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.
Yeah, I’m in the US and what you described matches the experience here too.
One major point though, the physical locations still have to pay humans, in my community, to operate. It’s not much, but these days I consider it roughly a moral duty to do what I can to force companies to spend money on employees.
And then otherwise at our house we just buy more and more stuff second hand. Quality in everything is trash anymore, even just packaging is barely functional trash these days. Everything you open destroys itself, including stuff that’s supposed to reseal with a zipper, like a bag of cheese. Gotta make line go up!
Fair points. We actually do buy much stuff used, even clothes. As a principle. Though I always kinda feel bad to buy stuff others could have needed more or are forced financially to do so. It’s a mixed bag…
As for employees that’s another thing. Offline shopping is so annoying that most stores closed already and the inner cities here basically became lil Istanbuls where you can’t even read the signs anymore unless you can read Arabic. What’s left are mostly chains, of which many are US-owned or lick US-boots (nothing against you guys, but the country and its course). So buying there or at Amazon doesn’t change much. Super large companies that shit on employees and would rather own slaves than pay minimum wage.
And the few shops where shopping is still fun, peaceful and with a variety that sparks joy, are often shops not meant for the average Joe. The last one we strolled through was awesome. Except that unless they see your platinum or better card they wouldn’t even talk with you. And we usually don’t look like we’re loaded and we got treated this way. So fuck them too.
I hate offline shopping. And I loved it 30yrs ago. I went to the city core every day and shopped like an idiot. It was fun, informative and efficient. Now that feels like a story from my dead granny
Look here for alternatives of Amazon: https://lmaa.space/
If you had read my comment you’d known that none of those stores actually do customer service. Especially not in germany. I tried nearly every shop - mostly electronics - and I heavily regretted every single one. Except those where I never had a reason to use customer services.
Finding other stores is not really the problem.