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Two things jumped out at me. 1. Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering. 2. As of now the trial is not scheduled to b
by jimbokun 8mo ago
Two things jumped out at me.
1. Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering.
2. As of now the trial is not scheduled to begin until January 2027 (although the discussed injunction is meant to address that). I believe the length of time required to get a decision in court is the single biggest impediment to justice being served. It usually waters down the final judgment, makes costs prohibitive for plaintiffs, and allows perpetrators to continue benefiting from illegal behavior indefinitely. In some cases, the defendant can be elected President in the interim eliminating any chance of facing a court decision.
- KittenInABox 8mo agoI wouldn't ascribe averages to mean much. I expect there is a small minority that buys everything on amazon (everything meaning groceries, holiday gifts, prescriptions, etc) that would jack up the average significantly.
- twoodfin 8mo agoAverage American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering. Is it? That’s by households, not individuals. Is it really crazy to imagine a household spending $200-300/month at Costco, Walmart, Whole Foods—or Amazon?
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo agoI spend $200-300 per week at whole foods, much to my own chagrin and moral discomfort.
- twoodfin 8mo agoAFAICT, the numbers Matt’s referencing include Whole Foods so that’s a Whole Foods + Amazon.com $3,000. Frankly, I think a lot of people have lost perspective on just how rich the average American household is: Around $145k annual income. Not shocking that Amazon is capturing 2% of that gross.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoYou’re way off the median household income is $80K https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
- twoodfin 8mo agoMedian isn’t the average and Matt was computing the average household Amazon spend.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoThe mean is almost always a meaningless statistics. It only takes a few people to buy stuff like this to skew it. http://www.sellersprite.com/en/blog/most-expensive-thing-on-amazon http://www.sellersprite.com/en/blog/most-expensive-thing-on-...
- twoodfin 8mo agoBe that as it may, the point at issue was the Amazon spending of the average US household. I’m not sure what point relevant to the discussion you’re trying to make, other than reflexively arguing with any use of means in economic analysis. OK, sure, tell Matt Stoller.
- ryandrake 8mo agoI guess it's just always important/helpful to keep in mind that the average is almost certainly going to be misleading when the distribution is extremely skewed, as is the case for household income. It's usually a mistake to talk about averages in these cases, when the median is almost always going to be more meaningful.
- danwills 8mo agoAgree, but can't we just include both average _and_ mean? And maybe min/max while we're at it? Seems like that could give a much clearer picture (without even needing a graph!?)
- SECProto 8mo agoIf it brings you moral discomfort, why do you shop at whole foods? Shopping at Walmart (or whole foods!) would also bring me moral discomfort, so I just ...don't do it.
- nielsbot 8mo agoMaybe there's no comparable or better alternative? (Possibly because of Whole Food's capitalist power)
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo agoToday I shopped at the local food co-op, Sprouts (regional/semi-national chain), Whole Foods and Trader Joes. Word on the street is that the co-op has a worse labor relations history than Whole Foods. Trader Joes is good but doesn't sell more than a 1/3rd of the food we eat. Sprouts I don't know much about, it would be a fallback if Whole Foods disappeared. Whole Foods has the food products (produce, dairy, eggs, grains, nuts) that we eat, is cheaper than the competition for this stuff, and unbelievably beats the co-op on labor relations. However, it also ships profit out of the area. For now, it's sort of the best of a bunch of not particularly good choices.
- zippyman55 8mo agoI spent $3000 at borders bookstore in one year, back in the day. But Amazon gets about $100 a year from me.
- WolfeReader 8mo agoYou should spend less at Amazon. $100 less per year.
- zippyman55 8mo agoI do agree with you.
- nerdponx 8mo agoThat's on food and consumable household stuff. I imagine some people do all of that shopping through Amazon. But on average?
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoThis is very bad math on the part of the article. You can’t just take total revenue/number of households. I mean have they not heard of a little side business Amazon has called AWS? Amazon is not just a US company either. They also have an ad business. You could rightfully argue that ad spend gets passed on to the consumer.
- twoodfin 8mo agoThe number Matt’s quoting doesn’t include AWS, AFAICT. It’s “North American segment” revenue in AMZN accounting. AWS is accounted separately as a global unit. Though now that I write that, I wonder if Matt divided by the total number of North American households or the number of US ones. EDIT: Amazon North American segment revenue divided by aggregate North American household count is roughly $2,300. But I’m guessing the real number is closer to Matt’s estimate as US households are wealthier and likely represent a disproportionate fraction of that revenue.
- throwaway5465 8mo agoThis is sadly typical arrogant HN commentary jumping off to sound clever, cynically playing on the 'engineer mentality' fallacy, having put no effort to discredit the argumen as witnessed by the now clearly stupid argument presented, yet selfishly putting the onus on others to correct. It's quite sociopathic.
- twoodfin 8mo agoI dunno, going in with the starting assumption that Matt Stoller is innumerate and/or will twist statistics to support his otherwise specious arguments is not a terrible approach. On the particulars of this number, he seems to be close enough, but it’s not nearly as shocking with any context: The average American household Walmart spend is comparable, Apple captures almost half that with a handful of devices and services.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoWould you rather I suffer from Gellman Amnesia? https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ If you can’t trust someone’s analysis about something you know about, why trust him about something you don’t?
- taurath 8mo ago> 1. Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. Where else would americans be getting home goods like soap, appliances, electronics? Vitamins, perscriptions, etc? The answer to almost every one of those, for the vast majority of Americans, is one of like 5 megacorps. Target, Walmart, Kroger, CVS, Amazon. Things have largely stopped being available retail because of all this consolidation. If I want to go buy a multivitamin, its no joke like $25 a bottle at my grocery store, and $8 on amazon. It is just kinda... a part of people's lives now, and the alternatives all involve either spending more money or time.
- abnercoimbre 8mo agoIt’s funny: a loved one gifted me a book knowing I’m opposed to Amazon’s practices. They let me know they bought it elsewhere and the act of paying more was part of the gift’s charm (they’ll use Amazon otherwise.)
- bombcar 8mo agoI've found that books of all things are usually something you can get for Amazon prices elsewhere.
- sfn42 8mo agoI just Google the book name followed by the word epub and generally find what I'm looking for pretty quickly.
- 4gotunameagain 8mo agoApples and oranges. Both fruits, some don't enjoy one as much.
- tene80i 8mo agoBooks are staggeringly affordable (aside from hardback), and if even they seem too expensive, libraries exist and offer ebooks. I would honestly be embarrassed to announce this – it reveals something very unflattering.
- stogot 8mo agoThe author ignores that a small business shoppers falls in North America retail, so only dividing consumer household is incorrect My relatives use it for ordering office supplies for their business.
- HaloZero 8mo agoLol, that sounds about right. I checked, our household spent $2700 last year on amazon. Only 3 things above $100 though, so it's just accumulation of lots of smaller purchases.
- NavinF 8mo ago3k is less than I expected considering median disposable income is ~50k. Where does the rest go?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- rationalist 8mo agoaverage ≠ median
- ToValueFunfetti 8mo agoYeah, but surely this goes in the other direction rather than answering the question; average > median
- bubblewand 8mo agoThat figure for "disposable income" doesn't include tons of effectively-mandatory spending.
- janalsncm 8mo agoAverage household, not American
- xoxxala 8mo agoYou can request your complete purchase history from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/preview.html https://www.amazon.com/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/prev... They will send you a bunch of spreadsheets and it's pretty easy to calculate your total expenditures. That showed us we were spending about $5k a year, mostly small stuff with very few purchases over $100. With Prime it was easy to order a little here and a little there. All those littles add up. We got rid of Prime and now spend about $300 a year on Amazon. Half of that for Kindle books. We do spend a $100 a month more at Costco to make up for it. A nice side effect is that we have a lot less clutter and junk around the house.
- lurking_swe 8mo agoi’m confused why that feels staggering to you. Do you realize how generous their return policy is? How convenient it is to order from them, and set up a subscribe-and-save for monthly household items? Also consider how many people set up wedding or baby shower registries on Amazon. I have been avoiding amazon recently for ethical reasons but i’m genuinely confused by your comment. It sounds like you’ve never shopped at amazon lol. And with inflation…$3k isn’t even that much money in the US. That’s $250 a month.