201–210 of 348 posts
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So don’t sell on Amazon. There are tons of other options. Amazon is merely the largest, not the only.
And what if, more and more, the products you want are only on Amazon, because of the deals made or conditions set by them?
How we actually define a company to be a monopoly seems to be somewhat arbitrary? I agree that Amazon engages in anticompetitive behaviour but I'm not sure that it can control prices or exclude competition to that extent? I mean every company can affect that, at what point does it become problematic?
> I'm not sure that it can control prices Amazon very often competes directly with sellers on the Marketplace, and often undercuts them on price. There are products they sell below the purchase cost, sometimes below manufacturing cost. You can't compete with that unless you have piles of money to burn. They sell at a loss until they shake everyone loose from a product, then dominate all sales of that products on the…
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> So if today its Amazon and tomorrow someone else, why be up in arms about it Because it doesn't matter who ultimately made an anti-competitive world marketplace, it's still anti-competitive and ultimately impossible to run morally when you participate in it in parallel. eg if ebay was undercutting other people's auctions via buyout prices under their own brand
But doesn't the customer benefit in that scenario? They get the items they want for a lower price from a brand they trust (they're on their website for a reason). And if the customer is benefitting, isn't that the best outcome of capitalism? In that scenerio, and captialism in general, eBay doesn't owe sellers on its marketplace the right to sell items at all. They've just been given a chance to make hay while the su…
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> I'm not sure that it can control prices Amazon very often competes directly with sellers on the Marketplace, and often undercuts them on price. There are products they sell below the purchase cost, sometimes below manufacturing cost. You can't compete with that unless you have piles of money to burn. They sell at a loss until they shake everyone loose from a product, then dominate all sales of that products on the…
Monopolies are usually defined in terms of sellers controlling the prices of the goods they sell, rather than the buyer forcing the seller to change price. Perhaps there's another definition for this situation.
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I'm not a huge Uber fan, but in their case at least I don't think you're being entirely fair. My home airport is SFO. The official taxis there have an extremely annoying pricing policy: if your destination is more than 20 miles form the airport they add a $50 surcharge to the cost of your trip. (I live 25 miles away.) And you can't summon a cab with an app. If you're at the airport they are very convenient. If you ar…
How do you know how much Uber would cost if they had to raise their prices high enough to have a marginal profit on each ride?
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I'm not a huge Uber fan, but in their case at least I don't think you're being entirely fair. My home airport is SFO. The official taxis there have an extremely annoying pricing policy: if your destination is more than 20 miles form the airport they add a $50 surcharge to the cost of your trip. (I live 25 miles away.) And you can't summon a cab with an app. If you're at the airport they are very convenient. If you ar…
take a taxi to the marriot next door. then uber from there.
Why would I pay $4.99,at Sobeys, for a jar of nescafe if I can get it from Amazon for $3.97?
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Wouldn’t that kind of behavior make a company seem less like a monopoly, and extend the time to government intervention?
No, I believe it will make them appear like a monopoly and the consumers as a monopsony. For example, imagine if amazon caves to the consumer group and makes toothpaste $1. Then suddenly the other sellers of toothpaste all charge $1. That would show amazon had pricing power over the market and that amazon is in fact a monopoly. Further it would show that amazon was using it's monopoly power to gain excess profits. No…
Airlines and gas stations are most, most definitely not monopolies.
I have actually started adopting other online vendors because Amazon's quality control and customer support is so atrocious. I think Amazon will end up digging its own grave by building this huge adoption for online buyong, training competition how to do online retail right, and then die from a million cuts as thousands of specialty vendors step in. Their search sucks too...you just get fed paid advertisements for cr…