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Walmart comes in, forces hundreds of other stores out of business, decimates mom and pop businesses, creates a massive workforce of underpaid employees, and the

Walmart comes in, forces hundreds of other stores out of business, decimates mom and pop businesses, creates a massive workforce of underpaid employees, and then Amazon comes in, does the exact same thing, except 'online', and then starts getting into every other business they can think of, and the US Government (and people) just sit there and watch?

josephd79 5y ago
You forgot Microsoft, but at least they eventually tried with them. oh and google too. I'm 100% agreeing with you though.
hammock 5y ago
What did the federal government do to impede Walmart?
jmeister 5y ago
Consumers love Amazon. Everybody loves Amazon. “A new survey says Americans have more confidence in Amazon than they do the government or the press.” https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/25/18022956/amazon-trust-survey-american-institutions-ranked-georgetown https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/25/18022956/amazon-tru...
- wongarsu 5y ago
  For the most part, Amazon does what they say they do. Sure, they have their problems with fraud, counterfeits and reviews, but at least they don't start a marketing campaign "we have the most honest reviews of all web shops". That doesn't necessarily mean everyone loves them, being trustworthy is only one aspect of likability. You can like the results and communication without approving of the means.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  The missing link here is that the U.S. government policymaking process is very much tied to citizen sentiment. Politicians who attack popular things can find themselves out of power. As long as most people are OK with Amazon, there will not be much public demand for government to make new policy to constrain them. Policymaking is the key process because it’s not illegal in the U.S. to outcompete other companies, regardless of how big or small they are.
SQueeeeeL 5y ago
"Greed is good" - The US Director of Treasury probably
- classified 5y ago
  Original quote by Gordon Gecko.
dadarecit 5y ago
Thats how a free market works, bro.
- remram 5y ago
  You mean deregulated. Online selling is not a free market, since Amazon owns buyers (subscription, platform, recommendation on their own devices), has a special deal with USPS, and uses contracts that prevent sellers from selling cheaper elsewhere. It is a deregulated one (which naturally evolves away from free).
AzzieElbab 5y ago
Are you seriously rooting against things that work as opposed to things that don’t?
- speed_spread 5y ago
  Fascism works! Yeah, Fascism! And those now unemployed losers? Haha, fuck'em!
- unity1001 5y ago
  Slavery worked. Feudalism worked. Aristocracy worked. Child labor worked (and very well too). Fascism worked as another commenter noted. Why did we do away with all those 'working things'. We should have kept them.
  - namlem 5y ago
    Except those things didn't work. Well, I guess child labor did in the short term sense. However, slavery, feudalism, aristocracy, and fascism were all remarkably inefficient, and only able to maintain their existence through force.
    - flandish 5y ago
      "Well, I guess child labor did in the short term sense." It's still working, in the global south, to make products shipped and sold all around the global north... but those of us in the north just don't see it; we no longer see children shuffling off to work, because, thanks to Capitalism's profit-over-people ideals, the labor force that has "disgusted" the consumers in the north (child labor) (and therefore properly threatened the profit of those companies using child labor) has been moved to the south... and those consumers in the north don't really "care" that a bunch of brown and asian children are doing the work now.
      - namlem 5y ago
        Yes, it is a problem, however it's not completely being ignored. For example, Canada successfully pushed for provisions to the CPTPP to push Vietnam to ban child labor.
RA_Fisher 5y ago
The competition benefits consumers. Shopping is much more convenient than before Walmart and Amazon and they help keep prices low— that’s why I wouldn’t be a fan of the government interfering with the two companies.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Keeping prices low is good when you're wearing your consumer hat. Keeping prices low is not necessarily so good, and can even be bad, when you consider it from the many other roles you play as a human being in a complex modern society.
- dTal 5y ago
  What competition? The whole point is that they are crushing the competition, rendering themselves inescapable. That's not at all good for the consumer. The logical endpoint of this kind of horizontal domination and vertical integration is the classic dystopian trope of "The Corporation" controlling every aspect of life. (Which is literally a thing that has already happened, by the way - the East India Company being the classic example. It was simply called "The Company", had its own flag and military, and completely ruled India.)
  - archhn 5y ago
    The shortsightedness of the comment you are responding to is unbelievable. Things may be cheap now, but what does the future look like when there are massive monopolies forming in every sector. From farming to retail, if you don't go big, you go out. This ends in neo-feudalism, with CEO's being the new lords. Every collaborator of this plot has been promised a place among the new nobility. That's why they are going along with it. I've seen my own community fall into ruin. Hopelessness is rampant; main street died years ago. It's bleak.
  - namlem 5y ago
    Shopfiy has risen as a competitor, giving independent businesses an alternative means of transacting with customers. Amazon has plenty of competition. eBay is another.
  - 5y ago
tenpies 5y ago
It's because one of Amazon's products is for the government: employing a huge number of people with no education or credentials, in a job that pays above minimum wage. In the Earnings Call in July of this year, they said they now employe 950,000 warehouse workers. They're probably over the 1 MM mark right now due to the holidays. Yes, there are plenty of people working there that are overqualified, but that is the beauty of what Amazon is doing. Their onboarding and recruiting for this is incredibly smooth, fast, and will give virtually everyone a chance. And it pays above minimum wage. There's not many places that provide that sort of service in the United States.
- rajman187 5y ago
  They apparently have a huge turnover rate which is why they invest in a “smooth” onboarding. > According to data analysed by the Times, Amazon was losing “about 3% of its hourly associates each week”, translating to an annual employee turnover of roughly 150% per year. They already re-employ people who had previously left. Eventually they’ll run out of people willing to take the jobs if they just focus on on-boarding efficiency rather than working conditions people don’t hate.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    Much of that turnover is the choice of the employee. They aren’t looking to build a long career in these instances. They’re looking for extra money or filler while between jobs. I know guys that driver Uber/Lyft and do delivery and work at Amazon occasionally for extra money. So long as you remain in good standing they will hire you back quickly with the mutual understanding you’re just doing a quick thing.
- netcan 5y ago
  Retail, as an employment sector, exists with or without amazon/walmart... and generally also employs low income people. Calling that a service is a bit much.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
chrisseaton 5y ago
If Amazon was able to compete with Walmart and push them out, then isn't competition working and why do you think we needed the Government to intervene? One day someone else will push Amazon out.
- unclebucknasty 5y ago
  >One day someone else will push Amazon out. The question is, "at what cost in the intervening time?" We've also not seen the combination of scale, network effects and technological capability that's available to companies like Amazon today, making monopoly power even more potent. It's not 100% clear that the potential for their displacement is remotely as viable as has historically been the case for companies.
  - 8note 5y ago
    The cost is whatever it takes to convince one rich person to decide it's profitable to invest in a competitor.
    - unclebucknasty 5y ago
      Not sure if your comment simply stems from a misunderstanding or you intended it as a pithy way of saying that, as consumers bear the cost, investors will see the opportunity to relieve their pain and move to compete. Either way, though, the problematic piece (and primary rationale for antitrust law) is that it's the consumers who are bearing the cost.
unity1001 5y ago
> and the US Government (and people) just sit there and watch? Yeah. That's called capitalism. No limits on the amount of capital and what the capital owner can do with it.
- zdkl 5y ago
  A better keyword might be '(ultra-)liberal' rather than 'capitalist'.
  - unity1001 5y ago
    Liberalism was just the early form of capitalist advocacy. Neoliberalism is the advocacy to return to those 'good old days' of mid 1800s where true capitalism existed in the most pure form. Neoliberals want to do it in a few decades. Far-right like in the US want to do it within the next 6 months by selling out everything and letting 'the market' rule.
namlem 5y ago
Why should the government intervene? It's called competition, and Amazon is winning. Some day someone will do the same to them. The government should merely enforce a level playing field and prevent market manipulation.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  who can compete with amazon when their pricing is a result of their massive scale and supply chain dominance?
  - namlem 5y ago
    A lot of things are still often cheaper on eBay. Plus, price isn't everything. Amazon has quality problems.
  - NavinF 5y ago
    who can compete with Walmart when their pricing is a result of their massive scale and supply chain dominance? /s
    - dTal 5y ago
      Why the /s ?
      - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
        Probably because Amazon is. And to be fair: though Amazon seems unstoppable now, so did Microsoft, IBM, Sears, GM, Kodak, and many others.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      You're trying to invalidate an argument with the same argument.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
refurb 5y ago
General Motors comes in, forces hundreds of furriers out of business, creates massive workforce of underpaid employees and the govt just sits there and watches?
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  furriers?
  - vnorilo 5y ago
    Probably farriers, who specialize in horse shoes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrier
  - dash2 5y ago
    He meant furries. It's a little known fact that before the internal combustion engine, furryism was much more popular due to the greater availability of horsehair for costumes. Notable furries included Kenneth Grahame of Wind in the Willows fame and by all accounts, King Edward VII, who was sent a Russian Bear costume by his cousin the Tsar. UwU.
- sofixa 5y ago
  It's even worse, because GM actively sabotaged, in some cases by buying and then dismantling, competitors ( in a larger sense), "streetcars" (trams/light rail). They literally forced cities to move to buses they provided, and service deteriorated and made cars necessary for everyone. And the governments just sat there and watched, and effects are still there today in the US.
Spooky23 5y ago
The legal theories around corporate regulation started changing in the 1970s and are now the philosophy of “conservative” attorneys almost universally. In short, if a series of actions doesn’t raise retail prices, it’s fine. Walmart beat the drum of “Made in the USA” and “Low Prices” until it didn’t matter anymore. Amazon arose during the era of impotent regulators, and just had to rope a dope Wall Street that it would someday somehow turn massive capital investment into cash. Despite the economic engine unleashed by anti-trust actions like the breakup of AT&T and to a lesser extent standard oil, we probably won’t see significant changes for 30 years or more when demographic shifts and the cohorts of judges, etc running the show now fade away.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  I fear you are correct. Hopefully the Millenials stay motivated until then!
tyoma 5y ago
There seems to be some selective amnesia about how great mom & pop businesses were. People drove an hour out of their way to Walmart because it was that much better. Not just the prices, but also selection and return policies (Walmart was the pioneer of long term hassle free returns). Similarly, Amazon is succeeding because it is genuinely a much better experience than going into a store. You order things, they show up at your door. If there is a problem Amazon refunds your money. If the government should do anything its invest in a same-day/next-day shipping infrastructure that can be used by any business (say, via the post office or maybe a new package logistics agency).
- burlesona 5y ago
  Amazon used to be a better experience. Now you can’t trust that the thing you ordered is what will actually be delivered. I was a prime customer for more than 15 years, but I cancelled this year because I no longer trust Amazon to deliver what I actually ordered, not some scammy knock off. (I like your idea about USPS parcel service though :))
  - neutronicus 5y ago
    Also if you live in a city there's like a 15% chance your package up and takes a walk
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Petty theft proliferates only because people are willing to let it. I live in a city that is stereotyped with rusting factories and falling down houses. We don't really have a petty theft problem because there's still political will to not tolerate petty theft. The police resources to proactively go after it don't really exist but they come if called. The thieves here are really clumsy and tend to break ribs and get black eyes slipping on ice in June or falling down one stair so that tends to dissuade people from making a regular income stream out of it so you're just left with opportunistic theft. When the police do happen to catch a thief they prosecute.
  - jacobr1 5y ago
pyrrhotech 5y ago
[flagged]
- ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
  “Despite illogical leftist primal emotional outcry” Move over Burke and de Maistre, conservatism as praising big business.
  - pyrrhotech 5y ago
    I'm not a conservative, I'm a rationalist. I don't make arguments based on "but poor mom and pop lost their jobs!!!". Instead, take a look at the pros and cons at a holistic, societal level and decide what is best quantifiably. Luckily, we don't even really have to do this often, because the free market usually gets it right. Despite what a naive view of American politics might have you believe, both the far left and the far right want to abolish capitalism and markets in favor of totalitarian beurocratic control, they just have different flavors of how to get to and how to manage that state. There is very little difference in economic and social policy between historical communist and fascist nations. Only rational centrists who fight for liberal democracy and free markets support the best path forward for society.
    - dTal 5y ago
      >the free market usually gets it right. Citation needed. The "free market" - that is, sitting back and allowing everyone to act in their own perceived self-interest - routinely ties itself in perverse knots, and has pushed us over the precipice into irreversible environmental catastrophe. The market is not efficient. The market is not rational. The market does not care about you.
      - pyrrhotech 5y ago
        The free market is the reason the USA is the richest country in history and has far outpaced the wealth gains of Western Europe who early on was resistant to free markets because of aristocratic feudalism (right wing) and later became resistant to them because of socialist ideas (left wing). On both sides of history, the USA has so far remained in the center in both eras and that has helped us grow immensely faster than them such that today the USA is wealthier than all of Europe combined despite having half the population and natural resources. Even Communist china learned the hard way that free markets are the only way to prosperity and after they adopted Deng's free market reforms in the 1970s, they subsequently pulled 700M+ people out of poverty. Of course we need some regulation to protect the environment. I never said a 100% regulation-free market is what is needed. What we need is to preserve private property, encourage entrepreneurship and innovation and preserve the incentive of hard-work.
robbedpeter 5y ago
Mom and pop shops, brick and mortar in general, have largely gone the way of horse drawn carriages. Technology has made them obsolete. There are definitely problems with mega corporations taking over, but Walmart and Amazon are filing in niches in a technological ecosystem where real world small shops aren't viable, and that's a good thing for consumers. Whatever the solution ends up being, it won't involve the return of brick and mortar - online shopping and Amazon style logistics are here to stay. Breaking up Amazon so that the shipping and warehouse part of the business gets spun off on its own might make sense, with established shipping companies able to compete. Luddism never works - you can't eliminate automation and do things less efficiently just to arbitrarily provide work for people.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  > Luddism never works - you can't eliminate automation and do things less efficiently just to arbitrarily provide work for people. This isn't just about automation. It's also about vertical integration into one company. If all we care about is efficiency then why break up the railroad barons or company towns? Because competition, despite some inefficiencies, makes for a more robust market. Also, we don't want our kids working in the mines.
  - vsareto 5y ago
    Idk what robustness is saving us from - if you’re big enough, you get bailed out. Amazon is clearly big enough now. There’s lots of bank competition but they still needed a bailout.
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      Banks didn't need a bailout. They needed to be allowed to fail. And restore the regulations that would've stopped them from overleveraging so much in the first place. (Or at least prosecute those knowingly involved in subprime mortgages.) Bailouts from taxpayers aren't a sign of robustness either. They are a sign of fragile, easily bought government and large players dominating markets.
- 5y ago
evrydayhustling 5y ago
You're getting hammered about the market competition being good for consumers. But even on the labor side, these two aren't the same: Walmart minimum wage is $12 / hour, Amazon just went up to $18. Conversely, the "that's a market" folks should deep read the article's last bit on how hard it is to be an "Anti Amazon Alliance" e-tailer. Amazon is piling up previously uncorrelated strategic advantages, so that you have to be an expert in way too many things for a small company to compete. - demand sourcing - warehousing - last mile logistics - defect management - now, freight forwarding I think their innovation in these areas is amazing and will some day benefit everyone, but it will eventually take a new type of antitrust (which recognizes cross-leveraging monopolies for efficiency) to keep Amazon from retaining all of the value generated.
- esotericimpl 5y ago
  [dead]
- baybal2 5y ago
  You need to believe that retailers are complete potatoes if they can't do that. If you can't do such basics, you will sink as a businessman long before Amazon, or anything. This however may well be the case. I will take that American business is very pampered, living off very protected business environment, and world's richest consumers. It's hard to not to make money here.
  - evrydayhustling 5y ago
    Retailers of all sizes can do those things. But go ahead, start an e-commerce business, and implement those things without Amazon or Shopify. Have a couple of good quarters, dish out for some marketing to speed up your growth. Then, watch the look-alike product appear on Amazon at a price 15% below your unit costs, because they do everything on the list more efficiently, didn't have to ramp up processes or prove their market, and are still on the part of the growth curve where Amazon supplies them at cost. Survive until the holidays and bulk up your inventory for black friday spending, then get swamped in chargebacks because your Amazon-platformed competition undercut your prices with a bundle deal including stuff you don't sell. Cheer up though -- if your product is really great, you'll get to see that competitor displaced by an Amazon Basics brand a few weeks later. America's rich customers and friendly government were not for you.
snarf21 5y ago
The government does nothing for several reasons. 1) People prefer Walmart and Amazon to driving down town to some mom and pop store. 2) Walmart and Amazon do provide jobs (the quality is questionable) and the government needs its citizens to have jobs. 3) Although people may have lower wages, the economies of scale give people greater buying power. Stores downtown need to pay rent and heat and carry inventory. The money for that needs to come from somewhere. That being said, the SEC and FTC need to start doing their jobs. They have failed us in the 21st century. We need to rollback all these mega-mergers and stop allowing them to move forward, not just in tech but also in banks and media.
- papito 5y ago
  Why do you thing certain people LOVE "small government"? It has nothing to do with their freedoms. It has everything to do with more corporate tax loopholes and a toothless set of regulatory agencies that have no resources to do anything meaningful to protect the public good. The government got weaker, and they got stronger. It's not even a fair fight.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
You can tell how minimal HN's exposure to small scale mom and pop retail is by the fact that it's considered an unmitigated good around here. For every hardware store being more flexible than robotic BigCo policies about working hours or teaching a teenager to drive a forklift there's a grocer systemically short changing its employees. It's very much a mixed bag. I personally hate for secondary political reasons but people need to stop looking at retail through rose tinted glasses. It's always sucked on average. Now it just sucks homogeneously.
jimbokun 5y ago
Just make the national minimum wage $15/hour instead of trying to micro-manage specific markets and businesses.
- jacobr1 5y ago
  Ignoring the social benefits, how would that improve competition? Amazon already pays more that that, it would be their competitors struggling with increased costs.
ldehaan 5y ago
Memory is short and books/blog posts/videos are written by the winners (like Amazon and Walmart) and people can't see the forest for the trees. You live on your knees and act like sinners. Wake up. Stand up and realize you're not bad, not racist, not gay, not evil, just you, a human. Stop letting people tell you who you are. Then Amazon and Walmart and all these companies can come around and they'll succeed, so far as they can convince you that you're nothing. You are everything all at once, wake up, smell the cosmos.

josephd79 5y ago

You forgot Microsoft, but at least they eventually tried with them. oh and google too. I'm 100% agreeing with you though.

hammock 5y ago

What did the federal government do to impede Walmart?

jmeister 5y ago

Consumers love Amazon. Everybody loves Amazon. “A new survey says Americans have more confidence in Amazon than they do the government or the press.” https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/25/18022956/amazon-trust-survey-american-institutions-ranked-georgetown https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/25/18022956/amazon-tru...

wongarsu 5y ago
For the most part, Amazon does what they say they do. Sure, they have their problems with fraud, counterfeits and reviews, but at least they don't start a marketing campaign "we have the most honest reviews of all web shops". That doesn't necessarily mean everyone loves them, being trustworthy is only one aspect of likability. You can like the results and communication without approving of the means.
snowwrestler 5y ago
The missing link here is that the U.S. government policymaking process is very much tied to citizen sentiment. Politicians who attack popular things can find themselves out of power. As long as most people are OK with Amazon, there will not be much public demand for government to make new policy to constrain them. Policymaking is the key process because it’s not illegal in the U.S. to outcompete other companies, regardless of how big or small they are.

SQueeeeeL 5y ago

"Greed is good" - The US Director of Treasury probably

classified 5y ago
Original quote by Gordon Gecko.

dadarecit 5y ago

Thats how a free market works, bro.

remram 5y ago
You mean deregulated. Online selling is not a free market, since Amazon owns buyers (subscription, platform, recommendation on their own devices), has a special deal with USPS, and uses contracts that prevent sellers from selling cheaper elsewhere. It is a deregulated one (which naturally evolves away from free).

AzzieElbab 5y ago

Are you seriously rooting against things that work as opposed to things that don’t?

speed_spread 5y ago
Fascism works! Yeah, Fascism! And those now unemployed losers? Haha, fuck'em!
unity1001 5y ago
Slavery worked. Feudalism worked. Aristocracy worked. Child labor worked (and very well too). Fascism worked as another commenter noted. Why did we do away with all those 'working things'. We should have kept them.
- namlem 5y ago
  Except those things didn't work. Well, I guess child labor did in the short term sense. However, slavery, feudalism, aristocracy, and fascism were all remarkably inefficient, and only able to maintain their existence through force.
  - flandish 5y ago
    "Well, I guess child labor did in the short term sense." It's still working, in the global south, to make products shipped and sold all around the global north... but those of us in the north just don't see it; we no longer see children shuffling off to work, because, thanks to Capitalism's profit-over-people ideals, the labor force that has "disgusted" the consumers in the north (child labor) (and therefore properly threatened the profit of those companies using child labor) has been moved to the south... and those consumers in the north don't really "care" that a bunch of brown and asian children are doing the work now.
    - namlem 5y ago
      Yes, it is a problem, however it's not completely being ignored. For example, Canada successfully pushed for provisions to the CPTPP to push Vietnam to ban child labor.

RA_Fisher 5y ago

The competition benefits consumers. Shopping is much more convenient than before Walmart and Amazon and they help keep prices low— that’s why I wouldn’t be a fan of the government interfering with the two companies.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Keeping prices low is good when you're wearing your consumer hat. Keeping prices low is not necessarily so good, and can even be bad, when you consider it from the many other roles you play as a human being in a complex modern society.
dTal 5y ago
What competition? The whole point is that they are crushing the competition, rendering themselves inescapable. That's not at all good for the consumer. The logical endpoint of this kind of horizontal domination and vertical integration is the classic dystopian trope of "The Corporation" controlling every aspect of life. (Which is literally a thing that has already happened, by the way - the East India Company being the classic example. It was simply called "The Company", had its own flag and military, and completely ruled India.)
- archhn 5y ago
  The shortsightedness of the comment you are responding to is unbelievable. Things may be cheap now, but what does the future look like when there are massive monopolies forming in every sector. From farming to retail, if you don't go big, you go out. This ends in neo-feudalism, with CEO's being the new lords. Every collaborator of this plot has been promised a place among the new nobility. That's why they are going along with it. I've seen my own community fall into ruin. Hopelessness is rampant; main street died years ago. It's bleak.
- namlem 5y ago
  Shopfiy has risen as a competitor, giving independent businesses an alternative means of transacting with customers. Amazon has plenty of competition. eBay is another.
- 5y ago

tenpies 5y ago

It's because one of Amazon's products is for the government: employing a huge number of people with no education or credentials, in a job that pays above minimum wage. In the Earnings Call in July of this year, they said they now employe 950,000 warehouse workers. They're probably over the 1 MM mark right now due to the holidays. Yes, there are plenty of people working there that are overqualified, but that is the beauty of what Amazon is doing. Their onboarding and recruiting for this is incredibly smooth, fast, and will give virtually everyone a chance. And it pays above minimum wage. There's not many places that provide that sort of service in the United States.

rajman187 5y ago
They apparently have a huge turnover rate which is why they invest in a “smooth” onboarding. > According to data analysed by the Times, Amazon was losing “about 3% of its hourly associates each week”, translating to an annual employee turnover of roughly 150% per year. They already re-employ people who had previously left. Eventually they’ll run out of people willing to take the jobs if they just focus on on-boarding efficiency rather than working conditions people don’t hate.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  Much of that turnover is the choice of the employee. They aren’t looking to build a long career in these instances. They’re looking for extra money or filler while between jobs. I know guys that driver Uber/Lyft and do delivery and work at Amazon occasionally for extra money. So long as you remain in good standing they will hire you back quickly with the mutual understanding you’re just doing a quick thing.
netcan 5y ago
Retail, as an employment sector, exists with or without amazon/walmart... and generally also employs low income people. Calling that a service is a bit much.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

chrisseaton 5y ago

If Amazon was able to compete with Walmart and push them out, then isn't competition working and why do you think we needed the Government to intervene? One day someone else will push Amazon out.

unclebucknasty 5y ago
>One day someone else will push Amazon out. The question is, "at what cost in the intervening time?" We've also not seen the combination of scale, network effects and technological capability that's available to companies like Amazon today, making monopoly power even more potent. It's not 100% clear that the potential for their displacement is remotely as viable as has historically been the case for companies.
- 8note 5y ago
  The cost is whatever it takes to convince one rich person to decide it's profitable to invest in a competitor.
  - unclebucknasty 5y ago
    Not sure if your comment simply stems from a misunderstanding or you intended it as a pithy way of saying that, as consumers bear the cost, investors will see the opportunity to relieve their pain and move to compete. Either way, though, the problematic piece (and primary rationale for antitrust law) is that it's the consumers who are bearing the cost.

unity1001 5y ago

> and the US Government (and people) just sit there and watch? Yeah. That's called capitalism. No limits on the amount of capital and what the capital owner can do with it.

zdkl 5y ago
A better keyword might be '(ultra-)liberal' rather than 'capitalist'.
- unity1001 5y ago
  Liberalism was just the early form of capitalist advocacy. Neoliberalism is the advocacy to return to those 'good old days' of mid 1800s where true capitalism existed in the most pure form. Neoliberals want to do it in a few decades. Far-right like in the US want to do it within the next 6 months by selling out everything and letting 'the market' rule.

namlem 5y ago

Why should the government intervene? It's called competition, and Amazon is winning. Some day someone will do the same to them. The government should merely enforce a level playing field and prevent market manipulation.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
who can compete with amazon when their pricing is a result of their massive scale and supply chain dominance?
- namlem 5y ago
  A lot of things are still often cheaper on eBay. Plus, price isn't everything. Amazon has quality problems.
- NavinF 5y ago
  who can compete with Walmart when their pricing is a result of their massive scale and supply chain dominance? /s
  - dTal 5y ago
    Why the /s ?
    - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
      Probably because Amazon is. And to be fair: though Amazon seems unstoppable now, so did Microsoft, IBM, Sears, GM, Kodak, and many others.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    You're trying to invalidate an argument with the same argument.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago

refurb 5y ago

General Motors comes in, forces hundreds of furriers out of business, creates massive workforce of underpaid employees and the govt just sits there and watches?

jjtheblunt 5y ago
furriers?
- vnorilo 5y ago
  Probably farriers, who specialize in horse shoes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrier
- dash2 5y ago
  He meant furries. It's a little known fact that before the internal combustion engine, furryism was much more popular due to the greater availability of horsehair for costumes. Notable furries included Kenneth Grahame of Wind in the Willows fame and by all accounts, King Edward VII, who was sent a Russian Bear costume by his cousin the Tsar. UwU.
sofixa 5y ago
It's even worse, because GM actively sabotaged, in some cases by buying and then dismantling, competitors ( in a larger sense), "streetcars" (trams/light rail). They literally forced cities to move to buses they provided, and service deteriorated and made cars necessary for everyone. And the governments just sat there and watched, and effects are still there today in the US.

Spooky23 5y ago

The legal theories around corporate regulation started changing in the 1970s and are now the philosophy of “conservative” attorneys almost universally. In short, if a series of actions doesn’t raise retail prices, it’s fine. Walmart beat the drum of “Made in the USA” and “Low Prices” until it didn’t matter anymore. Amazon arose during the era of impotent regulators, and just had to rope a dope Wall Street that it would someday somehow turn massive capital investment into cash. Despite the economic engine unleashed by anti-trust actions like the breakup of AT&T and to a lesser extent standard oil, we probably won’t see significant changes for 30 years or more when demographic shifts and the cohorts of judges, etc running the show now fade away.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
I fear you are correct. Hopefully the Millenials stay motivated until then!

tyoma 5y ago

There seems to be some selective amnesia about how great mom & pop businesses were. People drove an hour out of their way to Walmart because it was that much better. Not just the prices, but also selection and return policies (Walmart was the pioneer of long term hassle free returns). Similarly, Amazon is succeeding because it is genuinely a much better experience than going into a store. You order things, they show up at your door. If there is a problem Amazon refunds your money. If the government should do anything its invest in a same-day/next-day shipping infrastructure that can be used by any business (say, via the post office or maybe a new package logistics agency).

burlesona 5y ago
Amazon used to be a better experience. Now you can’t trust that the thing you ordered is what will actually be delivered. I was a prime customer for more than 15 years, but I cancelled this year because I no longer trust Amazon to deliver what I actually ordered, not some scammy knock off. (I like your idea about USPS parcel service though :))
- neutronicus 5y ago
  Also if you live in a city there's like a 15% chance your package up and takes a walk
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Petty theft proliferates only because people are willing to let it. I live in a city that is stereotyped with rusting factories and falling down houses. We don't really have a petty theft problem because there's still political will to not tolerate petty theft. The police resources to proactively go after it don't really exist but they come if called. The thieves here are really clumsy and tend to break ribs and get black eyes slipping on ice in June or falling down one stair so that tends to dissuade people from making a regular income stream out of it so you're just left with opportunistic theft. When the police do happen to catch a thief they prosecute.
- jacobr1 5y ago

pyrrhotech 5y ago

[flagged]

ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
“Despite illogical leftist primal emotional outcry” Move over Burke and de Maistre, conservatism as praising big business.
- pyrrhotech 5y ago
  I'm not a conservative, I'm a rationalist. I don't make arguments based on "but poor mom and pop lost their jobs!!!". Instead, take a look at the pros and cons at a holistic, societal level and decide what is best quantifiably. Luckily, we don't even really have to do this often, because the free market usually gets it right. Despite what a naive view of American politics might have you believe, both the far left and the far right want to abolish capitalism and markets in favor of totalitarian beurocratic control, they just have different flavors of how to get to and how to manage that state. There is very little difference in economic and social policy between historical communist and fascist nations. Only rational centrists who fight for liberal democracy and free markets support the best path forward for society.
  - dTal 5y ago
    >the free market usually gets it right. Citation needed. The "free market" - that is, sitting back and allowing everyone to act in their own perceived self-interest - routinely ties itself in perverse knots, and has pushed us over the precipice into irreversible environmental catastrophe. The market is not efficient. The market is not rational. The market does not care about you.
    - pyrrhotech 5y ago
      The free market is the reason the USA is the richest country in history and has far outpaced the wealth gains of Western Europe who early on was resistant to free markets because of aristocratic feudalism (right wing) and later became resistant to them because of socialist ideas (left wing). On both sides of history, the USA has so far remained in the center in both eras and that has helped us grow immensely faster than them such that today the USA is wealthier than all of Europe combined despite having half the population and natural resources. Even Communist china learned the hard way that free markets are the only way to prosperity and after they adopted Deng's free market reforms in the 1970s, they subsequently pulled 700M+ people out of poverty. Of course we need some regulation to protect the environment. I never said a 100% regulation-free market is what is needed. What we need is to preserve private property, encourage entrepreneurship and innovation and preserve the incentive of hard-work.

robbedpeter 5y ago

Mom and pop shops, brick and mortar in general, have largely gone the way of horse drawn carriages. Technology has made them obsolete. There are definitely problems with mega corporations taking over, but Walmart and Amazon are filing in niches in a technological ecosystem where real world small shops aren't viable, and that's a good thing for consumers. Whatever the solution ends up being, it won't involve the return of brick and mortar - online shopping and Amazon style logistics are here to stay. Breaking up Amazon so that the shipping and warehouse part of the business gets spun off on its own might make sense, with established shipping companies able to compete. Luddism never works - you can't eliminate automation and do things less efficiently just to arbitrarily provide work for people.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
> Luddism never works - you can't eliminate automation and do things less efficiently just to arbitrarily provide work for people. This isn't just about automation. It's also about vertical integration into one company. If all we care about is efficiency then why break up the railroad barons or company towns? Because competition, despite some inefficiencies, makes for a more robust market. Also, we don't want our kids working in the mines.
- vsareto 5y ago
  Idk what robustness is saving us from - if you’re big enough, you get bailed out. Amazon is clearly big enough now. There’s lots of bank competition but they still needed a bailout.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Banks didn't need a bailout. They needed to be allowed to fail. And restore the regulations that would've stopped them from overleveraging so much in the first place. (Or at least prosecute those knowingly involved in subprime mortgages.) Bailouts from taxpayers aren't a sign of robustness either. They are a sign of fragile, easily bought government and large players dominating markets.
5y ago

evrydayhustling 5y ago

You're getting hammered about the market competition being good for consumers. But even on the labor side, these two aren't the same: Walmart minimum wage is $12 / hour, Amazon just went up to $18. Conversely, the "that's a market" folks should deep read the article's last bit on how hard it is to be an "Anti Amazon Alliance" e-tailer. Amazon is piling up previously uncorrelated strategic advantages, so that you have to be an expert in way too many things for a small company to compete. - demand sourcing - warehousing - last mile logistics - defect management - now, freight forwarding I think their innovation in these areas is amazing and will some day benefit everyone, but it will eventually take a new type of antitrust (which recognizes cross-leveraging monopolies for efficiency) to keep Amazon from retaining all of the value generated.

esotericimpl 5y ago
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baybal2 5y ago
You need to believe that retailers are complete potatoes if they can't do that. If you can't do such basics, you will sink as a businessman long before Amazon, or anything. This however may well be the case. I will take that American business is very pampered, living off very protected business environment, and world's richest consumers. It's hard to not to make money here.
- evrydayhustling 5y ago
  Retailers of all sizes can do those things. But go ahead, start an e-commerce business, and implement those things without Amazon or Shopify. Have a couple of good quarters, dish out for some marketing to speed up your growth. Then, watch the look-alike product appear on Amazon at a price 15% below your unit costs, because they do everything on the list more efficiently, didn't have to ramp up processes or prove their market, and are still on the part of the growth curve where Amazon supplies them at cost. Survive until the holidays and bulk up your inventory for black friday spending, then get swamped in chargebacks because your Amazon-platformed competition undercut your prices with a bundle deal including stuff you don't sell. Cheer up though -- if your product is really great, you'll get to see that competitor displaced by an Amazon Basics brand a few weeks later. America's rich customers and friendly government were not for you.

snarf21 5y ago

The government does nothing for several reasons. 1) People prefer Walmart and Amazon to driving down town to some mom and pop store. 2) Walmart and Amazon do provide jobs (the quality is questionable) and the government needs its citizens to have jobs. 3) Although people may have lower wages, the economies of scale give people greater buying power. Stores downtown need to pay rent and heat and carry inventory. The money for that needs to come from somewhere. That being said, the SEC and FTC need to start doing their jobs. They have failed us in the 21st century. We need to rollback all these mega-mergers and stop allowing them to move forward, not just in tech but also in banks and media.

papito 5y ago
Why do you thing certain people LOVE "small government"? It has nothing to do with their freedoms. It has everything to do with more corporate tax loopholes and a toothless set of regulatory agencies that have no resources to do anything meaningful to protect the public good. The government got weaker, and they got stronger. It's not even a fair fight.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

You can tell how minimal HN's exposure to small scale mom and pop retail is by the fact that it's considered an unmitigated good around here. For every hardware store being more flexible than robotic BigCo policies about working hours or teaching a teenager to drive a forklift there's a grocer systemically short changing its employees. It's very much a mixed bag. I personally hate for secondary political reasons but people need to stop looking at retail through rose tinted glasses. It's always sucked on average. Now it just sucks homogeneously.

jimbokun 5y ago

Just make the national minimum wage $15/hour instead of trying to micro-manage specific markets and businesses.

jacobr1 5y ago
Ignoring the social benefits, how would that improve competition? Amazon already pays more that that, it would be their competitors struggling with increased costs.

ldehaan 5y ago

Memory is short and books/blog posts/videos are written by the winners (like Amazon and Walmart) and people can't see the forest for the trees. You live on your knees and act like sinners. Wake up. Stand up and realize you're not bad, not racist, not gay, not evil, just you, a human. Stop letting people tell you who you are. Then Amazon and Walmart and all these companies can come around and they'll succeed, so far as they can convince you that you're nothing. You are everything all at once, wake up, smell the cosmos.