California Attorney General Rob Bonta last night filed a request for a preliminary injunction in California’s existing case against Amazon for price fixing. Attorney General Bonta’s 2022 lawsuit alleged that the company stifled competition and caused increased prices across California through its anticompetitive policies in order to avoid competing on price with other retailers. New evidence paints a clearer and more shocking picture. The motion for a preliminary injunction comes after a robust discovery process where California uncovered evidence of countless interactions in which Amazon, vendors, and Amazon’s competitors agree to increase and fix the prices of products on other retail websites to bolster Amazon’s profits. Time and again, across years and product categories, Amazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites, threatening dire consequences if vendors do not comply. Vendors, bullied by Amazon’s overwhelming bargaining leverage and fearing punishment, comply — agreeing to raise prices on competitors’ websites (often with the awareness and cooperation of the competing retailer), or to remove products from competing websites altogether. Amazon’s goal is to insulate itself from price competition by preventing lower retail prices in the market at the expense of American consumers who are already struggling with a crisis of affordability.
If America was a serious country they would break up Amazon for this AND arrest Bezos and send him to Guantanamo. But I fear they never were.
America was bought by the corpos a long time ago.
Easy solution: don’t use Amazon.
You lived without it before. You can do it again.
They drove a large swath of stores out of business. It’s vastly more difficult
Yeah it was a trap.
The best you can do now is order a lot of stuff directly from China.
This has been my play since last February. In some ways it sucks, because Amazon really cornered the market on niche solutions to niche problems. However, when there is something I absolutely need I try to look for a local solution and if I can’t find that, I use eBay. By no means a perfect solution (ie. a lot of the eBay vendors still use Amazon to fulfill their shipments) but my mindset shifted from “oh yeah go on Amazon and press Buy Now immediately” to really working through a solution, and whether or not I need to purchase an item to enact that solution.
Hell, even ebay and etsy will drop ship you stuff from amazon :(
yes, always disappointing when this happens, but you can usually find vendors who avoid the practice (with some trial and error).
That’s easy to take a noble stance when you can afford it. A lot of people rely on the cheapest prices just to get by.
Amazon isn’t the cheapest option in many cases. What you’re saying makes sense if people shop around, the problem is that they generally don’t.
Can openers is what did it for me.
In 2015 I needed a new manual can opener. The local big-box stores had two basic styles. A cheap, all metal one that was just stamped from a single sheet, and a more expensive one with better handles.
The more expensive one had previously rusted and began to look nasty within a few years.
Amazon had a bunch of different styles at less than the price point of the more expensive one.I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.
Anyway. Replaced it in 2019. Amazon still had a broad selection, but all except for obvious crap was as expensive as the local big box store’s expensive option. Wound up going to a smaller local(ish) bulk foods store and bought a cheapo restaurant one for less than Amazon’s/the big box store’s similar offerings. Minimal rusting to date.
I would read your review of various day to day items.
I figured as such when I noticed, on multiple occasions, prices for random products would just suddenly change, multiple times a week for different people I knew. And also how seemingly multiple different pages for the same product were available with a word switched here and there… friends got product page 1, I got product page 2. Same product different price. Amazon always seemed shady to me and was kinda surprised it was always the go to online store for people.
I could never trust a price on amazon, even though they were always almost always cheaper than local alternatives.There was a time when Amazon was not full of scummy rip-off products, when it was not playing games with prices, when it was not a cloud-computing powerhouse, and you know what happened?
That’s right, they crushed their adversaries (retail shopping) and earned billions in profits. They won.
But somehow that’s not enough winning, there isn’t enough winning until all the value has been vacuumed up from the world.
Bezos explicitly undercut the competition for years to drive all of the competition out of business. Amazon took as much time from 1997-2016 to make as much profit as they did in 2017, which is also (not) coincidentally when they hit peak market saturation and were able to start raising their prices.
So what you’re talking about was real, but it wasn’t like, “back when Amazon was good”, they were just preparing for what they are now. Having a huge monopoly on just about everything has always been their win condition, and they’re no where near done winning.
Yeah. It’s the same thing Uber did with pushing cab services out of business.
Not only that, but AWS is the real money maker for them. Not that retail and gaming and prime and whatever don’t also make boat loads of cash, but it doesn’t even graze AWS. The scale of these data centers is unreal and most of the internet runs on AWS.
I’m an industrial electrician with background on what they’re ordering and installing in terms of control panels and if you saw the weekly shipments it’d make you sick. And we’re only one supplier, they have others.
I think it’s worse because Bezos (ex-wallstreet) had his buddies at Bain Capital short-and-distort competing companies into bankruptcy, which has the added bonus of clearing the tax burden from the gains on those shorts.
And that is why I no longer buy anything from them. I’m just embarrassed it took me as long as it did to realize what they were really doing.
The frustrating thing is we can’t boycott AWS since so many of the sites we use run on it. But yes, we absolutely shouldn’t buy things through Amazon or any of the other web stores Amazon owns.
You can’t really compare online book retailer Amazon to global online marketplace Amazon. Your underlying point is still mostly correct, but I would exclude the years that they were primarily focused on books. From my lived memory they didn’t really become the online retail juggernaut until a few years after the launch of Prime. Free shipping turned them into what it is today. So maybe the best comparison would be from like 2006-2016? Or maybe I’m wrong and the distinction isn’t necessary. Idk. I’m just trying to foster conversation
Yeah, I remember Amazon the book store. I still had my mom take me to the local bookstores, cause I knew them and the people, so I was comfortable lol. I remember when Prime launched. I don’t think anyone was expecting that, at the time. Free 2-day shipping on so many products was insane. And all for $89?/yr? Especially, when everywhere else online charged anywhere from $5-10. It was truly the Walmart of the online world. They ate shipping costs, which killed them, and put hurt their competition until AWS became such a powerhouse and they had a monopoly on online marketplaces.
That’s what’s crazy to me, they survived the dot com crash and were so diversified that I have no idea how they stayed afloat. I would think that all of the combined expenses across all of their ventures without a true cash cow would sink them. Instead they survived and became the trash heap of consumer rights violations that they are.
To quote a favorite singer of mine,
You could fill a man with gold, and still have room for greed.
The other commenters here are right about Amazon’s initial methods, but I’m also going to highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification for a detailed explanation of how this happens (including a breakdown on Amazon specifically) and what to do about it.
Ehhh not really. They operated at massive losses for a decade or more to eliminate the competition while growing their customer base. This is simply stage 1 of enshittification. You can only do this if you’re unbelievably filthy fucking rich. Then at some point they needed to cash out on all the good will and reputation they developed and that brings us to the shithole economy of today where people are simply too lazy to shop anywhere else.
It’s easy to crush the competition when you purposely take a loss as an investment in future market share.
They need to make (most favoured nation status) illegal. Sellers should be free to set the price they want on any platform. If a seller can offer it cheaper on their own site, or on another platform, they should be allowed to.
This is OK because our Leaders are Looking out For the COMMON man! That’s why I’m going to ENTHUSIASTICALLY Vote for the Billionaire AGAIN!
Bezos was a hedge fund manager. This should surprise nobody.
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Lol, these mods are a joke.
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I think it was pretty obviously sarcasm
It was not. Poe’s Law.
They’re a complete stranger, and there are actual people who unironically say stuff like that, even on the Fediverse.
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It’s pretty obviously a troll account.
Poe’s law strikes again
When you’re not sure check their overview. That one was obviously sarcasm.
Yourself though, you’re angry and reactionary so it tracks.
Their post history reveals them to be kind of a jerk. If it was an attempt at sarcasm it was a poor one.
yall are exhausting. Hate it or don’t but move on. Nobody wants to check post history
Holy shit guys! S-so, if you have a monopoly, it’s like, you can do whatever the fuck you want? So it’s like in THE FUCKING GAME OF MONOPOLY? Jee, we are learning something new every day
In the game, even if you’ve built yourself up, an unlucky roll can still lose you the game. As opposed to real life, where the government decides you’re too big to fail.
That’s why you’ve got to get chummy with the banker and promise them a cut, and also that you’ll give them some of your cookies after the game.
In the game, you have to improve your properties to charge more rent. In reality, the monopoly can reduce quality and raise price at the same time.
You dont really improve it, just added more units. Its about volume, not quality.
Wait, is Jee how the kids spell it these days?
Considering the origin is “Jesus”, “Jee” is technically closer spelling than “Gee”. Not that I have a dog in this race.
The intermediate step is “Jeez.”
The post-step is “Geezie willikers!” :)
Was going to add “Gee Whiz” which comes before that one? Like it got shorter, then it got longer again?
Oh, I thought that was the… just… regulat step. hehe.
I guess for some sort of vaguely-serious discussion[1], without doing any research, I think Jesus / Jesus Christ has stably evolved to Gee, with some variants like Gee Whiz being pretty common. I think Gee Willikers was more common around the TV Batman era and so now it’s less said straight and more said ironically. heh. I can’t think of any other common “Gee [something]”… maybe “Geezie Kreezie”, but I’ve only heard that from Suzy[2] Izzard, so not sure if that’s common or not. lol
It definitely got short; I wonder if we’d count a second word as it getting longer, or a second word replacing “Christ”. These are the types of inconsequential discussions I love. :)
Thanks bro, gee is what I was going for, kisses from Eastern Europe, or, as we call it, Gesus land
Well, your English is much better than my Eastern European. :) No clue you weren’t a native English speaker, so there’s that <3
This is what consumers deserve when they let big players become monopolies just because they’re a tiny bit more convenient. Enjoy!
I’m always a little shocked when people ask me if my product is on Amazon. I never even considered it because I’ve known what they are for so long; it’s been a bit of a wakeup call that most people still have no idea how fucking awful Amazon is. It sucks struggling with market visibility, selling just from my own website, but it beats the hell out of being bullied like this until I’m big enough to have my product stolen and copied by Amazon Basics.
The appeal of Amazon is the things that surround the store.
When I buy from a random website it often takes weeks to ship, costs more to ship, makes me deal with CC fraud if something is untoward, fights me on returns and I usually have to pay to ship back etc etc.
Amazon is bad for a number of reasons but the main driver for me is not the choice of things on there, it’s everything else.
And that’s what they innovated. Anyone can make a website that sells shit. They innovated the supply chain, storage, shipping and delivery.
You have to do way more marketing since you can’t rely on search result hits, right?
It would be cool if there were a business fediverse type deal where searching worked across all the small business federated web sites. Such a network should putposely exclude or kick out (politely and with a celebration) anyone that got too large, to maintain a small business focus to basically give the little guys a leg up.
It would be like a fediverse small bis cooperative kinda thing. That way there would be a search box for products and services that everyone could use to search the entire small bis network. And this would bypass monopolies like Google or Amazon.
Search results on Amazon are fully pay-to-play anyway. You don’t get anywhere near the top of the list without paying for the privilege. No big deal for slop producers who sell in volume, but basically useless for small businesses or private sellers.
Bought something from AliExpress last week. Showed up in an Amazon box 😐 Aggravating that the only way to avoid them is apparently to never shop online. I already mostly don’t, but sheesh.
Happens to me with eBay too. Sucks.
Yep. That has happened to me, too.
I bought something off Facebook marketplace that turned out to be someone proxying Amazon. I respect the hustle on that one, I suppose I deserved it for not checking more throughly.
This has been their standard business practice for over a decade. There are already tons of apps and browser plugins that track prices on amazon items and list the lowest/highest they’ve been listed at.
Hold up everyone. Think of the shareholders.
Amazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites
This is and has been part of Amazon’s contract to be listed on their site since the beginning. They are not even remotely the only one doing this. It’s an industry norm in digital storefronts. Valve has also been sued for this several times. I don’t know why we’re acting like this is a recent discovery.
We need to just ban this practice, because as long as they’re allowed to, they will.
Valve states you can’t sell a steam key in another platform for cheaper than in steam, not that you can’t sell your game anywhere else at a lower price. That’s slightly different than here. Not defending it just saying that it is actually different than here.
I just want to add in that what Valve has as official policy and what they actually practice differ in this case. Because yes, their policy states it’s for keys only. However, they have admitted in court that if the publisher has it as a cheaper price elsewhere, they will delist your game
Source?
