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.
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.
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.
Didn’t know. Thanks for saying that.
So it makes even more sense for the small buinesses to organize online under a special coop charter to fight off the icky monopolies.
Like small mom and pop grocers could band together to order in volume to get a similar discount to walmart. It might be hard to organize this for grocers in meat space, but should be more plausible to set up a coop fediverse site with a highly small bis protective charter written by a lawyer.
Maybe the way to handle the members that got too big and too successful for the coop network is to celebrate those members for a month by promoting them in a farewell promotion, then move them to a harder to acess “alumni” section of the site, instead of instantly and totally cutting them off. Someone more business oriented than me should think about the details.
My main point is that small anybodies should organise, and not just the workers. Small businesses are routinely oppressed, and should organize and fight back. If we wait for our billionaire-captured government to bust the trusts, we might have to wait a minute.
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.