251–260 of 930 posts
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Not even close. Combining all those brands results in a 13.5% market share.
Albertsons + Kroger is like 90% of the market in Seattle, where I live, though.
https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2023/04/24/seattle-favor...
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You're over generalizing. There are plenty of sellers that took the time to develop their own products and sell them, only to be copied and undercut by Amazon.
How is that different from Walmart selling their Great Value store brand? They see what products sell well then formulate their own cheaper alternative, maybe even giving their product better shelf placement. Every national grocer does this. It seems to be a pretty close analog yet nobody bats an eye at the practice.
The supermarket wouldn't stock the national brands at all if customers weren't buying them.
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> others spend a lot of time attacking large companies simply because they are large This isn't the FTC's complaint but search "How Amazon treats their workers" and see why large companies get attacked. Typically the only way you're going to become this large is by abusing people in some sort of way. Amazon abuses their workers, their sellers, etc. Meta abuses their users. Google abuses their users. Uber abuses their…
absurd. Nobody is forcing anyone to work for AMZN or Google or Uber. People would simply quit if these companies were actually abusing them
Likewise, quitting your job is extremely disruptive and carries risk of bankruptcy if you can't get on to another employer in time. It's not simply a matter of "switch to the best offer available".
I'm honestly not sure how you could make the case that they aren't maintaining and abusing monopoly power. I mean they literally blatantly copy the designs of other companies who sell on amazon, then put their own results for their own products higher in search results than what they copied off of. It's incredibly blatantly anti-competitive.
I get the sentiment behind this reaction that most people have. I just have a hard time understanding how it is any different than brick and mortar companies using their sales data to determine which products they should have a store brand version of. Costco, Walmart, Target, etc. all do this, and have been doing it for decades. At a Costco, they'll often stop selling the brand name product if they introduce a "Kirkl…
The legal difference underlying the lawsuit between this behavior by Amazon and the behavior you raise by those stores is not the behavior, but its context.
Amazon, the complaint alleges, has durable monopolies in two relevant markets which the behavior leverages and reinforces, making it a means of illegally maintaining a monopoly.
The other stores do not have monopolies, so the behavior is not part of a system of illegally maintaining a monopoly.
This is very similar to the kind of discussion that happened at the time of the Microsoft antitrusts suit about bundling software: one of the ways Microsoft illegally leveraged their Windows monopoly – in this case to monopolize other markets rather than to maintain the Windows monopoly, but same kind of issue – was bundling IE with Windows. People made all kinds of “well, how is this different than maker A bundling software X with software Y”, and mostly it wasn’t, except that maker A didn’t have and thus wasn’t leveraging a monopoly in the market of software X, so them bundling software Y with it wasn’t an issue.
Does anyone know more about Project Nessie? There's a portion of the complaint [0] that is heavily redacted from page 123 to 126. The only information that isn't redacted is this: * Project Nessie is an algorithmic pricing system * "Amazon's Project Nessie has already extracted over [redacted] from American households." * "this scheme belies its public claim that it “seek[s] to be Earth’s most customer-centric compan…
Guessing this is also related, from page 10: Amazon has implemented an algorithm for the express purpose of deterring other online stores from offering lower prices. [redacted] Rather than trying to compete, Amazon uses [redacted] Ultimately, this conduct is meant to deter rivals from attempting to compete on price altogether-competition that could bring lower prices to tens of millions of American households. As a r…
Meanwhile, I have to order from direct sellers to be sure I will get a genuine, new product. So I don’t even get Amazon’s lower-but-still-higher-than-optimal price, but a yet higher one.
As far as I’m concerned the whole company’s a giant scam and I can’t believe it still hasn’t caught up with them. They benefit so very much from enabling bad actors, and have for so long clearly without any serious attempt to stop it, that I’ll do a happy dance the day they go under or get broken up. I just wish the eventual consequences could force Bezos to have to work for a living again, since he’s built his empire on fucking people weaker than him. Shouldn’t get to keep a penny of it.
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I'm amazed at how much the idea of pissing into a bottle offended the sensibilities of journalists. Given a choice between pissing in bottles or having the time saved as a longer lunch break, I'd guess most would chose the lunch break. The never ending screw turning cost optimization is the problem, but using that example lands really flat.
Why would anybody need to make that choice?
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> on the backs of Amazon. They were using the Amazon platform for what it was intended for, and Amazon made more millions off of them. It was supposed to be a mutually beneficial relationship.
And I am saying what Amazon is doing is not anticompetitive at all. These “companies” that sell on Amazon are basically glorified trade companies that arbitrage low cost Chinese manufacturing. I don’t feel bad for them at all. If they are hurting so bad, go sell the goods on Shopify store or Walmart/Target. Oh, what’s that? They charge more than Amazon? Interesting…
FBA seller here. A lot of mom and pop businesses (~$20 million) have been built on Amazon over the past 10 years. Most of us are in the $250k to $5 million dollar range. The impact of Amazon’s monopoly power is felt big time by us as we’re being squeezed with no place left to go online especially post-iOS change. Our second option used to be the Facebook/Instagram/TikTok to Shopify connection but with that being dead…
Can you explain this further?
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My prediction (you can check my results): AMZN price will be largely unchanged. There does seem to be some antitrust exposure there: ========= Anti-discounting measures that punish sellers and deter other online retailers from offering prices lower than Amazon, keeping prices higher for products across the internet. For example, if Amazon discovers that a seller is offering lower-priced goods elsewhere, Amazon can bu…
Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain “Prime” eligibility for their products—a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon—on sellers using Amazon’s costly fulfillment service Isn't Prime a fulfillment service in this context? How would a seller be Prime eligible without using Amazon fulfillment?
Out of all the natural tech monopolies, Amazon is the ONLY one that did the opposite of exercising market power. They actually brought fast shipping to the market. A decade ago, you had to pay a crap ton of money to ship things even two days. They forced the incumbents such as Walmart to change. They’re constantly improving e-commerce. Heck they even opened up aws and created an entire industry. Amazon did more to re…
They straight up copied products in their store an then listed theirs higher in search results. There was a famous instance of a bag. You can't be more monopolistic than that. They also got insight into every states future plans (which are secret for some reason ) when they offered to build new HQs but then decided not too. This gives them a huge advantage over anyone else who wants to setup a nation wide logistics s…