Amazon is everywhere. That’s what makes it so vulnerable.

Is there a more familiar sign of corporate dominance than the Amazon delivery van?

As recently as four years ago, the blue-gray vehicle with the smiley arrow was a relative novelty among fleets of brown and blue-and-white delivery trucks clogging the streets. Today, the Amazon vans are almost inescapable. Between 2020 and 2022, their numbers more than doubled, to roughly 100,000.

But this symbol of Amazon’s strength may hint at something else: an underappreciated vulnerability.