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The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

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Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#561

Post by recursive »

jedberg wrote: post #545
mountainofdeath wrote: post #456

Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do. Amazon just does it more overtly and with smaller businesses. In fact, various aspects of this where pioneered by WalMart and Costco. 1. WalMart determines the expected product and expected price and tells vendors to take it or leave it. The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as Wal…

> Costco makes the majority of its money from memberships Not really. Their total profits last year were $2.8B and their membership income was $1.5B. It only represents the majority if you assume there is no cost to their membership income. But we know there is, because they have to have employees who do nothing but process memberships and they have to maintain all their membership benefits which also requires employ…

If those numbers are precisely accurate, it should be noted that Costco could be paying up to $100M to process memberships, and it would still literally actually be most of their profit. Also "about 1/2" and "most" are not mutually inclusive. In fact, I'd expect they mutually occur with some frequency.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#562

Post by mardifoufs »

jfghi wrote: post #319
jandrewrogers wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting to note that the US government often requires the same kinds of MFN terms, even though it is usually much more expensive to do business with the government than the private sector. There are many ways of constructively working around MFN requirements but it creates collateral damage. For example, the practice of having very high prices that are steeply discounted for most customers is often an artif…

Not the time or place for whataboutism

Common law is basically whataboutism. Whataboutism isn't inherently bad, it's not always a deflection. It is reasonable to expect similar treatment for similar actions. If anything, reciprocity is one of the very foundations of society and of our justice system. You can't really discuss a lawsuits without talking about precedent, it's inherent to the discussion

(In a way it's amazing how shouting whataboutism is now more often used to deflect or excuse double standards and unfairness than whatboutism itself.)

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#563

Post by OJFord »

simpaticoder wrote: post #500
pierat wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not the only thing I caught, at least with Ebay. During the pandemic, I decided to sell a bunch of a component I had stockpiled. (Im not a scalper. I got the parts when my dad died.). I put them for sale with $100 minimum, auction. They ended up selling for $300. I was definitely happy.... until Ebay refused to send me my money, and instead demanded access to a bank account, after the sale was complete. Fuck th…

I recently sold some items on ebay. ebay will not release the funds for 3 weeks. They give no reason for this. However I think the real reason is that if you do this over a large enough user base you can use the "time-value" of money to make extra money. It's nefarious, and I too will never use ebay again.

The reason they give/non-cynical take is that it's a hold for potential buyer dispute. If they do, and eBay decides in their favour (to refund or partially refund) then it ensures they already/still have your money, they don't have to try to bill you back for it. (Which would also have an associated cost, but surely the main aspect would just be already having it, you haven't run off with it, not unable or unwilling to pay it, etc.)

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#564

Post by pharrington »

jedberg wrote: post #545
mountainofdeath wrote: post #456

Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do. Amazon just does it more overtly and with smaller businesses. In fact, various aspects of this where pioneered by WalMart and Costco. 1. WalMart determines the expected product and expected price and tells vendors to take it or leave it. The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as Wal…

> Costco makes the majority of its money from memberships Not really. Their total profits last year were $2.8B and their membership income was $1.5B. It only represents the majority if you assume there is no cost to their membership income. But we know there is, because they have to have employees who do nothing but process memberships and they have to maintain all their membership benefits which also requires employ…

The assumption is that everything the business does has a cost.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#565

Post by OJFord »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #424
cwoolfe wrote: post #244

This strategy has been adopted by eBay as well and artificially drives up prices. Let me elaborate. Recently, eBay has made it so that only the products with paid ads are shown in places where customers click. This drives up the cost of everything by more than 10% which is eBay's ad fee. I refused to buy a paid ad to sell my MacBook. It sat on the site for a month, which is highly unusual for an in-demand and rightly…

> Please somebody make a site with no payola Aliexpress?

Is that a joke? It's far more of a nightmare. Sort by price and it's only sorting on the 'from' price, which isn't even necessarily the same product, doesn't include the shipping, and doesn't account for wild variation (in not just base price but also inexplicably shipping) when you change quantity or colour.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#566

Post by bbor »

mardifoufs wrote: post #553
_uhtu wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that every discussion of reigning in abusive companies has to come with 1000 comments about how other companies are also being abusive, which should apparently make us just wave the white flag. Nah, let's deal with all the monopolies, and Amazon is a good place to start since like you said, they are just incredibly blatant.

Legal precedent exists for a reason. It's not waving the white flag, it's having actual standards and rules. I think Amazon is a shithole of a website and one of the worst examples of downward spirals into mediocrity, but there has to be some semblance of fairness. Targeting amazon for something Walmart or Target does, but without targeting them too is just wack. You can't just handwave that issue by saying that we c…

The basic question is "does the FTC have the right to make rules about our society". I think you're answering "no, it should be the legislative only", which sounds great but I think is a serious status-quo bias. The FTC makes rules about our society all the time, both _de jure_ and _de facto_.

There is no moral justification for "starting here", but there is a definite practical one. It would be quite hard for the FTC to open 3-5 different massive lawsuits at the same time, each of which would require tons of funding at a time when funding is seeming scarcer by the day.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#567

Post by dragonwriter »

jedberg wrote: post #545
mountainofdeath wrote: post #456

Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do. Amazon just does it more overtly and with smaller businesses. In fact, various aspects of this where pioneered by WalMart and Costco. 1. WalMart determines the expected product and expected price and tells vendors to take it or leave it. The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as Wal…

> Costco makes the majority of its money from memberships Not really. Their total profits last year were $2.8B and their membership income was $1.5B. It only represents the majority if you assume there is no cost to their membership income. But we know there is, because they have to have employees who do nothing but process memberships and they have to maintain all their membership benefits which also requires employ…

> Their total profits last year were $2.8B and their membership income was $1.5B.

According to their 2022 annual report, their membership revenue for their reporting year (the 52 week period ending August 28, 2022) was $4.2B, and their net income for the same period was $5.9B, so neither your numbers nor the relationship between them seems to be correct, unless Costco committed massive securities fraud.

https://investor.costco.com/financials/annual-reports-and-pr...

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#568

Post by themacguffinman »

coconut08 wrote: post #428
slibhb wrote: post #423

Legality aside, I'm not sure that Amazon is winning in the long run with this strategy. I mostly buy products direct from the manufacturer these days and virtually all manufacturers have high quality websites with solid ordering experiences. As long as they have the name recognition, they can either sell for higher on Amazon and take the advertising hit or just ignore Amazon altogether. I continue to buy some stuff o…

i would pay more money to not have to put my credit card into or attach my identity to 100 different random websites all of which almost certainly have worse security practices than amazon and many of which absolutely will have that data stolen at some point. even for people who don't think about stuff like that, it's way easier for the average person to buy everything from a single place than to go to a bunch of dif…

I don't know why people get paranoid about this, in the US and most Western countries payment processing has minimum security requirements and you have blanket protection from fraud by credit card companies anyway. All of this means in practice consumers are very safe putting credit card details on websites. The websites that don't have the skill to meet minimum security requirements find a payment processor, so a hacker wouldn't get it from website, they'd have to get it from a processor like Stripe or Paypal.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#569

Post by ryukoposting »

mountainofdeath wrote: post #456

Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do. Amazon just does it more overtly and with smaller businesses. In fact, various aspects of this where pioneered by WalMart and Costco. 1. WalMart determines the expected product and expected price and tells vendors to take it or leave it. The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as Wal…

To what extent do the randomly-named Chinese Amazon storefronts manage to circumvent Amazon's price-competition algo? If you make a storefront named qwduburtf on Amazon and a storefront named civendntip on eBay, I can't imagine Amazon would be able to match up your product listings between the two sites.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#570

Post by [deleted] »

OJFord wrote: post #563
simpaticoder wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently sold some items on ebay. ebay will not release the funds for 3 weeks. They give no reason for this. However I think the real reason is that if you do this over a large enough user base you can use the "time-value" of money to make extra money. It's nefarious, and I too will never use ebay again.

The reason they give/non-cynical take is that it's a hold for potential buyer dispute. If they do, and eBay decides in their favour (to refund or partially refund) then it ensures they already/still have your money, they don't have to try to bill you back for it. (Which would also have an associated cost, but surely the main aspect would just be already having it, you haven't run off with it, not unable or unwilling…

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