Jeff Bezos may be holding a Trump card in the U.S. retail-store slump. Amazon.com, the e-commerce giant he runs, is considering a bid for the bankrupt American Apparel, according to a Reuters exclusive, just as Macy's and other department stores are losing sales and cutting staff. A deal could be a handy way to show a president-elect suspicious of Silicon Valley that he's saving thousands of working-class U.S. jobs.
It wouldn't be the main reason for Amazon to pounce on American Apparel, whose brand proudly refers to how it manufactures all its clothing in a Los Angeles factory employing some 4,500 people. The business would be a natural fit with Amazon's in-house fashion offerings that it launched last year and with earlier acquisitions like Shopbop and Zappos.
