So the .001% are making waves about the .00001% nibbling on their huge slice of pie. Yippee!
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The idea that the merchants using Amazon Fulfillment and back office services aren’t making money is a Trump-level falsehood. It’s true that Amazon makes money off its fulfillment businesses, just as it makes money off its cloud. But it’s not true that the companies who use those services are losing money, just as it’s not true that companies using its cloud lose money.
Reducing costs requires scale.
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Two things that I think make Amazon a particularly scary monopoly are:
A) They have much smarter people working for them than rival monopolies like Walmart. Like, an order of magnitude. And they are wildly better organized.
B) They are wildly beneficial to consumers. Of course this exploits a century of economists flogging the false consumer/worker dichotomy, but I think it’s genuinely hard for most people to make the connection intuitively.
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It would be had anyone said that.
Which is why Amazon has gotten every state in the union to eliminate their tax burden, and shops around states that will give them the most money to expand there.
More to the point, Amazon still forces small businesses to operate through Amazon and then uses their private label to stomp out the competition they can’t purchase for the price they offer. That’s not a healthy market.
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Are you seriously trying to say that Amazon isn’t the extreme behemoth in the online shopping arena? Surely you don’t believe that one has to be the largest player in all of merketdom to be worth regulating?
my issue personally isn’t with Amazon. IMHO People use Amazon because they’ve been slavishly devoted to good customer service and customer experience while also having “good enough” prices that in many cases, people don’t even online comparison shop anymore. My issue is that “competition” in an arena like that would require another company with the deep pockets required to bleed money for years and years to build a similar infrastructure, and that seems exceedingly unlkely.
I personally think government intervention to ensure that small players can offer comparable value (both in price and in usability/customer-focus) to amazon without requiring unattainable levels of capital up front is probably the best way to foster competition.
I mean, I’d use a “fair-trade” amazon that guaranteed great conditions for it’s logistics workers and a focus on locally produced goods, say - but right now even if there was a company willing to do this, they could never afford the startup costs. The government could help on that front.
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Here’s a list of DOJ antitrust filings in reverse chronological order. Looks like the filing rate around halved in the last 2 years, but was much higher since 1970 than before, and much higher since 1994 than 1970-1993.
(The people I’ve met in the DOJ antitrust division have all been hard-working and deeply committeed to enforcing the antitrust laws.)
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I am not so sure about that. WalMart has been a customer of mine at a few jobs. They are a legitimate tech giant in their own right, to operate at the scale they do.
When I was in college, they held the title of having the largest databases ever created and maintained in the history of tech.
They hold a few such titles with my current employer, but it is not public info.
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i think this is also part of the point re: their private label brands. people only have so much bandwidth.
the proliferation of choice on amazon is already dizzying. it takes a serious commitment to weigh price and options on the array of similar goods. to do that across multiple sites with multiple geegaw whizbang interfaces? of course people don’t.
it’s similar to the way individual brands will flood supermarket shelves with 48 varieties of say… peanut butter. it builds brand loyalty because people first settle on the brand, and then select the style of product.
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We really need to create a hierarchy of evil corporations and go after the most evil first. I.E. the ones who are most destroying or preventing fixing issues with the environment, democracy, innovation, etc.
Clearly there are companies who have been practicing extreme fuckery for decades or more earlier than Amazon or Google.
Telcos, Fox News / Corporate media, Fossil Fuel Companies, Pharmaceutical Companies and Banks leap to mind.
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That’s right, the Post hurt Trump’s fee-fees, and so Amazon must pay!
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All very true, but they fall down on the people side, in part because of their obsession with underpaying people (the main reason they are a Wall Street darling). I was near Bentonville in the mid-late '90s, and got to hear about both their computer power and how they treated even their corporate staff (see above). I also happened to have some insider info on their failure to launch a website (!) when they insisted on doing it out of Bentonville within their own corporate structure.
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Well put. I think it is critical that we break up Amazon, Alphabet (ugh), et al. But we need to do them last.
I pity you, stranger who comes from an alternative universe in which businesses other than Amazon are incapable of setting up stores on the internet. In this universe, you will be pleased to learn that thousands of small businesses sell their goods on the internet without going through Amazon in any way.
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I think Amazon falls down on that count in their warehouses. And they overwork the ones they do not underpay (coders).
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Most of them don’t pay sales tax in most states. Amazon collects sales tax nationwide, including every tax jurisdiction such as city and county taxes. And most of them don’t have the range of goods that require knowing all reduced or zero sales tax goods which vary by state.
Amazon doesn’t currently collect sales tax nationwide for their marketplace vendors, but given the recent supreme court decision that widens the criteria states can use to determine a Nexus for sales tax purposes, you can expect them to start doing that and more small retailers having no choice but to move to Amazon.
Congress could have fixed this years ago by setting specific rules on how states could collect sales tax from interstate sales and directing the department of commerce to set up a public database of conforming sales tax rules. But they didn’t so we are going to get Amazon. And while it will suck, it will suck less than the alternative which would basically be many of those retailers shutting down.
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Anti-trust is a big umbrella, but we are all well aware that the specific nature this thread is about has been a problem for longer than two years. Beyond retailers everyone is aware of how few commercial retailers there are in many industries. As for one that was brought up recently that is valid; we are two decades into telecoms knowingly split the country into competition-free chunks, and in that time they have been rolled into 2-3 companies owning almost the entire market and expanding into very sketchy territory like merging with competitive technologies (all above board of course 
).
I’m sure there’s plenty of anti-trust legislation being enforced, but considering the 70s is sort of the origin of the timeline these mergers began to happen I can’t hold a lot of stock in there being a lot of suits being filed urging ge timeframe alone.
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A substantial fraction of the cases are exactly the sort of thing this thread is about, namely civil mergers and unfair pricing. One can complain that there haven’t been enough cases (DOJ prosecutors don’t usually bring a case unless they are pretty confident of winning), or that too often there is compromise, or that the laws in place have not been adequate to prevent some bad market concentration, but that is a different complaint than “anti-trust hasn’t existed in the US in my lifetime”.
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I know a lot of online re-sellers, particularly with regard to books. These guys barely scrape by. The company I work for has an Amazon Advantage account, and we all regard Amazon like they were the mafia-- we have no choice but to use them because of their dominance, but they demand a ridiculous discount (45% plus free shipping) that we have started considering how much value there really is in using them, and limit which products we send them now.
Arguably we ALL invest in the markets, since we all buy products (unless you’re a mountain man hermit, or possibly Amish) and a government of the people, by the people, has to look out for the interests of the people, not just those who can afford “investments.” I don’t like Walmart any more than Amazon, I’ve seen small communities where all the small businesses disappear when Walmart arrives. I doubt anyone here really favors one big retailer over another, but you are probably correct in assuming some politicians do.
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Because I wasn’t being literal?
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America, where market-based economy is a fringe left-wing idea.
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