It's interesting how perspectives differ and I'm not disagreeing with yours. If you'd asked me before this discussion whether or not I felt, given those criter

It's interesting how perspectives differ and I'm not disagreeing with yours. If you'd asked me before this discussion whether or not I felt, given those criteria, that Amazon was a store or a flea market, I'd say I'd prefer Amazon to act like a store, and while it does have flea market aspects, I'd be happy for it to move away from them and in the store direction. The times I've actively disliked Amazon was when I bought some cheap but well-reviewed product and got something that was below cheap quality. I realized at those times that my natural expectation of Amazon was that it had some quality threshold for what it sold. I realized my thinking about Amazon did need to become flea-market-like, e.g. look that gift horse in the mouth! Except that isn't viable online where you can't personally evaluate what you're buying, especially on the low end of the market. I now like buying Amazon Basics at the low end price tier because it has a certain quality bar. I'd be more than happy, from a pure consumerist perspective, for Amazon to be mainly stocked with high quality third parties, its in-house brand filling in the cheaper side of the market, and then non-premium third parties who have somehow successfully competed with the in-house brand with some angle (say, sourcing a cheaper process that still gets results).