> The thing is, moving apartments has a high switching cost. It’s really something you want to avoid being forced to do, both for economic reasons and for socia

> The thing is, moving apartments has a high switching cost. It’s really something you want to avoid being forced to do, both for economic reasons and for social & personal reasons. Now, Amazon has you trapped: however much you may be inconvenienced or disappointed by being effectively required to purchase Amazon’s stuff rather than other merchants, it’ll be less bad than the monumentally large cost of moving apartments. Worse: in this scenario, "Amazon" competitors are unable to provide competitive pricing any more because everyone else, like you, waited a few cycles, and now they don't get enough sales volume for that. It is no longer economical for you to leave for another apartment that doesn't mandate this supply monopoly. The only way to break out of the cycle is if 1) a large proportion of people in your situation agree to move at the same time, which is particularly difficult because of individual circumstances as well as political will; and 2) all of you can afford to prop up the more expensive competing suppliers until volume discounts start rippling through the supply chain. * I say "Amazon" because this is entirely hypothetical, as the author admits, and I think it's rather unfair to use Amazon's name like this, which the author does not.