Amazon appears to be bulletproof. Despite the grim economic climate, Amazon continues to perform well, drawing comparisons to companies like Wal-Mart and phrases like "recession-proof." The general thought seems to be that consumers are cutting back and Internet shopping, especially at price-competitive, low- or free-shipping Amazon, is the fallback.

Personally, I signed up for Amazon's $79 Amazon Prime account a while ago and haven't looked back. I can order more of my bulk grocery needs and have them in two days, delivered, a godsend when you don't have a car. Amazon continues to expand its selections, offering even a wide variety of organic goods and items well beyond staples--I don't expect it to replace services like Fresh Farm to You or standard grocery delivery (Peapod), but you never know. With the way Amazon continues to expand its horizons, I'd watch my back if I was involved in e-commerce. 
 
And it’s not just e-commerce either. Amazon also runs amazing services for cloud computing, called AWS and EC2, providing servers and computing power and bandwidth for a huge variety of applications. You're probably using Amazon regularly without even knowing it, when using an iPhone application for instance. They own Alexa, one of the premier Web information firms, tracking Internet data. If you need a small, repetitive task done by humans, you'll want to try out Mechanical Turk, its system for connecting contractors with jobs. If that's not enough, they've started to fund films, run a TV and movie distribution system, own IMDB.com, and acquired Audible.com (a gigantic audiobook source). Throw in Kindle, and you're looking at a wide array of offerings. 
 
Which brings us to its latest announcement: Amazon will start accepting videogame trade-ins. Simply find the game on their special sub-site, decide if you like the offered price, print a label, and send it in for credit. This should worry GameStop, of course, which thrives on the used games market that it controls and whose stock lost 13 percent the day after the announcement. Toys 'R' Us recently announced that it is going to try and take a piece of the pie, but Amazon's deal is more interesting. It might be more hassle for some folks, less for others, and with trade-in values being about even between them all, hopefully Amazon can find a way to sweeten the deal for desperate gamers. Sure, offering "store credit" is one way (a 10% bonus in this case), but it doesn't go far enough. You can just sell your item directly to someone else (through Amazon, or Craigslist) and make quite a bit more, or use an online trading service if you just want a different game. 
 
But I think the party with the most to lose here is eBay, which is not doing so well, contrary to some predictions and expectations. Plenty of folks offer different reasons, but Amazon is clearly using their good name and product muscle to push ever more firmly onto eBay's turf. Yesterday, it came for your used books; today, for your games; tomorrow it'll be DVDs and CDs... and soon you'll see antiques.amazon.com.