Regardless of law, they are profitably delivering a very wide variety of items to my door for significantly cheaper than anywhere else I look. I cannot ignore that
Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?
91–100 of 159 posts
Re: Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The leases don’t show up as expenses in Amazon’s free cash flow calculations, even though the equipment is listed as an asset. Article aside, how does this work?
Let's say you mortgage something, take on $250k in debt. You now have $250k in assets. Net is zero. You don't take away the debt payments from your income, since you received something from taking on the debt, and it becomes a net positive over time. It works similarly with operating leases. But the actual accounting is a tad more complicated, so here's a link: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/operatinglease.asp
Isn't this basically converting capex to opex?
Re: Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?
#93Amazon has a team called "Amazon Profitability Group". I used to work for said team, albeit only briefly. The purpose of the team is to calculate the proper price to sell items for, the "discount" to vendors, and the items to put in the "buy box" in order to make the most profit for Amazon. I think the what is described here in the article is only the tip of the iceberg. Amazon isn't doing something as simplistic as…
I'm not sure offloading its decision-making to the neural network will be an effective legal protection for Amazon against anti-trust claims. The key question in the US is whether "predatory" pricing results in financial harms (higher prices) to US consumers. As I understand the logic put froth by Bork in the 70s, the general idea is that "the market" will solve this problem in most cases, under the assumption that if a single big company tries to gouge consumers, rival firms will emerge that are able to outcompete them, thus restoring (or at least reapproaching) the idealized price equilibrium.
The law article cited in ths news story seems to be saying that even though Amazon's practices haven't visibly hurt consumers in terms of retail prices, this is due to the ability to play legal games with corporate accounting that conceal the present and future anticompetitive effects of Amazon's business model, and that its status as the dominant platform for online retailers presents some degree of threat to competition.
Lina Khan published a very informative and influential review on Amazon and antitrust in 2017. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
Re: Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?
#94Maybe this so-called "law student" should read up on retail marketing terms from time to time. Loss-leaders have been a thing for decades if not longer. Amazon is just able to maintain more loss-leaders than your average brick-and-mortar store (chain or non-chain), and their operations are diversified beyond E-commerce/retail with higher margins which can polish the numbers quite a bit.
The world has yet to see another monopoly on the scale of Standard Oil, and no, Amazon (specifically in the E-commerce market) is nowhere even close to that. One law student's "predatory pricing" is just another business' loss-leader.
I hope Mr.Sussman will one day acquire the knowledge that he won't be the first nor the last to come up with ideas on how to challenge Amazon.
Re: Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?
#95Regardless of law, they are profitably delivering a very wide variety of items to my door for significantly cheaper than anywhere else I look. I cannot ignore that
What about if/when they are the only retail company left and significantly raise prices? This is the reason such laws exist.
Re: Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?
#96Reminds me of the astonishing anti-trust case against Microsoft arguing that giving consumers free stuff was harming them.
Re: Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue consumers are benefiting greatly from Amazon's profits. They have overall re-invested those profits into other businesses that benefit consumers. Ex: Purchased Whole Foods and have brought down those prices overall plus building Amazon Go stores which offer a much better consumer experience than traditional grocery. Amazon's Web Services platform has leveled the playing field and enabled many startups. Amaz…
Benefiting now perhaps, but isn't the point that in the long run customers will be worse off because of what Amazon is doing?
Maybe, but Amazon faces competition from Ebay, Alibaba, even Walmart. It's unlikely they can raise prices significantly and maintain market share, nor is it likely that they can push out all of those competitors.
Re: Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?
#98Amazon has a team called "Amazon Profitability Group". I used to work for said team, albeit only briefly. The purpose of the team is to calculate the proper price to sell items for, the "discount" to vendors, and the items to put in the "buy box" in order to make the most profit for Amazon. I think the what is described here in the article is only the tip of the iceberg. Amazon isn't doing something as simplistic as…
I do believe these sorts of "Amazon is amazingly smart" posts. But they are hard to reconcile with why Amazon keeps showing me a rice cooker ad, after I buy a rice cooker from them.
They've probably modelled the failure rate for the first one you bought.
Re: Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?
#99Amazon has a team called "Amazon Profitability Group". I used to work for said team, albeit only briefly. The purpose of the team is to calculate the proper price to sell items for, the "discount" to vendors, and the items to put in the "buy box" in order to make the most profit for Amazon. I think the what is described here in the article is only the tip of the iceberg. Amazon isn't doing something as simplistic as…
I do believe these sorts of "Amazon is amazingly smart" posts. But they are hard to reconcile with why Amazon keeps showing me a rice cooker ad, after I buy a rice cooker from them.
Reminds me of booking.com that keeps on sending me hotels in small towns I just visited once (for a weeding, driving thru) etc. I don’t why they get smarter than that
Re: Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?
#100Does antitrust law apply to a monopsony?