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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

This is... Not the best? That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor.

On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this and the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business... I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors.

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Wal-Mart have always been pure bastards to their supply chain.

My family had a small manufacturing business that went bankrupt years ago. At one point we were making a part that ultimately ended up on a WM product. Periodically WM's folks would come around and do a strong arm routine trying to renegotiate the contract. It got bad enough my dad adopted the habit of bringing a couple of the very burly folks that worked in the fabrication shop to sit in on meetings and reduce the intimidation BS.

They are a ruthlessly scummy business and have been for a very long time.

Someone close to me related the story of when they almost put one of their products in Wal-Mart's stores in Canada about 2 decades ago. One big showstopper was that they were asking for the quality to be reduced so that the price could be lower. The vendor I know refused, saying that their product lasts a long time and they are proud of it and they wouldn't sign unless that stipulation was removed. A few months later the head of Wal-Mart Canada visited the vendor and asked when they were going to close the deal and he was shocked when the vendor said they wouldn't sign unless that provision was changed! He wasn't used to hearing no from potential vendors! The deal never happened and to this day the vendor is really glad they didn't go down that road.

There's a great writeup on a company that experience similar:

https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart

That story, by Charles Fishman, is part of his book The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy :

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0143038788

It's worth reading.

"Buy it from Amazon!" Oh, how fitting.

As I understand it he later gave in and now they sell the lawnmowers. https://www.walmart.com/browse/patio-garden/lawn-mowers/snap...

Did Wal-Mart get another company to make a cheaper version of that product that's similar but sufficiently different that it's not infringing? That's their trademark move.

"Make it cheaper or we'll make it cheaper for you."

This is very common among big box stores as far as I know–often companies will make a special cheaper version just to get the deal done so they can sell in these big chain stores.

I often keep an eye on the product number if I'm every buying electronics or tools at a big box store to see if it's different than what I find online for what is ostensibly the same exact product, as that can be an indication that you're buying a cheapened version.

This is how Wal-Mart maintains its position, and grows to where it is today. Thats Business at their level.

I sympathize however. Strong Arming small and middle sized businesses, which are the bedrock of American Capitalist Power is just egregiously scummy. This is also what I think is currently gone wrong with the American Capitalism, but thats another comment, somewhere, sometime I guess :)

I'm not sure small and medium businesses are really the "bedrock of American capitalist power." Maybe you could argue they're the bedrock of American values or something like that.

Just to see if we were right or wrong, I found this article. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/77398

Here are stand out ones from the article. For just small business alone. I actually thought middle size business would have had figures like this.

* Small businesses create 75 percent of the net new jobs in our economy. * Small businesses pay more than 44 percent of the nation's private payroll. * More than 50 percent of the U.S. private gross domestic product is generated by small businesses. * Almost 97 percent of exporters are small businesses.

Those numbers are certainly much better than I expected, but "capitalist power" is kind of abstract and I was thinking such a thing was better represented by GM, Lockheed Martin, Apple, etc. -- i.e., companies with resources and influence to rival some sovereign powers.

yea, I hear ya! I can live with that :)

But Amazon doesn't do this to their vendors.

They most certainly do and have.

Take Books and Ebooks for a good example.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words

I was referring to these smaller firms as was addressed in the comment.

Regarding the major book selling firms, Amazon are the good guys because a relatively few book firms control the market. Amazon is helping to improve the customer experience by lowering the price of books.

> Amazon are the good guys because a relatively few book firms control the market. Amazon is helping to improve the customer experience by lowering the price of books.

they're replacing an oligopoly that is exploiting their customers with a monopoly though.

amazon hasn't really started exploiting its monopoly status yet (to my knowledge) toward the consumers, but a lot of authors have already started to complain about it.

I looked into this issue awhile ago and may have even written about it in HN. The publishers are trying to take a larger share of the income from Amazon for eBooks over traditional publishing leaving the authors with less than before even though production costs for publishers are far lower for eBooks. Amazon was trying to work to get authors at least the same proportion of the money they get for eBooks as for hardcopy traditional books.

They are also a very large, non-homogenous business which has had some great people work for them as well as some very shitty people.

The best managers there are the ones who largely disregard the incentives placed before them and respect the complexities of working at such a large scale. It sounds like the people who would show up at your dad's were enabled by management who cared more about bottom line sales than understanding how to appropriately treat a supplier with limited volume.

I'm sorry this was the experience you had, but there are just as many talented, respectful, and generally honorable people that work there and I wouldn't want them to get lumped in with the scum. (Source, have worked at WM home office)

> That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor.

Wal-Mart is pretty infamous for squeezing suppliers & vendors on price and operating procedures. Hard.

"It also is not unheard of for Wal-Mart to demand to examine the private financial records of a supplier, and to insist that its margins are too high and must be cut."

https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know

Sorry if this gets too tangential, but ... you ever notice how people are horrified by that, but at the same time actively advocate that the government use its "bargaining" (monopsony) power to force down drug prices, and believe the only downsides will be to drug company profits?

Probably because people consider small businesses (within a certain scale) to be indistinguishable from individuals. So, in both cases its the 'giant corporation' screwing over individuals. However with regards to healthcare, gouging people on prices is immoral. So its a different situation to a random retail product.

This is an incredibly facetious example. You have to remember that the drug companies have effective monopolies for many expensive drugs. Do you actually believe that the government should be forced (by legislation) to accept unilaterally decreed prices by drug companies? These prices are not set by any market, so they have no relation to the cost of the drug or the research & development that went into discovering it.

> You have to remember that the drug companies have effective monopolies for many expensive drugs.

I think it is funny that the people demand the government force companies to lower prices caused by the government granting a monopoly to said companies why way of the patent system....

How about we just end patents.

I mean there are plenty of reasons not to do that

The receiver of the surplus (Walmart vs consumers) is kinda important...

First of all, consumers get lower prices at Walmart, it doesn't just have the effect of higher profits.

Second, the real danger in both cases (though people only see it in one, hence my point) is that you're killing off the OEMs this way. No one wants to bring innovative new products to market if some monopsonist will just force them down to the mandated n% profits.

Nope.

1) Walmart doesn't pass savings to consumers, it passes them to shareholders, as they have a fiduciary obligation to do. The "lower prices" thing is just marketing; WM's prices aren't particularly low once they've driven away their competition.

2) If drug companies want to charge a R&D premium for bleeding-edge innovative products, that's fine. What's not fine is price gouging consumers for drugs they depend on to live, that are not innovative in 2017, and that are cheaply available in other countries, like the EpiPen.

Post-patent drugs usually have insane prices due to reasons outside of what can be effectively combatted by the bargaining power of universal healthcare (e.g. regulatory capture in the case of EpiPen). That tactic is rarely necessary once generics enter the mix, as long as nothing is artificially preventing them from getting to market.

Walmart does not in any way, shape, or form have an obligation to pass savings directly onto shareholders instead of reinvesting it in customer satisfaction.

As a publicly traded company, yes they do. Customer satisfaction only matters to the extent that it increases shareholder value.

> Customer satisfaction only matters to the extent that it increases shareholder value.

Which it does, so it is a completely valid option.

There is absolutely nothing forcing them to pick any particular use for the money. Both uses benefit the company in some way. Both uses are fine. It's not like they're burning it.

It may, it may not. If not lowering prices benefits shareholders more, then that is what they have to do.

>There is absolutely nothing forcing them to pick any particular use for the money.

Except this legal precedent right here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Walmart sells cheap stuff, it doesn't sell stuff cheaply. There is a very important distinction.

It works hard to lower supplier and employee costs not to benefit consumers but to prop up their own margins.

Fair enough on the passthrough to consumers.

Good grace, these "business practices" are nasty. Thanks for the read.

Amazon does exactly the same thing though: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words (focusing specifically on books, but they do it across all sectors)

When companies are able to do this, they should be broken up, period. Unfortunately we are in a system that's essentially the worst of capitalism with none of the good (and especially not with regulations), so there is no hope left and more jobs will migrate to China.

That's what Trump should tackle if he wants to stop job migration, but it seems like he's focused on anything but regulating BigCos.

Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that?

Back when Barnes and Noble was the big book store, same thing, they pressured better prices. What do you do, split up the book store into two companies, who still control the same market share and will both still put pressure on the book companies?

Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle prices, because it's considerably cheaper to sell a 12 meg file than a 200 page physical book. Which I agree with publishers, only benefits Amazon and not entirely fair, but for the most part, not much ahs changed, most kindle copies are MAYBE a dollar less.

> Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that?

In Germany, book prices are regulated: the printer sets the price, and the price the customer pays must be this price. Only exception are damaged (e.g. books with CD-ROM, but the CD is missing) or used books.

The prices the retailers have to pay at the printer are of course different and may well be based on the # of books the retailer has purchased, but the system right now successfully prevents price wars. And yes, I am happy with that, because it ensures that authors get proper funding instead of having to fight for the scraps.

> Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle prices, because it's considerably cheaper to sell a 12 meg file than a 200 page physical book

The printing and distribution costs of a book are not that high, once you have a significant enough mass of books. What Amazon wants to do here is squeeze the authors off their profit, and this must be prevented.

Books are culture, and culture must not be bowing to the demands of predatory capitalism or else we'll sooner or later live in a Idiocracy world with a movie called "*ss" the sole Oscar winner... (okay, that was an exaggeration, but still, it's a danger to culture!)

Copyright is the much larger "danger to culture". We invented it to try to keep artistic recompense safe, but like most idealistic propositions, the sharks have moved in and gamed it and now we are all worse off. Allowing anyone to make any type of contribution without fear of a crackdown from Big Legal leads to a much more prosperous culture.

This is already becoming reality as the internet has made traditional copyright completely unenforceable on the general population. For example, Adobe no longer sells Photoshop as a standalone unit, but as an ongoing subscription, which gives the impression that the vendor is an active participant in usage.

I've heard that the golden post-copyright era ushered in by the internet is coming for a long time, but all I've seen is indie game companies going out of business, games/applications including online features no matter how unnecessary, and much of Hollywood switching to a spitfire methodology. Not exactly advances for culture.

I don't mean that the internet will create unbounded prosperity for authors or creators. We can see that its effect is in fact the opposite (large companies are only somewhat isolated from this by their massive legal war chests and latent political clout, derived from employing a significant portion of a representative's constituency).

I mean that culture prospers more by allowing people to create and publish whatever iteration, derivation, or alteration they want than by ensuring a small group of well-moneyed "idea owners" can utilize the force of the state to monopolize significant cultural icons and stop people from going "too far" in their cultural iterations (that is, too likely to win the favor of the public as compared to the "owner's" offering; being too desirable and competitive).

The viability of establishing a revenue stream from this cultural lather is separate from the value or existence of a fertile culture itself. Creation will always occur. Copyright is just a matter of how far those creations are allowed to grow and/or spread before they get crushed by someone else's bank account (which can have chilling effects on the back-end, preventing the incubation of certain ideas due to uncomfortable legal risk, but it won't stop the ideas from germinating).

Culture is in a bad state when disseminating the wrong ideas in the wrong medium can result in the complete forfeiture of all earthly freedoms. If you sell T-shirts bearing Mickey Mouse's image without the permission of the "owner" of that cultural icon, you may very well find yourself not only deprived of your possessions through a costly legal battle (which you have lost before you begin), but potentially also deprived of your liberty when you're jailed for criminal copyright infringement. All because our concern for an active "culture" somehow translates into preventing derivatives, iterations, or improvements, blocking normal feedback and optimization processes and hopelessly distorting the market.

Fanfic authors have been sued for getting too close to the "owner's" trademarks. It's an entirely unnatural state of affairs and it stifles our cultural maturity.

Personally, I would suggest that people stop expecting passive IP-based revenue streams to cover them, because I don't think there is a lot of money in that down the road (because the internet makes it impossible to practically enforce copyright). You'll have to create a need for an ongoing service, paid for in small units, to get people to part with their money. Software vendors like Adobe have already accepted this.

I'm highly skeptical of the claim that printing and distribution costs are not that high. I get that they are not a high part of most publishers margins, but isn't that mainly because they have already invested in the infrastructure necessary to do these things. I would guess at a long timeline for deprecation write offs. This does not make them cheap, by any measure. (Indeed, just try printing a few thousand copies of a book personally, and see how small of a part of your margins this would be.)

Same is similarly true for ebook distribution. It isn't like the infrastructure to do that at scale is free, either. Both in technical of copying the bits around, and in the physical of authors/editors/etc.

However, I fail to see any way in which the advantages do not weigh in on the ebook side heavily.

> What Amazon wants to do here is squeeze the authors off their profit, and this must be prevented.

Authors typically get a 10-15% cut of print books. Amazon wants to squeeze the publishers off their profit. While they can be heavy-handed and exploitative, they are much less so than traditional publishing. It's not abnormal for an author to make more money of a $9.99 kindle sale than a $25 print sale.

While it seems ideal, I don't like the idea of consumer goods being regulated outside of groceries and other necessities.

My Raptor romance novel should not be 'regulated'.

I suspect the author of a successful novel hopes for some form of regulation to help guarantee revenue from the effort.

Can't that be said for every goods manufacturer? That would be like saying their needs to be regulation on the price of DVDs. Should we eliminate the 1 dollar DVD bin at WalMart now?

I've long wondered, with the rise of the internet, is prosecution really necessary to address unsavory business practices like these? Why not force the company into the light, posting this information in a useful form that informs the public and shames the malefactor?

I'm a strong proponent of open <EVERYTHING>. If shady behavior arises in business, government, public services, and even public discourse, I'd love to see a moderated form of public disclosure become the standard way to reveal and address such 'discrepancies'. Now that the 'net is ubiquitous, I don't see why age-old small town arbitration principles can't be applied to redress virtually all forms of grievance, as long as the public exchange is conducted decorously, as a judge or strict moderator rules could ensure.

IMO, the state of AI is getting pretty close to enabling this sort of moderator service, making it impossible for 'conduct unbecoming' to persist out of the public eye. What cellphone videos are doing to police/perp misbehavior ought to be possible for general business practices too.

> I'm a strong proponent of open <EVERYTHING>. If shady behavior arises in business, government, public services, and even public discourse, I'd love to see a moderated form of public disclosure become the standard way to reveal and address such 'discrepancies'. Now that the 'net is ubiquitous, I don't see why age-old small town arbitration principles can't be applied to redress virtually all forms of grievance, as long as the public exchange is conducted decorously, as a judge or strict moderator rules could ensure.

The problem is, there is no such thing as a moderated public exchange. Everything can be bought off, be it a journalist, a policeman or a judge. Mass media outside of countries with well-funded public media stations (think BBC or the German TV/radio stations) is always aligned to corporate interest, not to public/journalistic interest. And for what it's worth, state-funded journalism is often enough also subject to meddling by politicians.

> IMO, the state of AI is getting pretty close to enabling this sort of moderator service

lol even Facebook's content AI, which may very well be the strongest in moderating (Google's strength is lying more in content comprehension!) is not able to distinguish between an iconic Vietnam picture and child porn or remotely good at detecting propaganda. I certainly would not want the Facebook AI as a political moderator.

Because ultimately most people won't care enough to stop going with the cheaper option, especially when all you can point to is negative effects for vendors. It's not like Amazon is going around creating spurious libel lawsuits against people for publishing criticism of their business practices, or paying for people to muddy the waters with counter-articles. It's just that the information largely fall on deaf ears. I'm not sure what a judge or moderator would do when there's no real back and forth.

A lot of conduct unbecoming like this becomes public (Intel is a good example). How many people stopped buying their products even with literal judges finding them guilty of some particularly nasty anti-competitive practices?

> Because ultimately most people won't care enough to stop going with the cheaper option, especially when all you can point to is negative effects for vendors.

Indeed. If people could get cheaper clothing if slavery was made legal again, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Witness to a lesser extent the general sentiment on HN that Uber is "helping drivers", when they're indentured servants.

I wouldn't call it consumer excess when you're exploiting someone with limited options.

Honest question. How do companies in the US go about assessing the solvency and financial status of suppliers. In Sweden annual reports are public records for all limited companies, not only public companuee. How would US company determine that a supplier is solvent and not at risk of bankruptcy, which would be a risk to build into supply chains etc?

In the US, Dun & Bradstreet [1] is a company that attempts to provide a sort of "credit report" for both public and private companies of all sizes. Companies are required to have a DUNS number to do business with the government and it can act as a sort of unique ID.

However, like other credit agencies, it isn't infallible and is only as good as the information it is able to gather through information sharing agreements. They have also branched into the "Improve/Monitor your D&B score" business which is pretty shady. [2]

[Edit: We also have vendors require references if we are looking to establish a line of credit. We also provide references saying how much credit they have and how often they pay on time. It is a manual process.]

[1] http://www.dnb.com/ [2] https://www.dandb.com/ (See, their credit services are totally different! They use "and" instead of "&"!)

20 years ago my father ran a small business and routinely relied on D&B reports to provide insight into the creditworthiness of unknown suppliers or customers.

Of course investors and larger institutions use Standard & Poors and Moody's to provide credit ratings and background histories on public companies and their stocks and bonds.

A lot like this, as I understand it. Publicly traded companies have a fair bit of information generally available, but for a private supplier you might well demand some financials to establish enough confidence to pair with them.

What's distinctive here, I guess, is that Walmart has the weight to get that info and then start making demands instead of just deciding whether to trust the partner.

It's not like you are required to sell to Walmart. You can always refuse. Plenty of successful companies don't sell anything to Walmart.

The FastCompany article linked in the comments is interesting on that, though. (https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know)

In 2002, Walmart did more business than its next 6 grocery and general-good competitors combined. Something like that is presumably still true if you restrict to brick-and-mortar spending. If you sell something mass-market (e.g. pickles), a huge portion of all shopping happens at Walmart - you can get beaten by a competitor just for not playing ball with one retailer. Similarly, struggling companies can be saved by Walmart (e.g. Levis), but only if they concede to whatever Walmart demands.

I'm not going to take the anti-capitalist tack, here. When Walmart tells Levis to fix their supply chain and introduce products at a lower price point, that's how markets should work. They demanded reform, and that's what saved Levis - they might not even have needed to sell at Walmart if those changes had come sooner.

But the larger pattern is troubling. Walmart has so much power over smaller suppliers that it's like informal ownership - they're vertically integrating with none of the legal conditions or risk. And that helps them drive pretty serious ethical issues without ever taking direct action. Everything from monopoly creation to violation of labor laws to environmental devastation (mostly overseas) stems from Walmart's pricing demands.

They may not ask for anything unethical, but asking for a 5% price cut every year means something has to give. With such enormous legislative influence, they can bend laws and trade agreements to favor their model. With the freedom to change suppliers and limited legal accountability for their suppliers' actions, they can work with whoever's willing to behave worst, and give them a market that cripples everyone better behaved. So you don't have to sell for Walmart, but in a lot of industries you can expect to suffer for those scruples.

Suppliers are free to tell Walmart to stuff it.

"Free" in the sense that they have the 1st Amendment right to do so. Not in the sense that they actually can, especially once Walmart gets to be a significant customer to them.

How is that any different than any business that has one large customer?

And if you're creating a valuable product at a good price, then you have leverage over Walmart. If you're selling a commodity, then be prepared to get squeezed. That's how it should work.

No, that's not how it should work at all.

Really? So if someone else charges a lower price for the same product, I should be protected from a loss of business?

That goes against our entire economic system. We'd still be driving shitty expensive cars if that were true.

I recall a story about one vendor deciding it would be more profitable to separate from Wal-Mart and take the declining sales hit versus the dictated profit margin. I believe it was a lawn mower company?

Snapper mowers.

https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart

Interesting read, though it would appear that's no longer the case: https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=Snapper&cat_id=5428_11...

But what happens a lot of times is that the US company will produce a low-cost version in China and sell that exclusively in Wal-Mart.

Not sure if this is the case with Snapper (article doesn't say), but that's typically how they get back into the stores.

Threads like this give me hope for this website. Thanks' to everyone for excellent morning reading.

I think concerns about Amazon becoming a monopoly are greatly exaggerated. They are getting attacked from all sides, by Microsoft in the cloud and Wal-Mart in ecommerce. As Microsoft grabs share from them in web services it'll reduce Amazon's ability to cross-subsidize its ecommerce business. As Wal-Mart and Costco continue to catch up in ecommerce and free two-day shipping becomes table stakes in ecommerce, Amazon's value proposition for Prime is going to diminish.

A few points in refutation. I see Amazon as far ahead of Walmart in all ways that promise growth:

1) Walmart may be the biggest retailer in the US, but they don't have half of the US homes as subscribers. Amazon Prime does. I doubt Walmart.com attracts any where near as many e-tail visitors as Amazon, and I suspect the gap is widening.

2) Amazon is decades ahead of Walmart in the online shopper experience. I grit my teeth each time I visit Walmart's website. It's slow and ugly and very clumsy to navigate or search. And it hasn't gotten better after years of this.

3) Walmart's products are mostly middle-to-down-market, even online, and that doesn't seem to have changed all that much even as they've grown their e-tail efforts. Try buying a nice watch or high-end stereo equipment there. No such ceiling applies to Amazon, probably because Amazon welcomes re-sellers (which can span all market niches), while Walmart doesn't.

So I think Walmart has a long way to go to compete equally with Amazon, and isn't a comparable threat as an all 'round monopoly.

And personally, I don't hate Amazon enough to object to a monopoly threat from them the way I do Walmart. I think ill-will does matter when it comes to federal action on anti-competition. If Microsoft were as despised as AT&T was in 1984, they would be in pieces today.

Try buying a nice watch or high-end stereo equipment there. No such ceiling applies to Amazon, probably because Amazon welcomes re-sellers (which can span all market niches), while Walmart doesn't.

Ha- as it happens I just bought a nice watch, today, and after perusing the options on Amazon I found the same watch I was about to buy direct from the retailer. However after considering the number of knock-off items I've received from Amazon, I simply refused to trust that the watch was authentic, and ended up paying more for the peace of mind that I got from buying it direct from the manufacturer.

Amazon's lack of quality control makes it impossible to trust them for expensive items that can be knocked off. It's funny that you say that Wal-Mart is middle-to-down market, because Amazon is where I buy my household staples and some consumer electronic items and cheap crap that I'm not overly concerned with the quality. Clothing, watches- pretty much anything of quality I look elsewhere.

That said, I do buy clothing from Zappos, and I think Wal-Mart made a smart move to acquire Bonobos to make a serious move into high-end apparel.

> 3) Walmart's products are mostly middle-to-down-market, even online, and that doesn't seem to have changed all that much even as they've grown their e-tail efforts. Try buying a nice watch or high-end stereo equipment there. No such ceiling applies to Amazon, probably because Amazon welcomes re-sellers (which can span all market niches), while Walmart doesn't.

Yes but I'm quite sure when I order something from walmart I'm getting the genuine article, not a knockoff dumped into the SKU bin by some shitty counterfitter

>> Amazon welcomes re-sellers (which can span all market niches), while Walmart doesn't.

This is false, You can sell things on walmart.com as a reseller

https://marketplace.walmart.com/

There are not many resellers doing it, no where near as many as Amazon but many large online shops are embracing the Amazon Model, Newegg does it now, Walmart, and a few others.

Amazon is also getting more aggressive with their resellers, putting in more restrictions, heavily favoring the Fulfilled by program where Amazon gets a larger cut, increase the number of blackout catagories, and increasing the number of items sold by Amazon directly which puts huge pricing pressure on Resellers that can not get the pricing amazon can.

Several Niche and some larger brand have pulled out of Amazon completely in the last couple of years for these (and the counterfeiting problem) issues

Walmart also launched jet.com

Walmart bought jet.com

Valid point. I don't know why techies always like trying to fuck over (or over scrutinize) the tech companies they know/hear most about, while many offline-first companies never appear on our radar..

Valid point. I don't know why hacker neswies always like to try and extrapolate the entire universe of a poster's discourse from the focus of one specific post.

calling criticism "fucking over" is laughable.

where is that pressure represented in this chart? AWS total revenue is less than a year's growth. Wal-Mart showing signs of desperation does not imply amazon's defeat.

http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56abe654c08a80431d8...

I agree. Conceptually Amazon has competitors in every field. They just don't seem to be denting Amazon's growing control.

Well, that chart only goes to 2015. But in any case, ecommerce and web services are growing businesses, so naturally the growth has been huge looking back. But looking forward, Azure is presenting itself as a greater challenge to AWS each day and all retailers are getting smarter about ecommerce, taking cues from Amazon. Amazon has a huge lead in ecommerce and web services, but it's going to diminish. Prime video is a sinkhole of money. I get that they're using that to attract people to Prime, but it's a massive investment and if profits in other businesses start shrinking, they will be screwed.

That is also why Amazon is playing hard. The game is heating up, they're taking proactive action to not be at the mercy of these companies

Actually don't requirements like this that constrain vendor dealings outside of the two parties risk running afoul of existing "restraint of trade" antitrust laws? Or perhaps Wal-Mart is taking a calculated risk that this adminstration isn't going to pursue much along these lines anyway. Still it seems like Amazon itself could pursue damages directly if it desired (I'm no lawyer though..).

>Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year

Hasn't the same thing been said about Walmart?

Yes. And I'd agree.

To wax metaphorical, I'd rather the monsters devour each other while we race for a super-weapon to defeat all monsters and protect real people.

This situation where corporations are effectively replacing the state is not exactly what I had in mind when I said the world would be a better place with a diminished role of the State in individual life.

I like the term empath75 uses to describe this situation - 'corporate feudalism', because it really does feel like lords battling for power and influence, while an increasingly impotent state looks on doing little more than wagging its finger.

Counterpoint: I like shopping at Amazon. I used to work there too, but I liked it prior to working there, and continued to like it after I quit.

And I think it would be very difficult for a company to offer the level of convenience and good UX that Amazon does at a much smaller scale. For example, part of why they can get very fast shipping down to a reasonable price is their huge network of distribution centers + their size giving them leverage in negotiations with UPS/Fedex/et al.

If you split Amazon into a dozen smaller companies, the overall customer experience would likely be worse.

Could you elaborate on what you did mean by 'diminished role of the state', and what you imagined?

The only way you can prevent feudalism is by preventing accretion of power. Otherwise, it's a positive feedback loop through and through - the rich get richer, the powerful get more powerful. How exactly to do that is up for debate, and I see socialist democracy plus regulated capitalism as the most practical current answer. Unfortunately it's not a stable position and is prone to failing if any one side can't be kept in check by the others.

> Hasn't the same thing been said about Walmart?

I completely agree with it.

My hometown's retail business all goes to the Walmart super store on the outskirts of town. It's weird to be living in a Bruce Springsteen song.

Walmart is also perfectly happy to run companies out of business by playing dirty by purposefully playing with orders and inventory. Which they have done to Field Crest when they refused to outsource to their chosen Chinese factories

That second paragraph I have read in almost the same form about Wal-mart in the past.

I actually thought he wrote "Walmart" at the start. The same paragraph certainly applies to both, funnily enough.

I don't disagree with that assertion about Wal-Mart either. The only bright spot in this mess is that these two titans are limiting each other's growth while less outrageously sized entities try to work out how to not have their economies completely rewired without a chance to react.

> On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this and the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business... I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors.

Could say the same thing about WalMart w/r/t local retail in rural America and now cities for the past 40 or so years...

This encapsulates my feelings so well. I feel like I am watching King Kong and Godzilla fight it out and I don't really know who to root for since they are both going to destroy Hong Kong when they are done with each other.

Wal-Mart is "powerful" but Amazon is "immoral"? Can you elaborate on how moral you think Wal-Mart is?

Also immoral. I didn't think I would be accused of a pro-Walmart stance in a post that lead off with "It is bad WM can do this."

This kind of hyperbole is absolutely and demonstrably absurd. What a disgrace that this is the top comment.

Simon Head wrote "Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon’s sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers" back in 2014, and if anything, it's gotten worse since then.

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_...

It's not limited to warehouse workers, either. In 2015 Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld of the New York times published an expose of the hard-charging environment at Amazon, with stories about employees reduced to tears at their desks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

That was so untrue, that Jeff Bezos felt the need to send out a memo stating how much he has never seen that side of Amazon, which, as CEO, of course he's never been mistreated by middle management.

The whole "people crying at their desks" thing was exaggerated and it varies a lot by team. I've worked there and now at Google, Google is much nicer obviously, but Amazon wasn't some dystopian nightmare as sometimes portrayed.

I'm also a mod at /r/cscareerquestions, Amazonians would chime in back when this was big news, but the vast majority were always like "yeah it exists but not my team".

I'm glad someone else brought this up. I've been on mobile and walking from site to site all morning and haven't had a chance.

Thank you.

> demonstrably absurd

Please do demonstrate how it is absurd.

> Amazon is a massive immoral monster

this should be enough

> devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year.

Luddites repeat: automation, price reduction and job shifting isn't bad for the economy and it isn't worse either

> It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans.

Completely unsubstantiated. Surely it's one of the larger employees, but compared to automotive there are few satellites that lives because of the induced workload - if Ford closes, all subsidiaries and most vendor will close with it; if Amazon closes, the impact will be more limited.

> Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this

This is incredibly short sighted, since those were written at Rockefeller peak. Entities larger than this and more looming where at the order of the day, while Amazon has a load competitors and alternatives to fend off.

> the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business...

This political climate endured for most USA history, with shortly timed bouts into centrism, hardly something current, hardly something that slowed down the USA economic growth. cfr - Europe.

> I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors.

That's ok tho, as in not a bad thing

All in all the whole claim is conflated hyperbole that's filtered by an unhistorical view of the current situation

"Luddites repeat: automation, price reduction and job shifting isn't bad for the economy and it isn't worse either"

You haven't proven that. And its entirely possible that it's not worse for the economy in general, but it's quite awful for segments of it. And given the current attitude toward the safety net in the US, once those jobs are gone, that's it for those people.

> quite awful for segments of it

I wish this would see wider acknowledgement.

Lump of Labor is a fallacy, people do find new jobs, and productivity does improve the economy. But none of that implies that the displaced people will be better off in the end!

Similarly, free trade agreements are economically efficient, and boost per-capita GDP. But even aside from implementation issues (i.e. agreements that go far beyond lowering tariffs), there's no particular reason that the extra money ends up benefiting the same people who get hit by outsourcing.

If anything, the studies I've seen say that being displaced by automation or outsourcing causes a permanent wage decline. The original Luddites were right - they probably saw lower wages for their entire lives thanks to automation.

Pretending that overall growth inherently means an economy which works better for the majority of people is frankly dishonest, especially (as you say) in a country so opposed to helping the displaced.

you haven't proven your point either, so it remains that the original claim was unsubstantiated, which is what I was trying to asses here

You weren't trying to assess it, you were trying to assert it.

ah thanks, those always give me trouble

I can see where your coming from. You essentially want to end a guaranteed participatory role in civil governance.

I think that's awful. You think you should have to fight and use substantial resources to have a say in how your life is lived. I do not share this belief.

But it's worth pulling at one string of your argument. Work is effectively mandatory for US citizens. You cannot handle any health crisis, or even eat and drink reliably, if you do not work. There is no notion of job retraining or security, and over half the citizens of the US make so little money that they effectively get subsidies from the government and don't pay taxes.

Removing these people's livelihoods without any opportunity for retraining is effectively ruining their lives. Automation threatens to do this without sharing the returns on automation with the work force it's displacing. That is an unacceptable outcome.

> I can see where your coming from. You essentially want to end a guaranteed participatory role in civil governance.

nope, but I see that's not stopping you to go ahead and make up things about me just to hijack a high post for your tirade about social security, to which I agree in principle, but furthers nothing the argument at hand

You love freedom of speech and an open marketplace except when you're on the sharp end of it, I see.

and again jumping to conclusion seems the national sport wherever you live.

Good luck in the marketplace of ideas.

Because it used words like "immoral monster" and "devour the economy" without actually backing any of it up with evidence.

Those statements are obviously opinions. The evidence that I think they are such is before you. You're welcome to disagree, but don't demand I prove a moral judgement has been made, that's just silly.

I welcome the discussion.

I don't attempt to reason with people who are unreasonable.

Can you expand a bit on your suggestion that Amazon is approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status? Are you speaking specifically about AWS?

AWS is definitely a worry, as increasingly it's the fabric american business is woven from. Shutting that down or raising its prices suddenly would severely disrupt US business.

But secondary effects of lost sales from vendors would almost certainly upend the vendor table and make goods very difficult to get ahold of. Amazon as a delivery service (and its smile boxes, ads for its own products on said boxes, and specialized delivery frameworks) is as much of an American institution as the post office now, and growing as it takes over its own delivery and logistics.

Amazon accounts for 43% of online sales currently.

But accounts for less than 5% of retail sales overall. Until they start hitting a bigger chunk of total sales, I would not consider them too big to fall. Walmart is too big to fall, as it litterally controls a bunch of local economies. If Amazon closed tomorrow, there would be a shitty time in Seattle, but people would just go to Ebay, Walmart, Etsy, and Alibaba.

If WalMart closed tomorrow, a good chunk of the southern states would run into a state of emergency because the unemployment rate would skyrocket, and there would be no companies to pick up the slack locally, so local economies all across the US would crash.

Many towns would lack groceries or supplies because WalMart is all they have after WalMart ran everyone else out of business. How many businesses has Amazon shut down across the entire US?

I've never heard of conglomerates being broken up, as long as they didn't have too much share of any single market.

Amazon may end up like Uber: forcing competitors to upgrade their technology, but not succeeding in stamping the competitors out entirely.

> I've never heard of conglomerates being broken up, as long as they didn't have too much share of any single market.

Maybe that should change. But... even if we take it at face value...

Name a company in the world that is competing at scale and cost with AWS.

In the US, Amazon is definitely nowhere near suffering a loss of customers from Google and Microsoft's offerings. and they're securing massive contracts with key institutions in the US.

There's 1 in China, I guess. That market isn't freely accessible.

Cloud services providers are a New Thing but a Thing which is absolutely critical to the world market. It's utterly unregulated right now, and that's pretty crazy given how much power it has. The only thing holding AWS rates in check is the threat of competition from 2 other American companies, and the hope of securing more critical telcom and bank contracts.

There are more than two competitors to AWS when you look at "cloud" in the broader sense. First, of the "major", in addition to Microsoft and Google, you have IBM. There is also Red Hat.

And beyond that, in terms of "simple VPS's" there are a TON of competitors and some of them are already starting to move "up the stack" by adding new features and services like object storage.

That's not to say that AWS isn't fairly dominant at the moment, but there is enough competition to keep them honest. See, for example, how they've had to continue to lower prices on a regular basis.

You may be interested in some history related to United Airlines [itself an agglomeration of many airlines], Pratt & Whitney, Boeing, Sikorsky Helicopters, and others, which all used to be part of the same organization. They were broken up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_...

Name a company in the world that is competing at scale and cost with AWS.

Azure has more locations, and is better than AWS is several areas.

Azure is a better service imho, but is it actually succeeding? I'd argue it is not, yet.

Better service? That is highly arguable.

What Azure and GCE both have over AWS is better performance and better cost. AWS on the other hand has more services that just work together. So you either choose ease of integration or better performance. My company chose ease of integration.

Example, Amazon owns its CDN, Amazon owns all its services. Everything is in house, developed to work together, and just works out of the box, and you are dependent only on AWS.

Azure CDN uses Akamai. So it's not entirely in house designed and built. So we are now reliant on two companies working smoothly together rather than just one keeping it together. Not a huge issue, but something my company also had to factor in on reliablity.

Same with SLA. AWS has a better up time than Azure and GCE.

Again, not to say these services are inferior, but to say Azure is a better service is a lie. Does it have better performance on networking and HDD side? Yes, but I will take slower performance over a better up time, every time.

> Better service? That is highly arguable.

You shouldn't ding me on voicing a clearly labeled opinion as an opinion.

> but to say Azure is a better service is a lie.

Like you did here. This is ridiculous. You have your value judgement, I have mine. They're different.

> Same with SLA. AWS has a better up time than Azure and GCE.

That's not necessarily true: https://www.theinformation.com/how-aws-stacks-up-against-riv...

https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/17/microsoft-azure-revenue-r...

It's not even in the same order of magnitude as the sales of AWS.

>"It shouldn't be a big surprise that there are cases in which we'd prefer our most sensitive data isn't sitting on a competitor's platform, " he said, adding that it's a "small number."

what is unreasonable about this? do you trust amazon?

It's not their data.

   Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year.

Not so long ago, people were saying exactly the same thing about Walmart.

And it's still true, at least in some parts of the country. There are places in the Midwest where Walmart is the only place a lot of people shop. There are towns in the southeast going broke in part because they're paying police to act as Walmart internal security.

But I suppose two battling monsters beat one rampaging monster, at least.

Because there was no Amazon to compare to at the time. Walmart's reach never once approached modern AZ's.

It just seems kind of petty to me. One senses a bit of bitterness on the part of Wal*Mart over this decision.

Read "immoral" as "immortal". Maybe that's more accurate.

vendor is free to enter in a relationship with WalMart. WalMart is free to dictate their terms, vendor too. No agreement, no deal, part ways.

Explain how this is wrong.

The "freedom" is purely notional if your other option is to go out of business.

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