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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.
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As far as distractions from the Epstein Files go, this is an exciting one.
They’re BUSTED when someone goes to prison.
Well, it’s California’s attorney general, so better than even chance for actual punishment.
“Europeans need to be harder on Amazon” Wags greased finger
For now they’re just SLAMMED
Just wait until they get BLASTED in a strongly worded email.
I’ve been telling people to stop supporting amazon for years, but everyone seems to have their reason to keep supporting them. This hopefully will be a good enough reason for people to finally stop shopping on amazon.
I haven’t bought anything from amazon in over 12 years. I find everything on the manufacturer’s website or eBay. No need to ever use amazon for anything.
Okay. Here’s my story. I have been looking for a 4K 32 to 43 inch monitor for my PC. TV or monitor, I just wanted 4k 120hz minimum. Didn’t really care about IPS or VA panels. Both have their pro’s and con’s.
So I ended up getting a Philips Google TV 43" 4K Gaming TV with native 144Hz refresh rate. The asking price from Amazon was 450 CAD. everywhere I looked online It was 50 bucks more OR they were the same price, but charged 50 bucks in shipping.
THAT’S why I use Amazon. IF I can find it cheaper elsewhere, I’ll buy it somewhere else. For me price is everything since I’m on a fixed income.
Not to leave out they’re easy to return stuff too.
Indeed.
Okay, but have you considered that Amazon is the reason prices are high?
Obviously, none of these other retailers had a hand in it.
You’re not alone in that. A lot of people’s care for ethics ends where a good deal begins.
What you should know is that these companies offer these good deals for a variety of reasons, but usually involving shady or borderline illegal business practices in one way or another.
I understand you’re on a fixed income - I sympathize with that and I don’t want to be rude to a stranger - but is the deal on a particular item you want worth the cost of endorsing what these companies do and stand for?
That 50 bucks means I only eat rice for a week. I’ve done it before, but I do not enjoy it.
Aren’t most people on a fixed income?
Is such a TV… necessary?
Have you considered saving some for a few months and then buy the TV?What do you think I’ve been doing? That took me four months.
Same boat, I cancelled prime 5 years ago. My wife will activate for the holidays but I refuse to use it
My biggest problem is that very specific niche products that also have no direct sale options from the supplier / manufacturer tend to only be available on Amazon.
Like there’s a specific caramel sauce I like to put in my coffee that is made from real caramel and not “caramel flavored corn-syrup” and the company that makes it is great and based out of the US, but they have no direct-sale option on their website nor any place that says “where to buy.”
The only place I’ve found it to be reliably sold from is Amazon, because I’m not a small coffee business. As far as I can tell, unless I order massive quantities via some sort of scheduled contract ordering agreement, I don’t think I can order direct from the manufacturer.
I hate Amazon and would rather not give them money, but they have effectively created a de-facto monopoly for certain products… whether they are the actual only major supplier that has both a web storefront and that will ship around the US… or they are the only web storefront that yielded search results for specific products when consumers are combing the web marketplace for them.
Until the US govt or other entities with regulatory teeth willing to prosecute them for monopolistic practices and maybe even break them up some day, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect even the most savvy consumers to fully remove themselves from purchasing at least some number of very specific goods form Amazon.
Your point is valid and definitely a concern.
But how are people so basic.
You hate Amazon, but just have to have your caramel syrup? Doesn’t really sound like hate.
Sounds more like you do not want to have to make sacrifices to the things you like.
Wonder why bad things continue to happen.
I use Amazon too. Not trying to be too judgy, but come on. Accept some personal responsibility for your actions.
Ah yes - the “personal responsibility” argument… 🙄
Whatever product it is isn’t really the point.
There are certain things that people either need or want and if Amazon is the only place to get them and your solution is, “well, just sacrifice” is fine if it’s a luxury good like stupid caramel sauce, but what if it’s something like vacuum cleaner bags for the vacuum you use are only sold now via Amazon?
What if it’s a specific chewable version of a vitamin your kid’s doctor suggested for your child who has a specific deficiency and can’t swallow pills and the only maker of the kids chewable of it sells on Amazon?
Should the parent just “take responsibility” and not give them that vitamin their pediatrician suggested they need?
…or maybe we should just be okay with criticizing the fucking trillion dollar company that gets to have a monopoly, and maybe think of other suggestions to give other than a “Ben-Shapiro tier” canned response. 😑
But how are people so basic.
I would like a thing. All retail commerce has been monopolized by a handful of big box storefronts. One of those storefronts sucks marginally less than the others, such that I can actually find what I want to buy and expect it to be delivered in a timely fashion.
But I shouldn’t shop there because… ???
Wonder why bad things continue to happen.
Damn, so true. We should never have quit shopping at
TargetWalmartSearsWoolworths. Now we live in Capitalist Hell and its all our own fault.You shouldn’t shop there because of their blatantly anti-consumer monopolistic practices.
$1000 says you’re, at best, a college kid. Probably a teenager.
Why? People with actual life experience in this shitty system don’t make the personal responsibility argument because they’ve lived enough to know that’s bullshit.
Companies like Amazon can’t exist if people don’t buy from them. The fact that you think people have to buy from them is the problem.
No one has to spend their money with Amazon. There’s always going to be a personal responsibility aspect when people willingly do something they know is wrong.
I was going on buy some jack stands for my car and saw the exact same models from harbor freight or auto zone on Amazon. Even if you’re not trying to support Amazon, you can’t escape the slop products.
Amazon, in many cases, is not the seller. They are simply an online market. The reason you see the same products across multiple websites is because it is the same product. Doesn’t really have anything to do with shitty products although that’s what a lot of people do. They take advantage of Amazon’s monopoly on the market and sell products for hundreds if not thousands of dollars % mark ups. The reason it’s still cheaper on Amazon is because of the aforementioned price fixing.
I’ve found the Shop App to be a good alternative along with eBay. Shop App is basically a search engine for retailers who use Shopify, which is a ton of them. From my research it seems to be generally better for retailers.
well they also see what products are doing well on their site, then making exact copies to sell at a loss to kill the original maker, then once the captured competition is killed take their place and inflate the price
Seen this happen on multiple occasions. I assumed it was other sellers, but now, I’m not so sure.
Meanwhile in Canada, if something falls into a niche good luck finding it in person. It’s getting beyond frustrating trying to buy in person to avoid Amazon, then finding out that nowhere carries it and having to order from Amazon anyway.
That’s what we get when Canada is a handful of monopolies in a trenchcoat instead of a country.
I’d assume because in general we have smaller cities. I used to be big into RC stuff (remote control boat and car) and there were hobby shops around. All gone, or converted into old people hobby supplies only (macramé, bead work, hook rugs, etc)
I got all my shit on Hobbyking and aliexpress.
I also get my dental floss, electric toothbrush heads, and underwear on aliexpress. So it works both ways, the local retailers aren’t getting my money.
Market regulates itself or somthing.
Yeah, that’s what the Health Care CEOs assassin was doing, just a minor self-correction in the Free Market. That CEO’s policies pissed off a customer bad enough that the customer eliminated the problem, and that company, and every other health care company, loosened up their denials significantly as a result.
That’s the Free Market working the way it’s supposed to. That assassin should be celebrated for working within the system to balance the market.
It wasn’t Luigi though.
I heard there was an invisible hand that I should trust.
Capitalism at it’s most advantageous to humanity.
And nothing will be done about it probably
probably
lol
When you have a government of criminals, it emboldens those not in government
If America was a serious country they would break up Amazon for this AND arrest Bezos and send him to a random Supermax for corporate blackmail, mass fraud, and unfair competition. But I fear they never were.
America was bought by the corpos a long time ago.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a stain on America and a threat to all of us now.
I’m being hyperbolic, but I do think every CEO of every company in America worth hundreds of billions should be arrested, have their companies broken up, and said CEOs sent to Supermax prisons for mass fraud.
A nitpick, but America won’t have Gitmo in that scenario tho. Displacing american people to random countries now is deeply rooted in the premise it’s okay to have a torture camp franchized over to places out of everyone’s sight. It wasn’t okay before and it’s not now, and serious country with some sense and a accountability would not employ such tactic.
If you did want to nitpick Bezos hasn’t run Amazon since 2021, so we’d have to check when they were being accused of doing so.
5 years on and most of us think Bezos everytime we hear Amazon still
I mean, how can we be so sure Bezos doesn’t still have influence over Amazon? He sure owns a lot of stocks in it for obvious reasons. He’s bought the Washington Post to spread propaganda. He’s set up Blue Origin to get government contracts. I’ve no reason to believe that he’s not apart of the Amazon problem and their influence over American Markets.
Something about one big club.
cApItAlIsM
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 had a similar experience with a juicer. The hand ones kept breaking so I bought a rack and pinion beast from a restaurant supply company that will be inherited by my grand kids.
It cost me less than half of what Amazon wanted, and it wasn’t cheap
I would read your review of various day to day items.
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.
AKA the Walmart method.
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.
I have often wondered whether targeted internet boycott days would shake up AWS, but I don’t know enough about their billing structure to run the numbers to see how much that would dig into AWS profits + how much of their income is flat subscription fees vs. billing on number of calls and haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet.
You would basically have to convince a few hundred million people to not use the internet for months at a time with out a single percentage of them breaking the boycott to actually even start to hit aws.
Countless things have to start failing before aws even starts to feel it since it’s not a consumer product. You basically have the drive all the companies using it to near bankruptcy so they can’t afford to pay for aws anymore.
Frustrating, but I appreciate your answer; thank you.
we absolutely shouldn’t buy things through Amazon or any of the other web stores Amazon owns.
I try to use eBay as an alternative, though i find every 3-4 orders i place there, i get one in an Amazon box that by all rights appears to have been shipped by Amazon. I swear people are drop-shipping stuff from Amazon to their eBay buyers.
They are. If it has free returns and thousands of feedback it’s probably a drop shipper. Return it and use the eBay label it ends up costing them money.
Go figure the margins are that thin.
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.
The reason Amazon survived is because they WEREN’T running a dozen different ventures. They were an online bookstore and people kept buying books. Amazon benefited from the crash because that was when they started buying up servers to build AWS. Prime was just free 2 day shipping on books when it launched.
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.
To quote a favorite singer of mine,
You could fill a man with gold, and still have room for greed.
It’s easy to crush the competition when you purposely take a loss as an investment in future market share.
Easy solution: don’t use Amazon.
You lived without it before. You can do it again.
Expect for you know the fact Amazon ran 40% of businesses out of business and covid killed another 40%.
Your option in the vast majority of the case is to get fucked or use Amazon/AliExpress which is just Amazon China edition.
Which is infinitely worse then Amazon. At least Amazon has basic consumer protections unlike AliExpress.
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.
Time to replace Amazon dropshipping with AliExpress.
Probably same vendor at the end.
The only iasue I see is local customer service and return of an order.
That is way easier with Amazon (at the cost of the seller).AliExpress’ purchase protection is a total farce.
In one case, I was shipped the wrong variant of an item and the seller was totally unresponsive. Submitted evidence, AliExpress closed the case saying that Tracking shows it was delivered. No way to appeal.
In another case, I ordered something to my business and the Chinese courier service left the parcel out front on a public sidewalk. Naturally, the parcel was stolen. The courier service eventually admitted, in writing, that the delivery was mishandled and that the shipper was the only one who could file a claim. Once again, vendor unresponsive, AliExpress closes the case saying @Tracking shows delivered” with no way to appeal.
Meanwhile, I had a $1,000 Amazon package get stolen the other week and they refunded it with minimal fuss. The return policy is so easy might as well be “try before you buy”. I can see why people have a hard time de-Amazoning.
Amazon sure did refund it.
And then proceeded to charge the seller the amount + handling fees.Anyway: As I said, AE customer handling is…difficult.
I already look there first :)
Def the same vendor at the end (well most of the time on the kind of stuff I buy)
The amount I save on 3-4 things is usually enough to negate an Amazon purchase.
That said, I’m not the kind of person who makes big or risky purchases from either of these places.
One time I shopped for an ESP32 with an USB-C slim cable (3m) and a weather safe enclosure.
Amazon: >40€
AliExpress: <30€ (incl. shipping but waiting thrice as long).Oh well, didnt need it fast anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And to add to that, try searching for a product on a search engine.
Almost always the first links are Amazon.
And a lot of times there are no other options.
That’s like saying the simple solution to global warming is for people to not burn fossil fuels. It ignores the conditions that led to this becoming a problem in the first place; and it ignores the power of entrenched industry to protect their own interest.
What we need is political reform. so that the bodies that are supposed regulate industry and serve the public are empowered to make the necessary reforms. Lina Kahn was doing just that (before Trump got elected again in 2024)
I’m not trying to diminish the importance and role of personal accountability and individual action, but as a solution to affect meaningful change it falls well short.
You can find the same shit on AliExpress without the Bezos tax.
AliExpress
Hell yeah, if there’s one thing I already can’t get on Amazon is Chinese knockoffs /s
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).
Return it and don’t let them send you Amazon’s return label so they have to pay for shipping. Returns absolutely destroy drop shippers.
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.
Even if I add shipping costs, Amazon is typically more expensive. I order my car parts from rock auto and have NEVER found Amazon to be cheaper even after adding shipping costs. They were cheap maybe a decade ago when they were trying to fold everybody else but they got enough fools by the short and curlies to start jacking prices up until people start looking elsewhere. Same formula as Wal Mart, it’s a proven good practice for big corps to kill local and small businesses.
Dependso n the area, in remote areas amazon can be WAY cheaper so long as you pass the free shipping threshold even if the items themselves are more expensive.
I feel like that’s any retailer now. Most places online offer free shipping if you hit some threshold.
Absence of feces? I was never impressed with the prices.
