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Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

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Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#41

Post by Hasz »

This "everything as a service" industry is a terrible deal for consumers. It's a great deal for companies though.

Why should I pay a constant fee for things that should have been one time purchases?

Why should I lock myself into a proprietary ecosystem?

Why should a pay a membership fee to Cos. who just want to harvest my data at every turn?

Lawmakers, in the spirit of promoting competition, should seek to lower switching costs, increase price transparency, increase interoperability, reduce network affects, and lower barriers to entry for all fields, tech especially. Generics, in every field, should be encouraged and widely available.

1(see Spotify, Netflix, most terrible VC ideas(Bryd, Line) etc) 2(see Amazon, Apple's walled garden of hardware and software, etc) 3(see Amazon, most membership clubs)

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#42

Post by disinclination »

siliconc0w wrote: post #38

It seems the premise of every rental or subscription service is that you will send them more money, on average, than if you purchased the items a la cart (on average). I'm basically betting against a company with way more time, data, and expertise which seems like a fools agreement. The flip side of this coin is that I get free stuff subsidized by investors in hopes that eventually they get big enough or kill enough…

Yeah, I’m generally gonna choose to shop at other retailers, who charge flat prices and don’t try to optimize for net profit.

Waaaait a minute... you don’t think the wily motherfuckers could be using all their data and resources to boost revenue on the a la carte side, do you?

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#43

Post by zwkrt »

geofft wrote: post #21
zwkrt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more wild and outlandish thought experiment: would you become infinitely indebted for infinite reward? Imagining some cyberpunk wasteland where every commodity, pastime, medication, and media content is wildly expensive but offset by huge subsidies from complicated conglomeration of other corporations and government entities. Every action you take in your life adds wild positives and negatives to a fantastically co…

Are they fungible? Do secondary markets exist? The whole promise of money is that you can just add and subtract the value of all those things to get a number in a reasonable range. With money you can meaningfully compare "a pound of gold" and "two pounds of silver," and you can settle a debt you owe Alice via a debt Bob owes you instead of keeping both imbalances forever. Maybe this is me being broken by working in f…

The effectiveness of sci fi is the extent to which it exemplifies problems in the real world!

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#45

Post by aj7 »

Some unrelated (to each other) comments. 1. These trapping effects already exist when people won’t quit an otherwise disadvantageous job because of medical benefits. 2. A leasehold is not entirely one-sided in our system. It is designed to confer the full benefits of property ownership to the lessor, for a given amount of time, in return for the lessor’s paying of rent. All the Alexa-like machinations described seem to be modifications of the way rent is paid. 3. The book Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff, attempts to quantify various forms of forward value extracted from consumers by social media and intelligence gathering platforms.

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#46

Post by iseanstevens »

zwkrt wrote: post #12
geofft wrote: post #3

Thought experiment (I don't actually want to go down this road): can you out-market Amazon in this scenario? If you have a $400 committed spend for a $500 rent discount, can you find people who would buy things from Amazon anyway and offer to make purchases on their behalf at a 1% discount (which is, on paper, obviously rational for them), such that you're now getting back $396 of the $400? Now you're spending a mere…

A more wild and outlandish thought experiment: would you become infinitely indebted for infinite reward? Imagining some cyberpunk wasteland where every commodity, pastime, medication, and media content is wildly expensive but offset by huge subsidies from complicated conglomeration of other corporations and government entities. Every action you take in your life adds wild positives and negatives to a fantastically co…

Love it. This is like the hacker news version of Late Night Imgur.

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#47

Post by nexuist »

geofft wrote: post #3

Thought experiment (I don't actually want to go down this road): can you out-market Amazon in this scenario? If you have a $400 committed spend for a $500 rent discount, can you find people who would buy things from Amazon anyway and offer to make purchases on their behalf at a 1% discount (which is, on paper, obviously rational for them), such that you're now getting back $396 of the $400? Now you're spending a mere…

>could purchasers band together and join an organization that negotiates on their behalf, organizes boycotts, etc. for a relatively small fee?

I think you just reinvented unions.

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#48

Post by ggggtez »

TheRealSteel wrote: post #2

No. And I would expect anti monopoly laws legislation to outlaw this in any halfway civilised country (altho I wouldn't hold out much hope for America). "The toaster oven will only accept certain co-branded bread and other marked-up food products: any attempts to cook other food will throw an error message; “Unauthorized Bread.”" Barely fiction: Keurig, Juicero.

Assuming it was in the form of: You pay the total value in rent, and each month $500 is added to your amazon balance (I'm assuming that's how such a plan would feasibly work in practice)... then, yeah sure. Of course, the devil is in the details, but taking the deal just at face value, yeah it's profitable why wouldn't you do it?

Even if you bought stuff you didn't need, but you could resell later for a 20% loss after fees, that's still essentially a free $400 a month just for holding onto some merchandise in your closet temporarily. That's probably worth it for most people.

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#50

Post by wanderer2323 »

zwkrt wrote: post #12
geofft wrote: post #3

Thought experiment (I don't actually want to go down this road): can you out-market Amazon in this scenario? If you have a $400 committed spend for a $500 rent discount, can you find people who would buy things from Amazon anyway and offer to make purchases on their behalf at a 1% discount (which is, on paper, obviously rational for them), such that you're now getting back $396 of the $400? Now you're spending a mere…

A more wild and outlandish thought experiment: would you become infinitely indebted for infinite reward? Imagining some cyberpunk wasteland where every commodity, pastime, medication, and media content is wildly expensive but offset by huge subsidies from complicated conglomeration of other corporations and government entities. Every action you take in your life adds wild positives and negatives to a fantastically co…

Haruki Murakami's novel 'Dance Dance Dance' has a character who is in a similar situation. He's a movie star who because of circumstances related to his divorce has acquired a stunning amount of debt. So most of his income goes into covering this debt. He is very bad with numbers and money, this character, and so he cannot ever figure out how much he owes and how long will the situation last.

However his movie studio rents him a high-class apartment, gets him cool cars to drive, covers various bills from shops and restaurants and whatnot as 'the entertainment expenses', can send him on the high-profile vacations, etc. They can even get him the expensive escorts, because absolutely anything can be worded to fall under the umbrella of the 'enterntainment expenses'. So in short, he can 'have' anything as long as he does not actually own it.

In the end this character kills himself, due largely to the inability to exert agency over his life. And that if you read the book in the face-value 'no-mystical' mode, otherwise the outcome is rather worse.

So to answer your question, going into the infinite debt for infinite reward does not really sound attractive.

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