics story – Amazon is coming for UPS and FedEx – and most coverage stopped there.

But the bigger shift is one that consumers can’t see, and it has to do with how they support small businesses. A 2024 Pew Research survey found that 86% of Americans say small businesses have a positive effect on the country. For the millions of shoppers who have been redirecting their dollars away from corporate giants and toward small and local businesses, the May 4 announcement isn’t a logistics story at all. It’s about whether that effort still means what they think it means.

We’re scholars of consumer behavior and marketing who study how people square their purchasing decisions with ethical considerations, and we see a growing dilemma for consumers: If you pick the small........

© The Conversation