Amazon copies Peak Design's “Everyday Sling” – This is their response | Hacker News Reader

Amazon copies Peak Design's “Everyday Sling” – This is their response

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89 pointshubraumhugo27 comments

Is there any clearer evidence than this of anti-competitive, monopolistic behavior on the part of Amazon? Clearly this is an abuse of their logistics monopoly, is it not?

It just seems too close to the behavior of that prototypical trust that we all learned about in high-school, of how Cornelius Vanderbilt conspired with John D. Rockefeller to destroy Standard Oil's competition by monopolizing the means of transporting petroleum, which became the precedent that justified the creation of anti-trust law in the United States.

The following is the contemporaneous account that exposed the scheme:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1881/03/the-sto...

There are clear parallels.

Home brands copying popular products is common in grocery stores, down to the artwork and label design (to show similarity). Does anyone argue that a grocery store is using, much less abusing, its monopolistic power by doing that? No.

Anyway, Amazon renamed it (see the other comment's link to the 18-day-old thread) and calling it a "camera bag" probably nets them more than riding on a botique store's branding.

There has never been a grocery store that has had the logistical dominance that Amazon does right now. In fact, for much of the 20th century, retail and wholesale distribution operations were legally obligated to be owned by distinct entities under anti-trust law, specifically to prevent the emergence of a combination like what we see now with Amazon.

This is not a one-off for Amazon. New products need to sell through Amazon to get access to consumers without paying through the nose for that access; they can't be cost-competitive otherwise (close parallel here to the SO monopoly). Amazon frequently cherry-picks the most successful new products that they think they can manufacture themselves.

This is bad for innovation in the consumer products space, because it kills the incentive that independent entrepreneurs have to innovate. Why innovate if Amazon is going to capture all your profits once you are successful? What branded grocery-store products ever face the same quandary due to the existence of similar white-label products being sold in the same store?

In an environment where anti-trust principles were being enforced against Amazon, they would have listed the original product under the "camera bag" headline, increasing their sales, instead of stealing their concept and making it harder for them to build a sustainable business.

> There has never been a grocery store that has had the logistical dominance that Amazon does right now.

I challenge you on this.

I think that both Sears and A&P had Amazon level monopolies for quite a long time.

I'm not some newbie but who was A&P? Never heard of them.

Regardless I'd disagree about the reach of Sears vs. Amazon. They kinda look the same as a retailer scope (Sears owned phone-order, Amazon monopolized online), but that's where the analogy ends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Atlantic_%26_Pacific...

> In 1930, A&P, now the world's largest retailer, reached $2.9 billion in sales ($44.4 billion today) with 16,000 stores.

Atlantic and Pacific is what it stood for. Wikipedia says it shut down in 2015.

On top of the fact that it's probably been fifty years since I've stepped foot in an A&P grocery. They were hardly a monopoly even then. I'm truly surprised that they were still a going entity in 2015.

I don't think I've ever been in one and couldn't have told you what states they were in. Nevertheless I heard of them somewhere, so I don't think they're the most obscure chain.

"Not obscure" is a loooooong way from "monopoly", which was the original argument somewhere upthread. Wikipedia says that at their peak, A&P had 10% of U. S. grocery sales. That's not even iPhone territory, let alone monopoly.

Antitrust laws don't exist to build a sustainable business on somebody else's storefront. And in the bygone past, grocers delivered themselves when there were far fewer of them than there are Walmarts dominating small towns.

> Does anyone argue that a grocery store is using, much less abusing, its monopolistic power by doing that? No.

Grocery stores don't have anything like monopoly power.

So the only grocer in town isn't a monopoly, but a web site that is one of dozens of popular sites, among thousands which deliver to me, is?

I suppose it depends on the grocer and the town

Isn't it a well known narrative about how Wal-Mart expanded, at least initially, by opening stores in less populated areas where they could offer dramatically more than any other business in the area?

I know someone who lives out near the nature coast of Florida and Wal-Mart is a lot more important to their daily life than I'm used to.

Many if not most of those home brands are manufactured by the brand name and relabeled. You’ll notice this if you frequently check the manufacture location of similar goods.

This is to say that it is often more of a partnership to push more product at a cheaper price point than to push the competition out.

> Does anyone argue that a grocery store is using, much less abusing, its monopolistic power by doing that? No.

I do. Especially with how common it is for a single chain to have over 30% market share in some area. Often the chain's only contribution is packaging someone else's product in their own branding, so independent brands can't build consumer trust. And in my experience, they make sure the store-brand product is always well stocked, while others are allowed to frequently run out. Even when, if you look at the fine print, the manufacturer is the same.

That argument would make sense if Walmart served the grocery needs of 90% of the people AND they blatantly ripped off and copied branded goods’ products. In that case, yes, it would be a problem also.

I guess we will see more and more Amazon Basic products that are copies of high-quality, well-selling items. They just have to look at their massive amounts of data, manufacture a similar product, then placing it on the top ranking in the store.

This is just a tweet pointing to this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbxWGjQ2szQ

This is OP's Twitter account, something he isn't disclosing.

Not very related story:

Several years ago, I remember finding on Amazon this featured brand of headphones. They had wooden cups and they were marketed as being eco-friendly, high-quality and built in the US. After a 5-second search on Amazon itself, I found the exact same headphones, sans branding, being sold by a Chinese seller for a fraction of the price.

I used to work at Amazon back then as well, so I tried to find a way to report this as it seemed pretty dishonest to me. I couldn't find anything, of course.

previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26338525

Amazon isn't doing anything that Chinese manufacturers haven't been doing for years except Amazon is now directly grabbing a piece of the IP infringement pie rather than sponsoring it in the third party marketplaces.

If consumers prefer buying a $30 bag over a $150 bag, well, that's unfortunate for Peak Design, but that's what the mass consumer actually wants.

Regardless, no one is forcing anyone to buy anything.

If money-conscious consumers want a cheaper version of a desired product, they can get it. If status-conscious consumers want to buy value-added context for their very Authentic and Fancy product, then they have that option, too. If Amazon (or any other cheap IP poacher) can snipe that much market share, it's not the quality of the product that people are buying.

The difference between Amazon and Chinese manufacturers is also that Amazon controls the search listing, it controls which reviews are allowed to be present on its platform and in many cases, can influence when and how a competitor product is shipped to the customer.

Making corporate videos like this is much harder than it seems. If the tallant behind the video is in any way related to the tallant behind the products, I'm sold.

there's a debate here about IP, about ethics, but honestly?

socialism. free the means of production. this isn't a practical answer for the word we live in, but the world i want is ok with ripping things off, and maker spaces all over the world participate in helping each other rip products off, sharing the plans, helping folk do for themselves, cheaply. or wherever on the scale of cheaply to expensively someone so desires.

colossal in-efficiencies of scale. huge amounts of wasted time. material loss from doing it wrong. damage to tools from less-than-expert users. what i propose is economic madness, radically ineffective.

but i continue to think that society ought entail itself into the creation of everyday goods around it. that this would be such an incredibly helpful way to enhance the people of the world, give them such a more immediate grasp on what reality is, what it's constructed out of, that it would entail people in to participation. that it would encourage us all to think that the door is always open to more innovation, to more adjustments and tweaks to the product, that we all can have a say in how to shape things, that we all can do things.

capitalism has effervesced industry. it's created these huge tensions, between the small, the makers, the imagineers, the doers, and the giants, the goliaths, that operate only at a consumer-maximum mode, at vast volume. i feel like endless words are going to be shed over this forever-war, that this tension will rage, but almost never will we explore a 3rd way, or a 4th. we're going to be stuck in emotional debate over these situations, but to me, these are all artificially constrained debates, that squabbiling over control paves over the inconvenient underlying truths about consumerism and make. it's vital, it's absolutely vital to me, that we re-open the doors, to people everywhere thinking of themselves as active agents within society. we all consider that really difficult, really impossible, it sounds so hideously inconvenient: "who would ever try and make something like this themselves," it seems like a disaster. but i for one really believe in people. i am so optimistic that a socialist culture, one that sprung free the means of production, that enouraged us to think, to involve ourselves in the ideas that preceeded production, would be so healthy for the world, so beneficial. it's so easy to reject. in some ways my best defense is to point out how many pointless useless words we will shed over this forever war, to point out how damned and hopeless the situation is in it's current condition, how much worse it will keep getting, forever, and how little room for improvement there is in sight. intellectual and artistic property rights don't fix this situation. ip is at an impass, now that the world has been gobbled. post-late capitalism is upon us. i don't know how, but i want to escape the moralistic good vs evil tale here. i think there is such virtue in permission, to re-create, to re-do, the re-try the works of others. what's vulgar & iniquitous is that it's only the very big doing it, that it's only amazon. i want competition from below too. i want us all exploring, trying, learning, and i want the means of production unlocked, to facilitate the individual & the small group, as progenitors of change & re-creation.

society has so much become about forgetting. and it's so obvious, so easy to make the cases for why. it so hard to imagine society ever re-engaging in itself, in it's processes, it's been such convenience we've been delivered in to. but i don't think we know how to account for how much is lost, how astray & wandering so much of society is; i don't think we grasp anywhere near the scale of the drive & finding-itself pushing-forward behavior that is untapped in the world. it is so hard to connect to humankind-the-tool-maker, to be lucky enough to use that huge brain to assess the world about us & build alternate futures. socialism, freeing the means of production, letting us all embrace, as we may, the acts of creation, and supporting those individual & small-group endeavours: i think, if the ball could get rolling, it would do so well, spread such good, affirm so many of humankind's slumbering better natures, connect us so much better to the material real, to such good ends.

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