Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.

It's easy to think of Amazon executives going home every night and bathing in their cynicism.

The company has amassed considerable power by using technology to decimate the margins of retail competitors, until those competitors can barely breathe.

Yet out of the limelight, Jeff Bezos's company is doing something that would delight the most Machiavellian of cynics with its sheer beautiful gall.

It's often contended that Amazon has put an enormous amount of pressure on shopping malls.

So much so that many of those malls are shutting their doors.

Yet, as the Wall Street Journal reports, Amazon is now moving into precisely those derelict malls.

Why? To use the space for its vast and, some might say heartless, fulfillment centers.

It's delicious in its strategic intentionality. It's the perfect way to ramp up Amazon's promise to make one-day delivery the norm.

The malls were specifically built to give access to large urban swathes.

To make that even easier, they were built with good access to highways.

Amazon's avowed intention to offer free one-day delivery for Prime members involves creating the reverse flow.

Where hordes once flowed toward the malls, now convoys of vans carrying packages will flow from the malls to the malls' former customers.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Of course, all of this serves to help Amazon fight Walmart, which has a great advantage when it comes to a physical presence near highly populated areas.

Meanwhile, we sit back, mourn the death of malls and can't wait to get our new underwear delivered just that little bit more quickly.

And how do we use the time we used to spend going to the mall?