Hacker News Reader

Comment by an_opabinia | Hacker News Reader

How do you personally benefit from an Amazon with fewer competitors? I’m not sure if even ordinary people who work for Amazon benefit.

You’re complaining about someone who represents your interests, as opposed to representing the interests of someone you’ll never be, a billionaire.

View on HN

What? The whole point of "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" is that we should abandon the "consumer welfare" standard. Meaning that we should gut Amazon even though it provides enormous benefits to consumers in the form of low prices. Lina Khan may represent the interests of Amazon's competitors, but she certainly doesn't represent the interests of consumers.

The problem with the "consumer welfare" standard is that it traditionally only considers a single variable: Cost. But consumer welfare can and should extend beyond that. But if you try to get customer service from many of these monopolies, you'll see plenty of consumers falling through the cracks. Google abuses people's privacy, eliminates competitors, kills off services people rely on, provides literally no customer service... but because their core services are "free", the consumer welfare standard is often considered inadequate to deal with an absolutely reprehensible and societally harmful company.

And what's really crazy is: Competition tends to force companies to compete on treating consumers well. Protecting competing businesses protects consumer welfare pretty darn well, and it provides room for innovation which stagnates when a single company dominates a field.

> get customer service from many of these monopolies, you'll see plenty of consumers falling through the cracks

That's true of many non-monopolies too. And Amazon is widely known to have pretty good service. Conversely, no cellular company has ever had a monopoly in the US but a number of them are famed for poor customer service.

I can call Verizon or Comcast right now and get someone on the line in minutes. Usually they can solve my problem too. Get Google on the phone though. (Amazon actually does deserve credit here, their customer service isn't the worst, by any means. But they have a litany of other issues, like a work environment where people have to pee in bottles to make quotas...)

Even Metro has quick 24/7 phone support. Which, given the sad state of their online self-service options, has been the only thing that's kept me with them as long as I have.

I'm not sure there are any companies where you don't pay them anything and they have easily accessible phone support. Do you happen to know of an example? I never had any trouble getting support from Google when I was a Fi customer. On the other hand, I'll bet I couldn't get support for web search over the phone for love nor money. Similarly, I doubt I can call up Facebook or Twitter's customer support lines, although perhaps I am wrong.

> where you don't pay them anything and they have easily accessible phone support

They're still getting paid for your services. If my ad attention is equal to dollars, why don't I also get customer service for it?

I'd argue the idea that you shouldn't pay for services, and that you shouldn't expect to get customer support, are both examples of failures of the current antitrust regime.

Phone support is, unfortunately, a hard to find commodity anywhere in tech these days. Generally I have only selected web hosts and domain registrars that have 24/7, US-based customer service. I used to have a few options, now there's very few. :/ You're lucky if they have a ticket system they respond to in less than a day.

Because, well, since you're not paying you're not the customer.

To add onto that, if we manufactured more here, it might raise the price of goods, but if those goods are of higher quality and they last longer it might be better for the consumer in the long run. You might even extend this to looking at the environmental wins of having better wuality products that stay out of the landfill.

Absolutely agreed. Additionally, the more we manufacture here, the more competitive with overseas we eventually become. We'll never reach price equality, because we have labor standards, but we can get closer than people imagine today.

That's not even that bad IMO. I'd love to see other places bring up their labour and environmental standards!

Indeed. In my ideal world, the United States would set expectations on labor and environment that a foreign company needs to meet for their products to be imported to the United States.

We can't tell other countries how to operate, but we can set a bar for who we do business with, and we have the market power to encourage foreign entities to meet those standards.

Shame we didn’t just have a president who was trying to bring back manufacturing.

> absolutely reprehensible and societally harmful company

This is such an exaggeration. Google is not "absolutely reprehensible and societally harmful".

Amnesty International disagrees. (I think it would be off-topic here to give a lengthy account of Google's human rights abuses, the way they harm women and minorities, and the money they invest in politicians which are also very detrimental to society, with sources, but suffice to say, my description of them is, at least, a defensible position.)

My read is that people are seeking a means to an end. Means: whatever she’s writing. End: reducing Amazon’s scope of business.

If you’re being intellectually honest, the source of low prices is Chinese outsourced labor, not monopolies. Amazon could vanish tomorrow, and shit will still be cheap.

Amazon has many retail competitors. Maybe they have pricing power in AWS, but otherwise, I do not see evidence of them having control of the retail goods market.

Even for AWS, they have Microsoft and Google as competitors and a few other companies too.

Amazon is in such a monopoly position that it is able to force sellers to cover the price of prime shipping (incorporating the shipping price into the display price) and then penalizes their display rank when they list lower prices on websites where shipping is separate from product price. Forcing suppliers to raise prices on unrelated sales is a classic monopoly move, like when MSFT forced OEMs to pay for Windows licenses on computers sold without operating systems.

And those sellers cannot go to Target or Walmart or Home Depot or advertise their own website?

We have Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal making it very simple to pay for things with a simple click, just like Amazon. Amazon has inertia, but it’s not exactly in a high barrier business. Walmart supplanted Kmart, and Amazon was able to gain share from Walmart.

The switching cost is visiting a different website. If you have a good product at a price people we willing to pay, the internet makes it very possible to survive without any big retailer’s help.

The bigger problem is probably someone cloning it but with 50% cheaper materials and selling it for 70% of your price, one that I’m sure many sellers on Amazon’s flea market are aware of.

They can advertise and sell on other websites, but if they advertise below the prices they advertise for on Amazon, then Amazon pushes them out of the search results box. Something like 90% of Amazon sales happen due to products being put in that box.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com