Andy Jassy, the man who inherited Jeff Bezos’s throne but none of his flamboyant supervillain energy, has finally stepped to the podium to deliver the news we all knew was coming. On Tuesday, the Amazon CEO signaled that the inevitable has arrived: the trade-war chickens are coming home to roost, and they are significantly more expensive than the ones you ordered on Prime yesterday. Jassy, in a display of corporate stoicism that would be moving if it weren’t so patently cynical, informed the world that tariffs are starting to drive up product prices. It is a classic move from the executive playbook—pre-empting the inevitable gouging of the consumer by blaming the very government that the company spends millions lobbying every year.

The situation is a delicious comedy of errors for anyone with a functioning frontal lobe. On one side, we have the political class—those cognitive lightweights who believe that slapping taxes on imports is a sophisticated chess move rather than a blunt-force trauma to the wallet of the average citizen. The Right treats tariffs as a form of patriotic muscle-flexing, a way to 'punish' foreign adversaries by making sure a single mother in Ohio pays fifteen percent more for a toaster. The Left, meanwhile, maintains these same tariffs under the guise of 'protecting labor,' a performative gesture that does absolutely nothing for the factory worker but does wonders for the optics of a campaign rally. Both sides are playing a game of fiscal masochism, and the only people who lose are the idiots who think either party cares about their purchasing power.

Enter Jassy, the technocratic shepherd of our digital consumption. He tells us that Amazon is 'trying' to keep prices low. One can almost see the crocodile tears welling in his eyes as he describes the 'unavoidable' nature of these price hikes. It is a masterstroke of branding. Amazon, a company that has systematically dismantled the concept of local retail and turned the global supply chain into its personal plaything, wants you to believe it is a helpless victim of macroeconomic forces. It’s the same old song: 'We’d love to keep your plastic trinkets cheap, truly we would, but these big bad politicians are making it so hard for us to maintain our record-shattering margins.'

The reality, of course, is that Amazon isn't a victim; it’s the house, and the house always wins. If prices go up, Amazon takes its percentage of a larger pie. If prices stay low, they squeeze their third-party sellers until they bleed. But the narrative of 'unavoidable' hikes is necessary to keep the cattle from stampeding. Jassy’s warning is a calculated release valve, designed to prepare the American public for the reality that their addiction to cheap, disposable garbage is about to get slightly more taxing. We are a nation built on the high-speed delivery of things we don’t need, paid for with money we don’t have, and now we are being told that the privilege of this stupidity will cost a premium.

Let’s deconstruct the word 'unavoidable.' In the vocabulary of a CEO, 'unavoidable' means 'we refuse to let our quarterly dividends drop by even a fraction of a cent to absorb the cost of a trade policy we failed to stop.' To the billionaire class, any decrease in the rate of profit growth is viewed as a humanitarian crisis. Jassy isn't worried about you being able to afford a new blender; he’s worried about the optics of Amazon’s growth curve. The tariffs are a convenient scapegoat, allowing the corporation to hike prices across the board while pointing a finger at the circus in Washington. It is a symbiotic relationship of incompetence and greed: the politicians create the mess, and the corporations use the mess as cover for their next extraction.

In the end, we get exactly what we deserve. We demand that our leaders 'bring back jobs' through archaic trade barriers, then we act shocked when the things those jobs supposedly produce cost more than we’re willing to pay. We worship at the altar of Prime, handing over our data and our autonomy for the sake of 'low prices,' and then we act surprised when the monopoly tells us the discount era is over. Jassy’s Tuesday announcement wasn't a news update; it was a eulogy for the fantasy of the free lunch. The tariffs are here, the prices are rising, and the only thing more certain than an Amazon price hike is the bottomless stupidity of the people who will keep clicking 'Buy Now' while complaining about the cost of the rope being used to hang them.