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Comment by Narkov | Hacker News Reader

As a consumer, isn't this a good thing?

In the sense that more competition sometimes produces better outcomes, absolutely. However, going by Amazon's historic behaviour, it's an aggressive move which seems to continue their strategy of just using their massive scale to crush the competition, at which point there's no longer a need for them to act in pro-consumer ways any more.

Yes and no. A store brand can be a good thing for value and consistency, but at the same time, if it crowds out variety and selection and makes it harder for other suppliers to thrive, that's not good for consumers long-term.

My experience is that they push their products and require prime to buy them.

It was good when I could get a laptop bag for 11 dollars. Now they flood their pages with their products and many require prime to buy.

Amazon is turning into a club.

Home Depot sells their in-house HDX brand. They used to sell nitrile gloves from various brands. Now they only carry HDX nitrile gloves.

Their in-house brand gloves are extremely thin and pretty much worthless. Because of that, I no longer buy nitrile gloves from Home Depot.

If you're looking for another option check what Costco carries. They seem pretty good to me (certainly better than what I've seen in many medical offices) and when I was price shopping a bit they turned out to be well priced.

Having your prevalent online store push its own branded product instead of giving you a clear view of the overall market?

Honestly, my bigger issue with Amazon is the fact that they have a real problem with counterfeits and the way the comingle FBA inventory without any indication to the buyer makes it impossible to avoid by buying from trusted sellers. It's especially bad with electronic components.

I needed a solid state relay a few weeks ago. I buy most things from Amazon because of Prime, but I ended up ordering from Digikey, paying extra shipping, and waiting an extra couple of days because I needed to know that the component I was buying was actually legit and could actually meet its rated specs since I didn't want to risk a $20 part potentially wrecking a few hundred dollars of equipment.

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