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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

#51

Post by sokoloff »

urthor wrote: post #40
function_seven wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the all-caps brands for these? Is there some belief that it stands out more or something? Because it does, and not in a good way. I skip all those when I'm browsing search results.

Many official looking order forms and paperwork in supply chains come filled out in all caps. It's a descendant of all those forms you would fill in with pencil and they'd say "MUST HAVE CAPITAL LETTERS" for legibility. I suspect that all those all caps descriptions come from when someone has quickly copied and pasted text from manifests and the like, directly into something customer facing.

These brands are often pad printed onto the products though (pointlessly, IMO), which is upstream of manifesting.

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

#52

Post by nickff »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #24
nickff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they were trying to correct or prevent it? If they hadn't done the training, you'd be saying that they never even tried to avoid it.

This isn't about prevention. It's training to avoid recording damning evidence. The bad behavior can continue as long as it isn't written down. Preferably implemented in pieces that lend plausible deniability.

I thought it was generally accepted that changing verbiage/language has a huge impact on the way people think. Do you disagree with that notion?

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

#53

Post by clintonc »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #33

I'm confused why this is anti-trust. Isn't this how all wholesale vendor deals work? Regular wholesale: "We'll buy 200 units from you at $20 each. I'll sell them for some other amount, you don't need to care about it". Amazon in this example: "We'll buy 1 units from you at $20 each. I'll sell them for some other amount, you don't need to care about it. Finally, don't worry about the wholesale rate for a single unit,…

I am Amazon, and you sell cat mugs. I offer you a "sold by Amazon" contract, which you accept.

I start manufacturing my own cat mugs, and sell them at a price that undercuts yours. You have no way to change your price, so your mugs no longer compete effectively with Amazon cat mugs. Most of your sales go away, because Amazon is so dominant as an online marketplace (NOT as a cat mug manufacturer).

This is anti-competitive because Amazon used its dominance as an online retailer to become a dominant cat mug manufacturer.

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

#54

Post by klyrs »

valar_m wrote: post #9

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...

Be good > Don't be evil > Don't talk about being evil.

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

#55

Post by WaitWaitWha »

lucas_membrane wrote: post #35

It was pretty obvious what Amazon wanted from its business partners if you look at abebooks, a site owned by amazon, but not visibly if you just look at abebooks.com. 'Independent' booksellers sell used books through abebooks, but never for less than amazon sells the same books.

> but not visibly if you just look at abebooks.com

At first (admittedly lazy) glance I agree.

As soon as you click on the jobs link it takes you to Amazon. Looking at their wikip entry, it states abebooks was acquired by Amazon in 2008.

If they are attempting to hide it, they are doing a terrible job.

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

#56

Post by indymike »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #33

I'm confused why this is anti-trust. Isn't this how all wholesale vendor deals work? Regular wholesale: "We'll buy 200 units from you at $20 each. I'll sell them for some other amount, you don't need to care about it". Amazon in this example: "We'll buy 1 units from you at $20 each. I'll sell them for some other amount, you don't need to care about it. Finally, don't worry about the wholesale rate for a single unit,…

> I'm confused why this is anti-trust. Isn't this how all wholesale vendor deals work?

Amazon has to have it tough - it is often both a retailer and distributor at the same time. The problem here was getting multiple retailers (of which Amazon was one) to agree to set pricing (this is textbook price fixing). If I leave out the part about Amazon being the marketplace, this seems like a slam-dunk price fixing case. If we view it like a wholesale agreement, I think it's a lot harder to see what the AG was after.

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

#57

Post by pueblito »

pm90 wrote: post #11
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #5

although I think it's great that it's getting shut down I don't like this part: 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.

Agreed. Fines as a way of funding is almost always bad. If that money was to provide relief to aggrieved customers, that would certainly be different.

Are you concerned the financial motive will drive them to break up too many companies? Because right now I think that’s a great idea

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

#58

Post by BizarroLand »

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?

It reads to me like the sexual harassment trainings.

Those specifically tell you what not to do to limit the legal liability of the company.

Nowhere in any sexual harassment training video have I ever seen anything saying that if you have the urge to sexually harass people to seek a support group or find another, less socially harmful outlet for your energies, not anything.

It's strictly about treating the symptoms and not the disease.

Although, now that I've thought about it, I guess this is more like, "use these methods to prevent yourself from observing sexual harassment so that you can't legally report it" so... yeah.

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

#59

Post by ziml77 »

sokoloff wrote: post #51
urthor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many official looking order forms and paperwork in supply chains come filled out in all caps. It's a descendant of all those forms you would fill in with pencil and they'd say "MUST HAVE CAPITAL LETTERS" for legibility. I suspect that all those all caps descriptions come from when someone has quickly copied and pasted text from manifests and the like, directly into something customer facing.

These brands are often pad printed onto the products though (pointlessly, IMO), which is upstream of manifesting.

Not always. I've seen the name photoshopped on the listing photos and then be completely absent on the actual item.

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

#60

Post by blocked_again »

bo1024 wrote: post #44
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #33

I'm confused why this is anti-trust. Isn't this how all wholesale vendor deals work? Regular wholesale: "We'll buy 200 units from you at $20 each. I'll sell them for some other amount, you don't need to care about it". Amazon in this example: "We'll buy 1 units from you at $20 each. I'll sell them for some other amount, you don't need to care about it. Finally, don't worry about the wholesale rate for a single unit,…

It sounded to me like the problem part was where Amazon sold competing products, then used the agreement to price-fix between their own products and the third party's. Example: Amazon sells a dongle for $20, the competitors sell them for $20. Amazon makes a deal with each competitor, then raises all the prices to $25. (edit) I think this kind of example also: The competitor's dongle is priced at $24 on Best Buy. Amaz…

Well, the competitor did agree to sell the items to Amazon. Nobody forced them. They did it for economic benefit. So I don't understand the problem here.
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