On July 15, 2015, Amazon marked the twentieth anniversary of its founding with a “global shopping event” called Prime Day. Over the next 24 hours, starting at midnight, the company offered special discounts every ten minutes to the 44 million users of Amazon Prime, its members-only benefit program. The event was astonishingly successful: Amazon made 34 million Prime sales that day, nearly 20 percent more than it had on Black Friday, the traditional post-Thanksgiving buying bonanza. The company received almost 400 orders per second—all on a single, ordinary day in the middle of summer.

Prime Day is now an annual event; last year it marked the largest sales day in Amazon’s history. The sale has become a secular holiday, akin in its economic wallop and social ubiquity to Super Bowl Sunday or the Fourth of July. Today, nearly half of the nation’s households are enrolled in Prime. That’s more Americans than go to church every month. More than own a gun. And more than voted for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton last November.

The rise of Amazon, and its overwhelming market dominance, has accelerated the collapse of traditional retail outlets. Amazon’s stock has risen by 300 percent since 2012, and Wall Street analysts have compiled a “Death by Amazon” index to track the retail companies most likely to be killed off by the online giant. This year alone, three retail stalwarts—Walmart, JCPenney, and Rite Aid—plan to shutter or sell off nearly 1,200 stores, and nearly 90,000 Americans have been thrown out of work since October. One of every eleven jobs is tied to shopping centers, which generate $151 billion in sales taxes each year. All of which is rapidly being lost to a single company. In June, Amazon announced its largest-ever acquisition, paying $13.4 billion to buy the Whole Foods grocery chain. Such is the power of the “everything store” and its “one-click ordering.”

Amazon did not come to dominate the way we shop because of its technology. It did so because we let it. Over the past three decades, the U.S. government has permitted corporate giants to take over an ever-increasing share of the economy. Monopoly—the ultimate enemy of free-market competition—now pervades every corner of American life: every transaction we make, every product we consume, every news story we read, every piece of data we download. Eighty percent of seats on airplanes are sold by just four airlines. CVS and Walgreens have a virtual lock on the drugstore and pharmacy business. A private equity firm in Brazil controls roughly half of the U.S. beer market. The chemical giant Monsanto is able to dictate when and how farmers plant its seeds. Google and Facebook control nearly 75 percent of the $73 billion market in digital advertising. Most communities have one cable company to choose from, one provider of electricity, one gas company. Economic power, in fact, is more concentrated than ever: According to a study published earlier this year, half of all publicly traded companies have disappeared over the past four decades.

Monopoly can sometimes seem like a good thing. When Walmart first began to take over the retail industry, for example, Americans embraced its “everyday low prices.” Mom-and-pop stores on Main Street may have been going out of business, but the savings at the new Walmart were just too good to resist.