> What barriers?
It's likely that you don't know that I was the 2nd employee at Amazon. I don't want to spend time here going into all the ways that Bezos sought to create barriers to entry for competitors, but Brad Stone's two books on the company get into this.
> People's preferences change. If something better comes along,
People in general are very bad at carrying out long term analysis of their preference-based decisions. People went to malls while professing to love Main St., most of them not realizing that the former would eventually kill the economics of the latter. Likewise, people's preference for online shopping doesn't actually amount to a desire to kill bricks-n-mortar retail, even though that is (likely) the eventual result. People's preferences generally express short-term feelings, rather than longer term rational analyses of how their lives, homes and societies may be affected by their choices.
> If amazon warehouses are located in "locations that are not typically the ones where people are choosing to live", doesn't that mean they'll have an harder time finding workers and you having an easier time finding workers?
That's why there's an article on HN (Jacobin, really) title "Amazon is creating company towns across the United States".
> but in metropolitan areas they're almost always surrounded by houses
Most of amzn's fulfillment centers are rural or exurban. Most of amzn's current development plans are focused on rural locations.
And I described this in order to make the point that rural areas are almost always more difficult places to generate economic alternatives than cities.
> I'm not sure why it has to be employee owned
The question was about alternatives. Jacobin authors probably don't see much difference trading one multi-billionaire CEO for another, so I was mentioning the most practical genuine alternative to the sort of economic entity that amzn represents.