> How is that different than a department store? I think it is different. When a department store buys a third-party product, it pays for it and the Store bear

> How is that different than a department store? I think it is different. When a department store buys a third-party product, it pays for it and the Store bears the risk of the item not selling. If Macy's decides to make their own brand, they did so by transferring risk from manufacturer to themselves in the beginning; if a product didn't sell enough, they had stake in it. There are some successes (store-brands) and some failures (brands they bought, never worked) In the Amazon Basics case, AMZN doesn't own inventory for the product at all. All the risk is to be borne by the 3rd party manufacturer. When Amazon looks at its data and sees a product succeeding, it creates a Basics product with no risk - it knows this thing sells. There is no way Amazon can 'fail' per se. This essentially is the difference. Any manufacturer is likely scared of success on the Amazon Marketplace. If too successful, it can be Amazon-Basic'ed. > The consumer (along with Amazon) is a beneficiary here. The losers are brands trying to sell commodity items at a markup. I think in the short-term for that product - yes, the consumer finds a cheaper product, but Amazon will always have an economies-of-scale advantage. However, long-term, I think innovators will not know if making a highly successful product (which is always difficult to sell cheap because scale isn't achieved) is worth it. I found this episode from Planet Money pretty informative: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/antitrust-3-big-tech https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti...