Amazon built a giant trucking operation to serve itself, and now it is renting that operation out to everyone. Freight carriers got the message fast, and their stocks dropped the same day.
Amazon is opening up what is called less-than-truckload shipping to all businesses, where several companies share space on one trailer instead of paying for a whole truck.
Until now, that service was mostly for sellers shipping goods into Amazon's warehouses, but the company says it will now carry freight for any business, to any address in the country.
The move folds into Amazon Supply Chain Services, the company's growing push to sell its supply chain muscle to outside customers.
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Amazon is not a small player here, since its freight arm runs about 80,000 trailers and 24,000 containers, all built over years to handle its own deliveries.
Turning that into a service for outsiders is like a company that built a private cafeteria suddenly opening the doors and charging the public, where the kitchen was already there and now it is a business.
The worry spread quickly, with Old Dominion dropping more than 6% while Saia and XPO each fell around 5%.
Amazon has spent years cutting its reliance on outside carriers, building cargo planes, vans, and trailers so it controls its own deliveries.
Now it is flipping that cost into a product, offering features like GPS tracking and flexible pickups to pull in customers of every size.
Last month Amazon rolled out a full end-to-end shipping service that sent UPS and FedEx shares lower too, so this is a familiar pattern aimed at a new corner of the market.
Whether Amazon can pull real customers away from carriers that have run these routes for decades.
The network Amazon built for itself is now everyone else's competition.
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