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The standard for antitrust enforcement for decades has been when the action of a company harms consumers. How does Amazon harm consumers? I mean precisely, how

The standard for antitrust enforcement for decades has been when the action of a company harms consumers. How does Amazon harm consumers? I mean precisely, how? Amazon is one of the most highly rated companies in the US by its customers. Its NPS score is 69 and 70 is considered "world class". I can get almost anything online shipped to my house the SAME DAY. If Amazon sends you the wrong item they'll let you keep the wrong one and immediately ship you a new one! How is taking action against Amazon going to help consumers? Seems to me that just ends up being a giant win for Walmart and target who offer worse service and often worse prices! So how are consumers being hurt?

ohazi 5y ago
It's possible for a monopolist to have a great product that allows people to do amazing things that were never previously possible and still be harming the consumer. Microsoft had the leading desktop operating system in the 90s that allowed millions of ordinary people to start using computers for the first time, yet their browser bundling was considered problematic. Bell telephone allowed you to talk to people across town and across the country in real time. People love talking to their far away friends and relatives! But they were simultaneously providing this futuristic service and harming consumers with their anti-competitive practices and monopoly pricing. It's possible for Amazon to both be providing a great service to you and me and be harming consumers with priority placement of Basics products and even harming competitors by abusing their access to product metrics in deciding what Basics products to make.
- spacemanmatt 5y ago
  Microsoft's dirty tricks with DOS, Windows, and other would-be commodity software are legend. They should have gotten parted out into OS, Desktop suite, and probably several other fragments a long time ago. That stuff was a nightmare for me as a consumer.
  - rincebrain 5y ago
    Should they have, though? I agree they should have been penalized (ideally more harshly than they were) for their legendary anticompetitive behavior, I'm just no longer as sure that partitioning the company out into distinct divisions would have been a net gain for the consumer as I used to be, especially against the specific behaviors they were accused of. How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into distinct divisions prevent, say, the OS division from enforcing the same anticompetitive requirements on companies licensing the OS? I also think consumer perception of what's reasonable in an OS has shifted since then. I don't think any of us would argue now, for example, that shipping a desktop OS with no browser installed by default would be a reasonable choice. (Likewise probably a media player.) Should it be impossible to uninstall? Maybe not, but there's a not-unreasonable argument to be made for preventing someone from winding up in a situation where they have no browser installed at all and can't look up how to fix it. (Having no media player installed is obviously less catastrophic.)
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into distinct divisions prevent, say, the OS division from enforcing the same anticompetitive requirements on companies licensing the OS? That kind of breakup wouldn't have solved that anti-competitive problem, but it would have solved others (e.g. the Office Team being able to use undocumented OS APIs to get an edge on competitors). Though, personally I kinda think a breakup of a tech monopoly should be more extreme, for instance by breaking it up by division and splitting some of those divisions further into competitors (e.g. split the OS division in two, each with their own Windows fork to sell, and all the Windows trademarks go to some independent interoperability consortium).
      - rincebrain 5y ago
        > it would have solved others (e.g. the Office Team being able to use undocumented OS APIs to get an edge on competitors). I mean, it might have prevented learning about and using new undocumented APIs going forward, but it would be in none of the newly-broken-up companies' interests to break the existing usage. > splitting some of those divisions further into competitors Even that I'm skeptical of - first, because you'd need enforcement to prevent them from simply merging again after a while (glares at Ma Bell breakup companies reforming into a few huge companies which usually deliberately avoid competing in markets), and second, I'm not convinced that deliberately fragmenting Windows into 2 distinct codebases is beneficial for consumers? Even assuming you could avoid one of the two competitors simply winning the vast majority of the marketshare after one round of OS upgrades, you'd likely end up with mutually incompatible API surfaces, thus breaking one of the main reasons people like Windows - compatibility. (I still claim, though, that given two initially equal products and equal resources, that one will probably relatively quickly eat the other's lunch. Look at what's happened almost every time a large open source project has had a high-profile fork - look at egcs and gcc, or OpenWRT and LEDE, or libav and ffmpeg.)
- skystarman 5y ago
  Microsoft and Bell were successfully sued using existing antitrust law because they WERE harming consumers. So again, how is Amazon hurting consumers?
  - kube-system 5y ago
    They are using their power to force competitors out of the market. That's what antitrust is about anyway -- it's not really about how happy customers are. "We're the best!" is easy to say when you've decimated any potential rivals.
    - dontblink 5y ago
      It is in the US though?
      - kube-system 5y ago
        Laws that prohibit anticompetitive practices do just as the name implies -- they prohibit companies from acting in a way that inhibits competition with their competitors in the market. The impact on consumers is often used as a justification and evidence of that, but it's not usually a requirement. It is assumed that the act of being anticompetitive itself is harmful to consumers as it limits their options.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - insert_coin 5y ago
      > They are using their power to force competitors out of the market. Everyone does this, it is called competition.
      - kube-system 5y ago
        In fact, many would say that monopolistic powers are the end result of capitalism. Thus the reason for antitrust regs to act as a reset.
- abduhl 5y ago
  Let's be clear about something misunderstood about Microsoft: Microsoft won that litigation in America, which is the jurisdiction we're talking about. Framing Microsoft's browser bundling as being "considered" problematic is the same as framing someone who was acquitted as being "considered" a criminal. The Microsoft approach remains an acceptable practice in law and is one of the principle points of the Apple v. Epic fight.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    >Microsoft won that litigation in America No they didn’t? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor... > the district court ruled that Microsoft's actions constituted unlawful monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed most of the district court's judgments.
    - rovolo 5y ago
      To expand on this: they basically won the right to bundle on appeal, but they were found to have abused their market power in support of IE. First Trial: > On June 7, 2000, the court ordered a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy.[19] According to that judgment, Microsoft would have to be broken into two separate units, one to produce the operating system, and one to produce other software components. Appeal: > On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[29] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > they basically won the right to bundle on appeal, If, by “appeal” you mean “settlement negotiated with the new, Microsoft-friendly Administration”, that is correct. That’s not what “appeal” usually means in a legal context.
baq 5y ago
One example: Amazon doesn’t seem to care about fraudulent sellers and fake paid-for reviews on its platform.
- zikzak 5y ago
  They seem to have a lot of sellers (relatively speaking) that do "triangle fraud". So they sell the part, order it from another site using stolen card, ship to original customer. They could be doing a lot to combat this but basically say "call the police" if they don't just ignore well sourced reports. Moving to more "fulfilled by Amazon" helps but that's never going to cover of all the inventory so fraudsters will always have a home there.
- zepto 5y ago
  That’s an example of poor service. Not them harming consumers. Do you know whether Walmart.com or Aliexpress are any better?
  - baq 5y ago
    actively looking the other way in presence of fraud on your platform is only 'poor service'? goalposts moved to the moon.
    - zepto 5y ago
      Are they “actively looking the other way”, or is it just hard to detect when there is so much money involved?
      - baq 5y ago
        i don't know, do you?
        zepto 5y ago
        So you just made up a bullshit accusation to discredit Amazon based on no evidence at all, and then claimed I was moving the goalposts?
lenkite 5y ago
Amazon regularly carries out malpractice by flouting federal regulations as described at https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-operation/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
- skystarman 5y ago
  Us antitrust law has no jurisdiction over what Amazon does in India...
IgorPartola 5y ago
https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-pressures-small-businesses-with-retal-1846696033 https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-pressures-small-busine... Amazon Reportedly Pressures Small Businesses with Retaliation if They Don't Hand Over User Data
- skystarman 5y ago
  Again, how does this harm consumers?
  - baq 5y ago
    it's in the title?
  - arcticfox 5y ago
    As one example, I used to sell textbooks on Amazon. Our account would be suspended at ANY report of potential issues with a book, despite a 98%+ positive feedback rating. It was a constant battle against the platform, despite doing everything under the sun to ensure our customers had a perfect experience. Meanwhile, Amazon Warehouse was slinging hot garbage and getting constant negative feedbacks (80% positive range) and they never got suspended. Amazon Warehouse even cancelled a massive number of their own negative feedbacks by blaming Amazon Prime for things that had nothing to do with shipping. We were undercutting Amazon on price for a long time, but in the end we threw in the towel because it was just an impossible marketplace to participate in. Interestingly there was another textbook seller that had a similar experience that got their testimony read to Bezos by Congress. https://www.theverge.com/21349440/amazon-marketplace-third-party-sellers-antitrust-hearing-jeff-bezos https://www.theverge.com/21349440/amazon-marketplace-third-p...
  - fakedang 5y ago
    Smaller businesses get eaten up, resulting in a bigger Amazon with greater monopoly powers, that harms consumers with shittier goods and less choice.
  - pydry 5y ago
    Amazon squashes competitors and raises prices or reduces quality/costs safe in the knowledge that consumers have few alternatives. It's weird asking "how does killing off the competition hurt consumers?" when literally all economic growth depends upon it.
Robotbeat 5y ago
Yeah, I agree with your point. I’d rather see legislation that focused on both improving worker wage and making it easier for new companies to enter the marketplace and compete with Amazon rather than punishing Amazon for having a store brand or whatever (store brands very often seem to be a good thing for consumers, even if companies don’t like being undercut).
0xB31B1B 5y ago
“The standard for decades”... the article is about a new laws being proposed because the current laws don’t properly account for the harms monopoly actors cause.
- zepto 5y ago
  What harms?
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Isn't that itself very suspicious that they are going all Calvinball and changing the rules which long stood out of the blue? Now they say it is a monopoly is a problem after Walmart managed to become the biggest employer in several states and literally becoming the only option in many areas? Now they cite vague unspecified harms while long ignoring concrete ones and claim the ones with no ability to exclude from the market are too far? That just screams "pretext".
  - jkestner 5y ago
    Out of the blue? We’ve been talking about Amazon’s market power for a long time—longer in tech years. If we expect tech companies to move fast, I’d like regulation to be less than a decade behind.
Renaud 5y ago
>How does Amazon harm consumers? I mean precisely, how? but burying alternatives, they basically drive smaller product competitors away, reducing their sales and their ability to grow and innovate. Amazon has been blatantly copying products that other brand sold, and made them cheaper. Great for consumers if the only thing you care about it price. Because the game is getting rigged and Amazon products will always be more prominent, no-one can compete with Amazon on these products. You end up with less competition and less choice. Amazon can just undercut you, push you down in their listings and get the lion's share of any product type they find lucrative. Certainly not all that bad but where do you imagine this is going if no-one else is able to compete with Amazon? Amazon is already king and has power of life and death on countless businesses that rely on it being an impartial party so they have a chance to sell their ware.
- insert_coin 5y ago
  The same things were said against Walmart, the exact same arguments word for word. And yet we saw the rise of independent stores, gentrification, Whole Foods, the rise of e-commerce, the rise of etsy, amazon, ali, ebay, the rise of the Apple Store, the rise of... And then we saw an explosion of "third party" brands. Millions and millions of alternatives flooded the market despite Walmart "undercutting everyone of their suppliers". From soda to nailclippers, to phone cases to chairs, to spoons, to...everything. Despite all the fear mongering, today there is not a single product category where only one brand exists, there is not a single product category where only the Walmart brand exists. Competition cannot be stopped, the business cycle cannot be stopped. Birth, growth, death, repeat. Amazon is huge today because Walmart was so huge before it; people actively went out of their way to avoid it just out of spite. Competition cannot be stopped, except by regulations. Give amazon by law a pen to play in and you are making sure they'll never let anyone else in. Things never stay as they are, and retail has never been so competitive. Amazon won't be top dog forever, just as Sears wasn't, just as Walmart wasn't. Just as the mighty GE wasn't, or the even mightier East India Co. wasn't.
  - pydry 5y ago
    >The same things were said against Walmart, the exact same arguments word for word. And? >And yet we saw the rise of independent stores, gentrification, Whole Foods, the rise of e-commerce, the rise of etsy, amazon, ali, ebay, the rise of the Apple Store So... Walmart was outcompeted by the Apple Store?
foobiter 5y ago
NPS is gamed so hard with dark patterns that it’s completely unreliable as a metric... I worked at a sales driven company and the lengths they went to push the score up despite actual customer feelings was borderline fraud.
blihp 5y ago
Price and selection. You may love what Amazon offers today. I think they're moderately terrible, even compared to the Amazon of 10 years ago, and I have fewer alternative marketplaces to choose from and products in those marketplaces. Try finding the exact thing/seller/manufacturer you're looking for... for some things I find it damn near impossible due to how they now consolidate listings. I'm also pretty sure that the prices aren't as good as they would in a more competitive environment but can't be certain as Amazon has wiped out much of it. Competition is a key mechanism that allows markets to self regulate. The vast majority of companies are incapable of self regulating because it is contrary to their primary mission of 'maximizing shareholder value'. This generally just means eliminate your competition and then maximizing profit. In the absence of competitive markets, the government often needs to step in at some point.
pottertheotter 5y ago
There's many that argue that the current standard for antitrust enforcement does not consider enough or the right factors.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
How does Amazon harm consumers? Try to boycott them and find out. I'm harmed when I have no choice.

ohazi 5y ago

It's possible for a monopolist to have a great product that allows people to do amazing things that were never previously possible and still be harming the consumer. Microsoft had the leading desktop operating system in the 90s that allowed millions of ordinary people to start using computers for the first time, yet their browser bundling was considered problematic. Bell telephone allowed you to talk to people across town and across the country in real time. People love talking to their far away friends and relatives! But they were simultaneously providing this futuristic service and harming consumers with their anti-competitive practices and monopoly pricing. It's possible for Amazon to both be providing a great service to you and me and be harming consumers with priority placement of Basics products and even harming competitors by abusing their access to product metrics in deciding what Basics products to make.

spacemanmatt 5y ago
Microsoft's dirty tricks with DOS, Windows, and other would-be commodity software are legend. They should have gotten parted out into OS, Desktop suite, and probably several other fragments a long time ago. That stuff was a nightmare for me as a consumer.
- rincebrain 5y ago
  Should they have, though? I agree they should have been penalized (ideally more harshly than they were) for their legendary anticompetitive behavior, I'm just no longer as sure that partitioning the company out into distinct divisions would have been a net gain for the consumer as I used to be, especially against the specific behaviors they were accused of. How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into distinct divisions prevent, say, the OS division from enforcing the same anticompetitive requirements on companies licensing the OS? I also think consumer perception of what's reasonable in an OS has shifted since then. I don't think any of us would argue now, for example, that shipping a desktop OS with no browser installed by default would be a reasonable choice. (Likewise probably a media player.) Should it be impossible to uninstall? Maybe not, but there's a not-unreasonable argument to be made for preventing someone from winding up in a situation where they have no browser installed at all and can't look up how to fix it. (Having no media player installed is obviously less catastrophic.)
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into distinct divisions prevent, say, the OS division from enforcing the same anticompetitive requirements on companies licensing the OS? That kind of breakup wouldn't have solved that anti-competitive problem, but it would have solved others (e.g. the Office Team being able to use undocumented OS APIs to get an edge on competitors). Though, personally I kinda think a breakup of a tech monopoly should be more extreme, for instance by breaking it up by division and splitting some of those divisions further into competitors (e.g. split the OS division in two, each with their own Windows fork to sell, and all the Windows trademarks go to some independent interoperability consortium).
    - rincebrain 5y ago
      > it would have solved others (e.g. the Office Team being able to use undocumented OS APIs to get an edge on competitors). I mean, it might have prevented learning about and using new undocumented APIs going forward, but it would be in none of the newly-broken-up companies' interests to break the existing usage. > splitting some of those divisions further into competitors Even that I'm skeptical of - first, because you'd need enforcement to prevent them from simply merging again after a while (glares at Ma Bell breakup companies reforming into a few huge companies which usually deliberately avoid competing in markets), and second, I'm not convinced that deliberately fragmenting Windows into 2 distinct codebases is beneficial for consumers? Even assuming you could avoid one of the two competitors simply winning the vast majority of the marketshare after one round of OS upgrades, you'd likely end up with mutually incompatible API surfaces, thus breaking one of the main reasons people like Windows - compatibility. (I still claim, though, that given two initially equal products and equal resources, that one will probably relatively quickly eat the other's lunch. Look at what's happened almost every time a large open source project has had a high-profile fork - look at egcs and gcc, or OpenWRT and LEDE, or libav and ffmpeg.)
skystarman 5y ago
Microsoft and Bell were successfully sued using existing antitrust law because they WERE harming consumers. So again, how is Amazon hurting consumers?
- kube-system 5y ago
  They are using their power to force competitors out of the market. That's what antitrust is about anyway -- it's not really about how happy customers are. "We're the best!" is easy to say when you've decimated any potential rivals.
  - dontblink 5y ago
    It is in the US though?
    - kube-system 5y ago
      Laws that prohibit anticompetitive practices do just as the name implies -- they prohibit companies from acting in a way that inhibits competition with their competitors in the market. The impact on consumers is often used as a justification and evidence of that, but it's not usually a requirement. It is assumed that the act of being anticompetitive itself is harmful to consumers as it limits their options.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - insert_coin 5y ago
    > They are using their power to force competitors out of the market. Everyone does this, it is called competition.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      In fact, many would say that monopolistic powers are the end result of capitalism. Thus the reason for antitrust regs to act as a reset.
abduhl 5y ago
Let's be clear about something misunderstood about Microsoft: Microsoft won that litigation in America, which is the jurisdiction we're talking about. Framing Microsoft's browser bundling as being "considered" problematic is the same as framing someone who was acquitted as being "considered" a criminal. The Microsoft approach remains an acceptable practice in law and is one of the principle points of the Apple v. Epic fight.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  >Microsoft won that litigation in America No they didn’t? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor... > the district court ruled that Microsoft's actions constituted unlawful monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed most of the district court's judgments.
  - rovolo 5y ago
    To expand on this: they basically won the right to bundle on appeal, but they were found to have abused their market power in support of IE. First Trial: > On June 7, 2000, the court ordered a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy.[19] According to that judgment, Microsoft would have to be broken into two separate units, one to produce the operating system, and one to produce other software components. Appeal: > On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[29] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > they basically won the right to bundle on appeal, If, by “appeal” you mean “settlement negotiated with the new, Microsoft-friendly Administration”, that is correct. That’s not what “appeal” usually means in a legal context.

baq 5y ago

One example: Amazon doesn’t seem to care about fraudulent sellers and fake paid-for reviews on its platform.

zikzak 5y ago
They seem to have a lot of sellers (relatively speaking) that do "triangle fraud". So they sell the part, order it from another site using stolen card, ship to original customer. They could be doing a lot to combat this but basically say "call the police" if they don't just ignore well sourced reports. Moving to more "fulfilled by Amazon" helps but that's never going to cover of all the inventory so fraudsters will always have a home there.
zepto 5y ago
That’s an example of poor service. Not them harming consumers. Do you know whether Walmart.com or Aliexpress are any better?
- baq 5y ago
  actively looking the other way in presence of fraud on your platform is only 'poor service'? goalposts moved to the moon.
  - zepto 5y ago
    Are they “actively looking the other way”, or is it just hard to detect when there is so much money involved?
    - baq 5y ago
      i don't know, do you?
      - zepto 5y ago
        So you just made up a bullshit accusation to discredit Amazon based on no evidence at all, and then claimed I was moving the goalposts?

lenkite 5y ago

Amazon regularly carries out malpractice by flouting federal regulations as described at https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-operation/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...

skystarman 5y ago
Us antitrust law has no jurisdiction over what Amazon does in India...

IgorPartola 5y ago

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-pressures-small-businesses-with-retal-1846696033 https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-pressures-small-busine... Amazon Reportedly Pressures Small Businesses with Retaliation if They Don't Hand Over User Data

skystarman 5y ago
Again, how does this harm consumers?
- baq 5y ago
  it's in the title?
- arcticfox 5y ago
  As one example, I used to sell textbooks on Amazon. Our account would be suspended at ANY report of potential issues with a book, despite a 98%+ positive feedback rating. It was a constant battle against the platform, despite doing everything under the sun to ensure our customers had a perfect experience. Meanwhile, Amazon Warehouse was slinging hot garbage and getting constant negative feedbacks (80% positive range) and they never got suspended. Amazon Warehouse even cancelled a massive number of their own negative feedbacks by blaming Amazon Prime for things that had nothing to do with shipping. We were undercutting Amazon on price for a long time, but in the end we threw in the towel because it was just an impossible marketplace to participate in. Interestingly there was another textbook seller that had a similar experience that got their testimony read to Bezos by Congress. https://www.theverge.com/21349440/amazon-marketplace-third-party-sellers-antitrust-hearing-jeff-bezos https://www.theverge.com/21349440/amazon-marketplace-third-p...
- fakedang 5y ago
  Smaller businesses get eaten up, resulting in a bigger Amazon with greater monopoly powers, that harms consumers with shittier goods and less choice.
- pydry 5y ago
  Amazon squashes competitors and raises prices or reduces quality/costs safe in the knowledge that consumers have few alternatives. It's weird asking "how does killing off the competition hurt consumers?" when literally all economic growth depends upon it.

Robotbeat 5y ago

Yeah, I agree with your point. I’d rather see legislation that focused on both improving worker wage and making it easier for new companies to enter the marketplace and compete with Amazon rather than punishing Amazon for having a store brand or whatever (store brands very often seem to be a good thing for consumers, even if companies don’t like being undercut).

0xB31B1B 5y ago

“The standard for decades”... the article is about a new laws being proposed because the current laws don’t properly account for the harms monopoly actors cause.

zepto 5y ago
What harms?
Nasrudith 5y ago
Isn't that itself very suspicious that they are going all Calvinball and changing the rules which long stood out of the blue? Now they say it is a monopoly is a problem after Walmart managed to become the biggest employer in several states and literally becoming the only option in many areas? Now they cite vague unspecified harms while long ignoring concrete ones and claim the ones with no ability to exclude from the market are too far? That just screams "pretext".
- jkestner 5y ago
  Out of the blue? We’ve been talking about Amazon’s market power for a long time—longer in tech years. If we expect tech companies to move fast, I’d like regulation to be less than a decade behind.

Renaud 5y ago

>How does Amazon harm consumers? I mean precisely, how? but burying alternatives, they basically drive smaller product competitors away, reducing their sales and their ability to grow and innovate. Amazon has been blatantly copying products that other brand sold, and made them cheaper. Great for consumers if the only thing you care about it price. Because the game is getting rigged and Amazon products will always be more prominent, no-one can compete with Amazon on these products. You end up with less competition and less choice. Amazon can just undercut you, push you down in their listings and get the lion's share of any product type they find lucrative. Certainly not all that bad but where do you imagine this is going if no-one else is able to compete with Amazon? Amazon is already king and has power of life and death on countless businesses that rely on it being an impartial party so they have a chance to sell their ware.

insert_coin 5y ago
The same things were said against Walmart, the exact same arguments word for word. And yet we saw the rise of independent stores, gentrification, Whole Foods, the rise of e-commerce, the rise of etsy, amazon, ali, ebay, the rise of the Apple Store, the rise of... And then we saw an explosion of "third party" brands. Millions and millions of alternatives flooded the market despite Walmart "undercutting everyone of their suppliers". From soda to nailclippers, to phone cases to chairs, to spoons, to...everything. Despite all the fear mongering, today there is not a single product category where only one brand exists, there is not a single product category where only the Walmart brand exists. Competition cannot be stopped, the business cycle cannot be stopped. Birth, growth, death, repeat. Amazon is huge today because Walmart was so huge before it; people actively went out of their way to avoid it just out of spite. Competition cannot be stopped, except by regulations. Give amazon by law a pen to play in and you are making sure they'll never let anyone else in. Things never stay as they are, and retail has never been so competitive. Amazon won't be top dog forever, just as Sears wasn't, just as Walmart wasn't. Just as the mighty GE wasn't, or the even mightier East India Co. wasn't.
- pydry 5y ago
  >The same things were said against Walmart, the exact same arguments word for word. And? >And yet we saw the rise of independent stores, gentrification, Whole Foods, the rise of e-commerce, the rise of etsy, amazon, ali, ebay, the rise of the Apple Store So... Walmart was outcompeted by the Apple Store?

foobiter 5y ago

NPS is gamed so hard with dark patterns that it’s completely unreliable as a metric... I worked at a sales driven company and the lengths they went to push the score up despite actual customer feelings was borderline fraud.

blihp 5y ago

Price and selection. You may love what Amazon offers today. I think they're moderately terrible, even compared to the Amazon of 10 years ago, and I have fewer alternative marketplaces to choose from and products in those marketplaces. Try finding the exact thing/seller/manufacturer you're looking for... for some things I find it damn near impossible due to how they now consolidate listings. I'm also pretty sure that the prices aren't as good as they would in a more competitive environment but can't be certain as Amazon has wiped out much of it. Competition is a key mechanism that allows markets to self regulate. The vast majority of companies are incapable of self regulating because it is contrary to their primary mission of 'maximizing shareholder value'. This generally just means eliminate your competition and then maximizing profit. In the absence of competitive markets, the government often needs to step in at some point.

pottertheotter 5y ago

There's many that argue that the current standard for antitrust enforcement does not consider enough or the right factors.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

How does Amazon harm consumers? Try to boycott them and find out. I'm harmed when I have no choice.