261–270 of 344 posts
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Yeah, but normally your competitor doesn't get to choose the price of YOUR widget.
Is that true? This sounds like typical white label type stuff that you'd see at the grocery store. Safeway sells Safeway brand X and also name brand X, and presumably chooses the prices for both.
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Not all industries have buybacks, and many producers won't take on contracts that involve them. (Fun Fact for anyone not familiar with this practice: in publishing the covers were shipped back as the proof because whole books are heavy/costly to ship and take up a lot of space/costly to warehouse so the retailer with them on hand would just have the rest of the book pulped).
I would expect it's pretty uncommon sure, I mean how would you do buybacks of canned goods. It works because of the many historical features of publishing, and the physical realities of books (removing cover to send back) and doesn't seem like it could work in most industries.
Most products in stores today that aren't sold in bulk have a bar code on the packaging, which can be sent back as symbolic proof the item was "destroyed" (about as meaningful as the; for smaller objects, send back the entire front of the package.
I'm not saying this is a good idea. (I think this is a terrible idea, and that we create too much waste already) I'm just saying it's entirely possible.
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It's somewhat similar in books IIRC, if the books don't sell you send back covers of the books and get reimbursed? (based on info from 20 years ago, pretty static industry so probably still the same) on edit: of course book stores don't compete with publishers.
Not all industries have buybacks, and many producers won't take on contracts that involve them. (Fun Fact for anyone not familiar with this practice: in publishing the covers were shipped back as the proof because whole books are heavy/costly to ship and take up a lot of space/costly to warehouse so the retailer with them on hand would just have the rest of the book pulped).
Enjoyed a lot of cheap sci-fi and fantasy that way.
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Why not just buy from somewhere else? I don’t understand why you would put this level of effort into shopping at a place you don’t trust.
Alot of people outside of news/tech circles do trust Amazon. They're literally the most popular retailer, of course people trust them. Anecdotes are everywhere about inventory co-mingling being such a mega problem, but I think opinions are getting repeated and amplified by a vocal minority. Beyond that, trust is irrelevant when returns/refunds are dead simple. It's wasteful, for sure, but I guess that's capitalism.
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Sold by Amazon and Fulfilled by Amazon seem to come out of the same box at the warehouse. Unfortunately if you really need genuine products you simply cannot buy things off Amazon anymore.
Bold of you to assume genuine products are coming in through any supply chain that isn't "walk up to the factory and buy wholesale."
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>That said companies care a lot about the legality of things and not necessarily the morality. I worked for a fortune 100 company. We are humans, and our customers are humans. We absolutely have morals - at an individual level, and those morals influence how we work
Morals don’t matter when the shareholders sue board members for failing to uphold fiduciary responsibility. Just saying, the law influences how we work
That often includes stuff that you would classify under 'morals'.
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This isn't new to Amazon. Leaving written paper trails is often times attempted to be avoided by simple messages like "let's chat about this over the phone" or "let's chat about this over a cup of coffee".
This is also why you viciously respond with a follow up message saying "You would like to "discuss in a non-recorded/discoverable medium?" Yes. I've seen that tactic before, and it is very easy to counter with the pre-message and a post-summary message with CC and BCC. The fun part is dropping in statutory and case law citations. Nobody expects actual well formed legal research, and it makes it more difficult for leg…
Annoying your bosses too much doesn't sound like it would help your career.
(And if you want to be a whistleblower, I'd recommend being a bit sneakier, so that you can collect more information.)
Former Amazonian here. When i was there, they made us take this antitrust training course that had things like "don't use terms like 'market share' in internal communications", but all along there were people doing this? I mean...
The most interesting part of their training is that they only talk about actions that employees should be taking or not. It never considers the end result: being a monopoly. In other words, being monopolist is just fine, as long as people don't do any action that can be used as evidence against the company.
Somewhat generalized, they also care about the court of public opinion.
Both kinds of courts rely heavily on interpretation and on words. They don't ascertain objective truths.
Things revealed in proceedings in a court of law can often be used against you in the court of public opinion, too.
Former Amazonian here. When i was there, they made us take this antitrust training course that had things like "don't use terms like 'market share' in internal communications", but all along there were people doing this? I mean...
People pay attention in corporate training? I sure as hell don't.
It's also partially about being able to show that you had the opportunity to learn. So if you act contrarily to the training, you can be fired and/or claimed a rogue actor.
Everything seems to be based on a marginalist theory/formalisation of what monopolies are and how they affect economies. The theory/law seems to target very specific sets of economic dynamics.
IRL, monopoly is a more nebulous concept. Size, power, ability to structure the market are often its primary characteristics, not a simple more-profit-less-utility outcome that can be charted with a simple model.
Actual antitrust, I think, needs to be more like an industrial policy set than what exists currently. Whatever the outcome of current antitrust actions, the monopolies stay mostly intact and unharmed. What's the point?