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FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

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Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#441

Post by IshKebab »

dantheman wrote: post #433
vhiremath4 wrote: post #430

Yeah I’m kinda on the fence about this. On one hand, I see the case that this diminishes the open market. On the other hand, Amazon is doing this all within their own ecosystem. So it’s a bit disingenuous for the FTC to say that this has nothing to do with their size. The problem the FTC keeps skirting around on anticompetitive is the fact that the internet favors power differentials, so we’d have to ding any company…

I'd argue that anti-trust is a fundamentally flawed concept - it's a matter of time frames, but no company without significant government intervention has had a 'monopoly' for more than a few years. Hell, Standard Oil was only 64% market share when it was broken up.

Google has had >90% market share for decades. Windows had >90% market share for several decades.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#442

Post by hrdwdmrbl »

rob74 wrote: post #70
hrdwdmrbl wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also do the fact that you never own what you "buy". Buy means buy. Period. Amazon, Audible, Google Play, Apple TV, etc. I would like to _own_!

Then you are in the minority unfortunately. Just look at music - you can buy DRM-free music online without problems, but people still prefer to pay for Spotify...

Streaming is a different matter. I agree that you don't own anything if you stream. I also don't think lack of popularity for "buying" is a reason not to have a reasonable rule about the definition of "buying".

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#443

Post by miguelazo »

Nice to finally see this, so many years after online retailers (read: Amazon) were given total exemptions from sales tax in order to not “stifle innovation”. We subsidized the destruction of brick and mortar retail, and by extension, many of the retail spaces that served as community anchors. It will take decades to recover, if it’s even possible at this point.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#444

Post by mrraj »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #52

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…

From the Bloomberg article :

"Chuck Gregorich, who sells fire pits and outdoor furniture, says turning a profit on Amazon is getting harder. One of his popular fire pits costs $200, of which Amazon takes $112 for its commission, warehouse storage, delivery and advertising. That leaves him with $88 to pay the manufacturer, ship the product in from China and cover his overhead."

I have a hard time sympathizing here. They farm out manufacturing to China and logistics/warehousing to Amazon, and then also lend brand to a marketplace they don't own. Assuming this is how FBA selling works on Amazon, it sounds like the low profits they make are just a byproduct of them not actually doing much work.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#445

Post by mindslight »

burkaman wrote: post #331
mindslight wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people have to make choices of how to spend their time? Because there is a finite amount of time in any given period, and most activities are mutually exclusive.

No, why are they forced to make this specific choice? Why would they need to deduct time from their lunch break in order to use the bathroom? Using the bathroom and eating lunch are not normally mutually exclusive activities, unless there is a third party enforcing such an exclusion.

Sorry, we might be talking past one another. When I hear about peeing in bottles, I think of the delivery drivers. This is the obvious place bottles would get used, and in my recollection this was most of the reporting on the pee bottles. I believe there was also reporting on workers in the brick and mortar fulfillment center using bottles to meet their quotas, which is perhaps what you are talking about.

For delivery routes, there's no simple solution for bathroom access (unless you want to talk about installing some step up from a "bottle" in all the vans). Meaning a driver will inevitably have to choose to spend time not delivering packages to leave the van and use an indoor bathroom.

If you are talking about the workers at the fulfillment centers, I do agree that is indefensible. That human need should be entirely owned by the business. If it takes workers too long to walk to the bathroom, or if Amazon insists on using time with security lines and whatnot, that's entirely on Amazon.

(Also to each their own, but using the bathroom and eating lunch are definitely mutually exclusive activities for me)

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#446

Post by duped »

Justsignedup wrote: post #19

remember that time that amazon was bleeding like 5 million a day just to make sure they can destroy diapers.com? by selling diapers at a loss, which was numbers that diapers.com couldn't compete with given that they didn't have another business to rely on, then forced diapers.com to sell to amazon because they had no other option? And this came out last time they were doing monopolistic inquiries against amazon. Yet.…

The current FTC chair wrote the ~~book~~ essay on Amazon's monopolistic business practices (1) and has spoken so much about it that the only reason we'd see the government take their foot off the gas here is if Amazon's lawyers can claim that her previous advocacy biases the case against them.

(1) https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#447

Post by Avshalom »

heleninboodler wrote: post #400
m463 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny is that I couldn't tell if this was serious or sarcastic at first glance. (caught fire -> sarcastic) Thing is, these silly UPPER-CASE-NONSENSE-COMPANIES are winning against established brands with quality products. Except there is a trend now where a brand with products of known good quality like YETI can now charge outrageous amounts of money - like 10x or more.

The UPPERCASENONSENSENAMES are so obvious it makes me wonder if this is a target-selection technique in the same vein as the 419 scammers use -- make it so only the most clueless people would ever buy your garbage product, so you get a lower percentage of people who are going to report you.

The thing is, it's 2023, we all "know" that every company's product get made in the same factory and there's just a fork at the end of the conveyor where they get different branding slapped on.

So the gamble is that UCNN is sourced out of the exact same factory as the product/brand you actually want. It's the the evolution of the Warby Parker model.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#448

Post by Xeronate »

ashbee wrote: post #436
tantalor wrote: post #343

"most customer-centric company" I don't think anybody actually buys that line. Do they believe that internally?

Some do, some don't. I know some folks who really genuinely believe that Amazon is a force for good, the criticism is exaggerated, will talk about how lucky they are to work for the World's Best Employer, and will get a bit sulky if you say anything negative about the company. Generally though, I think it's understood that "most customer centric company" doesn't mean "we will put the customer before ourselves because…

I've never met anyone that thought the LPs were meant to imply Amazon "really cares". I like Amazon because it seems more straightforward than other companies. It's a business and it wants to make money. The only way I've ever interpreted "customer obsession" is that it's mutually beneficial to do what's best for the customer.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#449

Post by jm4 »

redbell wrote: post #405
brianstorms wrote: post #287

I signed up as a Seller on Amazon a while back, with one primary goal: sell extra copies of my book, published by Pantheon Books in 2017. The publisher offered me boxes of them at dirt-cheap prices and I took them up on their offer. So I started selling on Amazon, and I set my price as the lowest possible for "New" condition hardcover. For a while my price got listed on the main book product page. Only briefly though…

Your story is a true tragedy and hearing such stories makes me feel sad. I believe it’s, mostly, these unfair, monopolistic practices that made those companies giants because they can, technically, crush anyone willing to swim in their red ocean . Normally, you could easily file a lawsuit against them and got them pay you 10x the damage they caused.

Amazon became a giant because they were genuinely good before they became what they are now. For a long time, they offered a superior online shopping experience. The prices were good, the processing time was faster than anyone else, the shipping was fast and reliable, the site was easy to use, etc. Then all the third party sellers, whack-a-mole Chinese brands, and counterfeits took over the site. I thought Amazon was great when they were the retailer instead of a marketplace.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#450

Post by pests »

hotnfresh wrote: post #415
KyleJune wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might still be getting products from the same inventory pool in an Amazon warehouse when ordering directly if the company uses Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfillment offering. They sell on their site, tell Amazon about the sale, then Amazon ships it to the customer. They even offer the option to ship it in unbranded boxes so that customers don't know the order is being fulfilled by Amazon.

Ew, gross. I’m pretty sure the couple companies I order from regularly that also have an Amazon presence don’t do that, since they have direct-order products not listed on Amazon and often include little touches like a bonus sample or handwritten note that you don’t get if you order their stuff on Amazon, but good to know to watch out for that.

> since they have direct-order products not listed on Amazon

This is still at-risk because you are not required to list on Amazon to use FBA.

The handwritten note is a better indicator for sure.

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