Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

foxbusiness.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 410 posts

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#351

Post by boreas »

SilasX wrote: post #252
joezydeco wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It also is not unheard of for Wal-Mart to demand to examine the private financial records of a supplier, and to insist that its margins are too high and must be cut." https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know

Sorry if this gets too tangential, but ... you ever notice how people are horrified by that, but at the same time actively advocate that the government use its "bargaining" (monopsony) power to force down drug prices, and believe the only downsides will be to drug company profits?

This is an incredibly facetious example. You have to remember that the drug companies have effective monopolies for many expensive drugs. Do you actually believe that the government should be forced (by legislation) to accept unilaterally decreed prices by drug companies? These prices are not set by any market, so they have no relation to the cost of the drug or the research & development that went into discovering it.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#352

Post by Dylan16807 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #211
Kocrachon wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that? Back when Barnes and Noble was the big book store, same thing, they pressured better prices. What do you do, split up the book store into two companies, who still control the same market share and will both still put pressure on the book companies? Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle…

> Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that? In Germany, book prices are regulated: the printer sets the price, and the price the customer pays must be this price. Only exception are damaged (e.g. books with CD-ROM, but the CD is missing) or used books. The prices the retailers have to pay at the printer are of course different and may well be…

> What Amazon wants to do here is squeeze the authors off their profit, and this must be prevented.

Authors typically get a 10-15% cut of print books. Amazon wants to squeeze the publishers off their profit. While they can be heavy-handed and exploitative, they are much less so than traditional publishing. It's not abnormal for an author to make more money of a $9.99 kindle sale than a $25 print sale.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#353

Post by astrodust »

clhodapp wrote: post #334
cookiecaper wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never worked with Walmart directly, but to be fair, I experienced this kind of thing all the time as a contractor. It seems to be sort of an unspoken thing in accounting departments that you allow vendors to complain before you pay too much attention to the particularities of any given invoice. It doesn't excuse the practice and I always appreciated the clients who paid correctly and promptly, but I don't think…

If ever there were a use case for a lawsuit punitive damages, some poor company that is driven out of business by a well-documented case of this would be it. I know I'm being naive here but I feel that it should be clear to anyone with a sense of propriety that the big company should have to pay the liquidation cost for the small one!

Yes, suing your biggest distributor is a great way to succeed in business.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#354

Post by astrodust »

stephenhuey wrote: post #242
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wal-Mart have always been pure bastards to their supply chain. My family had a small manufacturing business that went bankrupt years ago. At one point we were making a part that ultimately ended up on a WM product. Periodically WM's folks would come around and do a strong arm routine trying to renegotiate the contract. It got bad enough my dad adopted the habit of bringing a couple of the very burly folks that worked…

Someone close to me related the story of when they almost put one of their products in Wal-Mart's stores in Canada about 2 decades ago. One big showstopper was that they were asking for the quality to be reduced so that the price could be lower. The vendor I know refused, saying that their product lasts a long time and they are proud of it and they wouldn't sign unless that stipulation was removed. A few months later…

Did Wal-Mart get another company to make a cheaper version of that product that's similar but sufficiently different that it's not infringing? That's their trademark move.

"Make it cheaper or we'll make it cheaper for you."

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#355

Post by tatersolid »

ajarmst wrote: post #123
ue_ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that competition is some kind of holy grail which we must as a society aspire to maintain, I think, is very narrow minded and suffering from tunnel vision.

You don't have to see competition as some sort of "holy grail" in order to perceive it as almost invariably better than its absence (from a consumer perspective) in a market economy.

And to preempt a rejoinder, a market economy has proven invariably better than the alternative. Remember, the Soviet Union collapsed because nobody wanted to wear Bulgarian shoes.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#356

Post by cat199 »

KirinDave wrote: post #94

This is... Not the best? That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor. On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a ge…

> On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this and the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business... I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors.

Could say the same thing about WalMart w/r/t local retail in rural America and now cities for the past 40 or so years...

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#357

Post by [deleted] »

Mz wrote: post #309
__d__ wrote: post #220

I sold to Walmart for 4 years. In the beginning we believed we were lucky to become vendors. Then we realized how much stress they created. Every single year they would short pay our invoices. We would have to submit a claim with Walmart accounting. This process was completely and utterly time consuming. But the worst of it, they wouldn't pay the invoices owed until a year later. It's hard to float a $100,000 short p…

From what I have read: Large businesses routinely do this to small businesses. It is standard operating procedure. If you have a small business, you need to be very leery of having a large customer.

[deleted]

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#358

Post by toomuchtodo »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #319
randcraw wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long wondered, with the rise of the internet, is prosecution really necessary to address unsavory business practices like these? Why not force the company into the light, posting this information in a useful form that informs the public and shames the malefactor? I'm a strong proponent of open . If shady behavior arises in business, government, public services, and even public discourse, I'd love to see a modera…

Because ultimately most people won't care enough to stop going with the cheaper option, especially when all you can point to is negative effects for vendors. It's not like Amazon is going around creating spurious libel lawsuits against people for publishing criticism of their business practices, or paying for people to muddy the waters with counter-articles. It's just that the information largely fall on deaf ears. I…

> Because ultimately most people won't care enough to stop going with the cheaper option, especially when all you can point to is negative effects for vendors.

Indeed. If people could get cheaper clothing if slavery was made legal again, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Witness to a lesser extent the general sentiment on HN that Uber is "helping drivers", when they're indentured servants.

I wouldn't call it consumer excess when you're exploiting someone with limited options.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#359

Post by mason55 »

johnflan wrote: post #316
randcraw wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few points in refutation. I see Amazon as far ahead of Walmart in all ways that promise growth: 1) Walmart may be the biggest retailer in the US, but they don't have half of the US homes as subscribers. Amazon Prime does. I doubt Walmart.com attracts any where near as many e-tail visitors as Amazon, and I suspect the gap is widening. 2) Amazon is decades ahead of Walmart in the online shopper experience. I grit my…

Walmart also launched jet.com

Walmart bought jet.com

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#360

Post by syshum »

randcraw wrote: post #288
dkrich wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think concerns about Amazon becoming a monopoly are greatly exaggerated. They are getting attacked from all sides, by Microsoft in the cloud and Wal-Mart in ecommerce. As Microsoft grabs share from them in web services it'll reduce Amazon's ability to cross-subsidize its ecommerce business. As Wal-Mart and Costco continue to catch up in ecommerce and free two-day shipping becomes table stakes in ecommerce, Amazon's…

A few points in refutation. I see Amazon as far ahead of Walmart in all ways that promise growth: 1) Walmart may be the biggest retailer in the US, but they don't have half of the US homes as subscribers. Amazon Prime does. I doubt Walmart.com attracts any where near as many e-tail visitors as Amazon, and I suspect the gap is widening. 2) Amazon is decades ahead of Walmart in the online shopper experience. I grit my…

>> Amazon welcomes re-sellers (which can span all market niches), while Walmart doesn't.

This is false, You can sell things on walmart.com as a reseller

https://marketplace.walmart.com/

There are not many resellers doing it, no where near as many as Amazon but many large online shops are embracing the Amazon Model, Newegg does it now, Walmart, and a few others.

Amazon is also getting more aggressive with their resellers, putting in more restrictions, heavily favoring the Fulfilled by program where Amazon gets a larger cut, increase the number of blackout catagories, and increasing the number of items sold by Amazon directly which puts huge pricing pressure on Resellers that can not get the pricing amazon can.

Several Niche and some larger brand have pulled out of Amazon completely in the last couple of years for these (and the counterfeiting problem) issues

Post reply on HN