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Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

atg.wa.gov

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Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#291

Post by alisonkisk »

newaccount74 wrote: post #246
DannyBee wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are zero sellers I want a relationship with on Amazon. Almost all spam and annoyance I get by email is somebody I bought one thing for who wants a relationship with me. The vast majority of my shopping is transactional, and I want it that way. If I want a relationship with a seller, I can take care of making one The most frightening part of the Senate bills are that they require Apple, et al to let people commu…

While I do understand your take, I'm not sure it's a net positive for consumers. Marketing to previous customers is a very effective marketing strategy. If you prevent that, small companies are losing one of the few ways they can compete with bigger operations. Otherwise they have to keep buying ads on Google and Amazon.. Yes, most mail from retailers is spam. But for a handful of small retailers I actually like thei…

No post body was provided.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#292

Post by alisonkisk »

bytelines wrote: post #193
DannyBee wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please kill this trope? it is because humans use terms colloquially rather than with the utmost precision, and then it gets held up as if the person meant the exact precise legal concept. This is true always, which is why the advice this person got is also commonly given in lots of forms. For example, doctors are often trained in being careful in what they write down for the same reason. The audit trail is alw…

> This is true always, which is why the advice this person got is also commonly given in lots of forms. For example, doctors are often trained in being careful in what they write down for the same reason. Alternative take: it is indeed for the same reason - to avoid incriminating yourself. You carry assumption that the behavior is not incriminating. Doctors do commit in malpractice. Companies do engage in monopolisti…

No post body was provided.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#293

Post by msrenee »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #239
Permit wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be like if Costco instead of buying 1000 legos, just stocked legos in it's warehouse, then paid Lego company everytime a single unit sold. For some reason I was under the impression that this is exactly how it works at some physical retailers? Can someone confirm that this is not the case? Does Costco/Walmart/CVS/etc. eat the cost if the items don’t sell?

It is exactly how it works for physical retailers. In most cases, they even delay payment for a few months to account for returns and the cost of returning unsold products. Costco, to my knowledge, is actually one of the more strict retailers with IIRC 6 month delay between a product sale and the vendor being played. Mostly due to their generous return policy. I don't know of any large retailer that eats the cost of…

I don't know if JC Penneys counts as a large retailer anymore or if petsmart ever did, but both of those stores do eat the cost of unsold goods to my knowledge. Lowes does as well, except for certain types of products such as live plants from certain suppliers. Clearance is almost always the store trying to recoup any money from a product that they can't sell and is taking up shelf space. That certain suppliers take on the cost if unsold product is why you won't see Bonnie Plants tomato plants on clearance at the end of the year. The supplier eats the cost if the product isn't sold.

Edited to make it clear that I'm saying the retailers I'm well-acquainted with do not get reimbursed for unsold items except from a few specific suppliers.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#294

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

DannyBee wrote: post #290
bytelines wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is true always, which is why the advice this person got is also commonly given in lots of forms. For example, doctors are often trained in being careful in what they write down for the same reason. Alternative take: it is indeed for the same reason - to avoid incriminating yourself. You carry assumption that the behavior is not incriminating. Doctors do commit in malpractice. Companies do engage in monopolisti…

This argument makes no sense to me. Yes some people and companies break the law. That is completely and totally orthogonal to whether the training exists for a given reason or not. They also train people to not commit insider trading. It still happens. Does that mean the training exists simply to help them figure out how to not get caught insider trading, or to avoid an evidence trail? You aren’t going to successfull…

The company isn't held liable when employees insider trade. When employees engage in monopolistic behaviors, the company is more on the hook.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#295

Post by bogwog »

skybrian wrote: post #46
urthor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually surprisingly cunning. Run a very in depth training program on how "not" to do antitrust. Secretly, it's just a training course in antitrust. Gotta respect the level of commitment to evil.

It sounds like pretty ordinary corporate training. The idea is that you don’t want ordinary workers saying things that sound bad in discoverable messages, which is very likely if there is the ordinary amount of speculation about things they don’t really know about. Whether any particular thing actually is an antitrust violation is for the lawyers to decide. I guess they decided wrong?

I don’t think there’s anything “ordinary” about antitrust training. I think if’s a safe bet to say that you wouldn’t see that type of training in 99.99% of companies.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#296

Post by tzs »

Permit wrote: post #231
snow_mac wrote: post #227

One thing everyone is getting hung up on is the fact that Amazon isn't wholesaling the dongle. The contract isn't a wholesale deal, meaning if your widget doesn't sell, it's sitting on your balance sheet, not on Amazon's balance sheet. It would be like if Costco instead of buying 1000 legos, just stocked legos in it's warehouse, then paid Lego company everytime a single unit sold. Then they figured out how to make th…

> It would be like if Costco instead of buying 1000 legos, just stocked legos in it's warehouse, then paid Lego company everytime a single unit sold. For some reason I was under the impression that this is exactly how it works at some physical retailers? Can someone confirm that this is not the case? Does Costco/Walmart/CVS/etc. eat the cost if the items don’t sell?

That was how it worked in the US with software retailers back in the days when most of us got our consumer software from the local Egghead, CompUSA, etc or from mail order companies like PC Warehouse, CDW, etc.

The stores were really more like real estate companies and payment processors than what most people think of when they think "retailer". They rented shelf space to manufacturers/distributors and handled the money when someone bought something. (For the catalog companies, replace "shelf space" with "page space").

This was why when after you decided in late 1995 to upgrade to something better than Windows 3.1 and walked into Egghead to buy a new OS you'd see Windows 95 somewhere prominent visible from the door, probably with banners touting how great it is, and OS/2 Warp would be on the bottom row of some shelf in the back of the store with poor lighting and enough dust to suggest that not even the person who is supposed to vacuum bothers to go back there.

Microsoft paid for prime real estate in the store and in-store advertising for Windows 95. IBM did the minimum possible that would get OS/2 Warp to be somewhere in the store.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#297

Post by jeltz »

Permit wrote: post #231
snow_mac wrote: post #227

One thing everyone is getting hung up on is the fact that Amazon isn't wholesaling the dongle. The contract isn't a wholesale deal, meaning if your widget doesn't sell, it's sitting on your balance sheet, not on Amazon's balance sheet. It would be like if Costco instead of buying 1000 legos, just stocked legos in it's warehouse, then paid Lego company everytime a single unit sold. Then they figured out how to make th…

> It would be like if Costco instead of buying 1000 legos, just stocked legos in it's warehouse, then paid Lego company everytime a single unit sold. For some reason I was under the impression that this is exactly how it works at some physical retailers? Can someone confirm that this is not the case? Does Costco/Walmart/CVS/etc. eat the cost if the items don’t sell?

No, that is pretty rare. It os mostly books which works like that.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#298

Post by analog31 »

chefandy wrote: post #242
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is exactly how it works for physical retailers. In most cases, they even delay payment for a few months to account for returns and the cost of returning unsold products. Costco, to my knowledge, is actually one of the more strict retailers with IIRC 6 month delay between a product sale and the vendor being played. Mostly due to their generous return policy. I don't know of any large retailer that eats the cost of…

I’ve never worked in large consumer goods retail, but smaller retail outlets, food, clothing, etc. do not commonly operate like this. Most don’t have the storage to pre-buy even two months worth of merchandise. In food, purveyors won’t hesitate to ask for cash up front if you’ve been late a couple of times or have a bit of an outstanding balance. The places you describe sound like they act as both distributors and re…

I think it's certainly a matter of leverage, and could also be why smaller retailers struggle to survive. For suppliers, getting involved with one of the big retailers is a calculated risk. The retailers work their suppliers against one another, and if you don't play along, you vanish from the shelves. I worked with one of those suppliers long ago.

It's interesting that food is an exception, perhaps because it's perishable, and if you don't pay for a delivery of ingredients... no soup for you. And restaurants may actually be competing for access to high quality materials. Of course the larger chains can manage their supply chains differently, partly by using less perishable ingredients in the first place.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#299

Post by Maarten88 »

moozilla wrote: post #223
ghostly_s wrote: post #10

Why are regulators incapable of assessing meaningful punitive damages? 2.5 million is peanuts to Amazon.

From the article, the fee is to support the AG enforcement, it's not meant as a meaningful punitive damage. > In addition, Amazon will pay $2.25 million to the Attorney General’s Office, which will be used to support the Attorney General’s antitrust enforcement, which does not receive general fund support.

> which does not receive general fund support

This is the part that surprised me most. So instead of the government making sure that the market is kept fair using taxation, the AG finances this function by extracting money for its own use from offenders? That seems fishy to me.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#300

Post by 101008 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #236
Permit wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be like if Costco instead of buying 1000 legos, just stocked legos in it's warehouse, then paid Lego company everytime a single unit sold. For some reason I was under the impression that this is exactly how it works at some physical retailers? Can someone confirm that this is not the case? Does Costco/Walmart/CVS/etc. eat the cost if the items don’t sell?

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.

It is. Fun fact: when Harry Potter 7 was published in the United Kingdom, the publisher didn't allow this, so bookstores had to purchased the stocks from the publisher. This wasn't that bad because most people preordered it, but independendt bookshop had to took the risks to order a few extra copies.
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