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Quick link to AmazonBasics https://www.amazon.com/s?rh=p_89%3AAmazonBasics I am happy to buy these products over generics because of the higher quality. Batteries, paper shredders, water filters, electronics accessories, household supplies, office products...
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I've lived in Kirkland, Washington, off and on since 1994. It's amazing how many people all over the world know of Kirkland from Costco branding. For a log time the reddit tag line[0] was "We're more than Costco!" [0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Kirkland/
Same actually! Grew up in Juanita from ‘89-‘03 then went to UW and have stayed in Seattle proper mostly since. I always thought it was funny, as a young kid, that my city’s name was on all sorts of products, not making the connection.
Don't grocery stores do this with own-labeled items?
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It is not illegal to have a monopoly; but it is illegal to use a monopoly you have in one area to get an unfair advantage in another. Amazon may or may not legally be a retail monopoly - I do not know the answer. But your question can be rephrased for any monopoly and the answer would be “monopolies should be punished for leveraging their monopoly power in other markets, because that ruins the market for everyone els…
> It is not illegal to have a monopoly; but it is illegal to use a monopoly you have in one area to get an unfair advantage in another. This is a very common misconception in the United States. It’s how a lot of defenders of antitrust law want antitrust law to work, but it is not how antitrust law does work. This Supreme Court case explicitly establishes that antitrust laws can be used against companies which obtain…
Also I think there's 0 chance that wouldn't be overturned if tested today.
The solution isn't hoping the free market would solve this with a competing platform. The solution is to create regulations & laws that prevent this behavior. You're either a platform/retailer or you're a manufacturer. You don't get to be both because we see the perverse incentive that happens when it's allowed.
What really is the issue? That Amazon is leveraging its success to be successful? It's unfair that Amazon is able to see that a product category is doing well so it invests its own money into manufacturing a product to sell through its site? Do you really think that if Amazon couldn't use the data from its own site that it wouldn't procure it elsewhere? Before any product is developed there is extensive market resear…
1. Amazon clones independent manufacturer's product.
2. Amazon strangles manufacturer because they can promote their own product more and have lower overhead because they control the entire chain.
3. Competitor dies.
4. Amazon has no competition on this product.
5. They raise prices and/or lower quality.
6. Consumers pay more for a shittier product.
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Definitely not. Consumers are best served when you have a bunch of relatively equal players competing for their business, and where success is rewarded financially. That gives everybody an incentive to focus on continuously getting better at serving the customer through R&D, etc. But if the reward for success is just having Amazon come in and hoover up the money you would have gotten by launching a knockoff, then sud…
I dislike Amazon as much as the next guy but let's not kid ourselves here. Consumers aren't looking for innovation in the paper towel market. They just want cheap stuff. If Amazon can make these products cheaper then the consumers win.
Once there is only one paper towel manufacturer left, what is to prevent it from raising prices?
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This is totally false - the number of retailers who have testified before congress that they don't use seller data to compete against sellers - and then who go ahead and do just that is basically zero. Additionally, most other retailers actually BUY the third parties products and take the risk of promoting and selling it. On Amazon third parties take the inventory and many other risks and may have to pay amazon to pr…
Can you link to where AMZN has said this?
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/16/amazon-tells-house-it-doesnt...
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You're focused to much on Amazon. Every company does this just go to your local Walmart, everything is white-label. A law like this would have to be applied to them as well.
> A law like this would have to be applied to them as well. You say it as if that was a bad thing. More competition is good for the consumer, bad for the oligopolists.
Looking through the comments, everyone is talking about Amazon.com purchases, but the much quieter, arguably more valuable move on Amazon's part would be to do this via AWS. If you're running your entire system on AWS, Amazon immediately knows what kind of scale you're currently running. Depending on the type of product, they can pretty easily ballpark what your profit margin is based on your pricing model and all the metrics they have on your application (which is basically everything).
The application of this data could be used for acquisition targets, deciding which products to build into AWS, ongoing competitive analysis when they do build those competing products...