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Comment by the-dude | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is currently marketing the Netherlands heavily for 'Black Friday' ( a totally foreign concept to us, however it is marketed for 5 - 10 years now ). Not for specific products, for like everything from now till Christmas.

Normally I am totally ad-blocked, but my Mac refuses to reconnect to my OSS Airplay Raspi contraption, and I just don't feel like rebooting ( already killed coreaudiod ).

I wired up my tuner with a dipole and am listening to radio through the ether mind you. No adblocking though.

Amazon is almost absent in NL at the moment, but they will crush the competition in a couple of years.

Amazon should be broken up.

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>Amazon should be broken up

For offering more products and better service at a lower price? They don't have a monopoly on anything.

The governments role should not be to subsidize uncompetitive businesses. That hurts consumers.

But the govt should also consider the effect of drastic competition that will put local stores out of business and many people losing their jobs.

This is similar to anti dumping taxes we have against chinese products.

The problem with dumping is that is anti-competitive, not that it is competitive.

If the government wants people to have money, then they can easily add money to people’s bank account without going through the trouble of an employer.

So the purpose of a business is that it should be a jobs program?

No, you are mistaken.

In the absence of outside influence, scale produces monopolies that haven't the slightest interest in serving consumers, much less competing to win their favor. Have you ever BOUGHT anything from Amazon and gotten screwed by them? Have you been given random stuff by third parties working (successfully!) to game the Amazon system so their garbage is full of fake testimonials and is #1 recommended Amazon product in their category?

Competitive businesses gotta start from somewhere or there will NEVER be any others. It will just be 'what was competitive, once, and forever' because infrastructure and scale lock in and then you're monopolized and it no longer matters.

Show me the alternative to Amazon. Show me the alternative to YouTube. There is by definition no competitive option to any of these things because they locked in controlling positions, and now it doesn't matter what they do: they are NOT subject to any sort of competitive forces because it's too late. It doesn't matter what they do to consumers: there's nowhere else to go.

>Show me the alternative to Amazon

In the US retail market? Walmart (2x the size of Amazon), eBay, Kroger, Home Depot, Lowes, HEB, Costco, Target, Walgreens, Staples, CVS, Publix, Albertsons, Aldi, Macy's, Best Buy, OfficeMax, Nordstrom, Kohl's... I can continue if you want. Those are just off the top of my head.

>Show me the alternative to YouTube.

Netflix, cable, Hulu, Amazon, HBO, Disney, Sling, there's a few more. It's a very competitive market and it's why YouTube hardly makes any money, if they actually make any at all.

I think you are making the common error of conflating "big company" with "monopoly". Amazon doesn't control supply in a market like say the USPS with first class mail or your utility with electrical supply.

This is a mic drop comment.

Tons of competition to Amazon. Tons. For anything you want to buy, there are other places that sell it.

I have certain issues with the Amazon company but I have to admit their customer service has been incredible in my experience.

> Show me the alternative to Amazon.

there aren't any other companies that offer the full range of what you can get from amazon (cloud services, audio/video streaming, physical goods, etc.), but there is viable competition in each of those markets.

for cloud: google and microsoft

for streaming: spotify, google, apple, netflix, hulu

for physical goods, walmart also has a huge inventory of many different SKUs and they offer free two-day shipping on a lot of them (without needing a subscription). there are also tons of specialty retailers like newegg and microcenter.

> Show me the alternative to Amazon.

LOL, Amazon makes up maybe 30% of my online shopping. Less if I can get away with it. The rest is _all_ other places to go.

Efficiency should be balanced with other concerns.

The US defense sector requires domestic manufacturing for good reason. The US recently got bitten hard with an inability to manufacture 5G equipment.

The loss of skills accompanying loss of industry is a huge problem that can take decades to fix.

There is a reason pilots prefer flying two engine aircraft, even though you really only need one engine. Redundancy is important.

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