Towing companies appear to be a large shell game where your $200 tow is handled my one or more middlemen who eventually get some poor independent towtruck driver to tow you for $75
Amazon should do something that would allow partnering with decent brands. Customers would be happy, brands could keep their reputation, amazon could get a reasonable cut, and they would still sell stuff via flea-market brands and the made up word-salad amazon brands
Apparently especially in Ontario…
https://www.thedrive.com/news/44749/inside-the-tow-truck-maf...
In other news a car has infinute milage on a frictionless surface in a vacuum
As far as what you can do about it, you could start with preventing those people from interacting with markets. I leave the mechanism as an exercise for the reader.
What we are doing is the equivalent of looking at a warped mirror e.g. a non free market and declaring that the reflections are not distorted e.g. a free market.
A lot of people are scared of living on the streets or feel shame from living off welfare. There is no way these people are going to make long term decisions if their short term needs haven't been met or there is a constant risk that they won't be met tomorrow.
This is actually one of the more disgusting parts of Austrian economics. Where a low time preference is basically considered the equivalent of a high IQ. If you have a high time preference you must be some dumb consumerist animal, when the truth is that you barely earn enough money to meet your living expenses which means 100% of your spending must go to consumption. Thirst is more urgent than hunger which is more urgent than shelter which is more urgent than social needs and so on. At some point you are not longer hungry or homeless. The urgency is gone. It would be more accurate to say that time preference is a function of wealth and having your needs met, rather than some intellectual jerk off competition where stupid people are filtered out and smart people end up with all the wealth.
His idea was: buyers don’t know if a car is good and the risk of getting “a lemon” (a bad car) reduces how much they’re willing to pay. That means sellers reduce the quality of what they’re selling or leave the market. After a while the quality degrades so much that buyers notice and want to pay even less. Eventually the market is 100% lemons.
The paper was controversial when it was published in the 1970s, but helped kick start research into “information asymmetry” and the potential for market failure.
I honestly just see a regular capitalistic market, where a company is trying to make money at the expense of other companies. By that I don't mean Amazon is outcompeting retailers and pushing them out the market. I mean Amazon is actively causing damage to well known brands by letting scammers sell those branded products to promote their own AmazonBasics brand which is free of scammers.
Even if the scams are unintended, there is no profit incentive to get rid of them.
Short termisum might win out, but it is not a foregone conclusion.
And the problem is that Amazon's growth profile (retail-side anyway) is going to be pretty constrained going forwards because they own too much of the available pie right now. So the result is that managers are going to have to look for other ways to trim costs to make numbers.
If you're starting from 0.001% of the retail market and trying to grow 10x it is much easier to do that just by having really good customer service.
There are companies that have been around for 300 years, in fact prior to rise of venture capital moat companies were multi-generational family business and you would consider how a decision would reflect on your children.
Why do you believe this? Not one of the top 10 online retailers in the US doesn’t have third party sellers. It appears to be the case in practice that growing does require opening the doors to anyone and everyone, which obviously increases the scale of business a retailer can offer. There are both reasons and evidence to suggest third party sales are what it takes to grow to even one hundredth the size of Amazon.
> seeing what is happening to Amazon’s reputation, that seems like a bad long term move.
This seems like a big assumption. There is a very long list of corporations and monopolies with relatively bad reputations that are doing just fine and have for a long time. Reputation isn’t a good measure for the success or future prospects of a company, once it gets large enough.
The big thing that changed isn't the third-party marketplace on Amazon, it's that they increasingly and intentionally blurred the lines between "third-party" and "second-party" marketplaces. Any third-party that uses "Fulfilled by Amazon" logistics (warehouses, shipping) just about gets automatically upgraded in the Amazon user experience to "second-party" even if Amazon has no deeper working relationship with the third-party than "Fulfilled by Amazon".
Some of that intentional blurring of the lines is also questionably Dark Patterns intentionally designed to confuse consumers in just exactly what categories Amazon supports directly (first-party) and which ones are third-party, and more importantly which ones are first-party usually versus third-party today (such as sold out goods). They want to give consumers the illusion of an "everything store" that is never out of stock. That's never the practical reality, and the illusion may be evil from the perspective of shadily pushing consumers to unvetted third parties due to Dark Patterns that back that illusion.
And I trust Target's products are genuine and what you receive is what's in the product description, because they sell them in stores.
By the time you factor in the time and frustration for that, any savings (which isn't even guaranteed) doesn't look like great ROI anyway. Plus, even Amazon often won't carry the full range of a brand's products, so I get more options shopping this way.
You can read reviews for a whole different model of headphones or kettle, for example, but what you get is another, (usually) cheaper model/revision. Which is insane!
There are two time when I will use Amazon nowadays:
1) If there is an official store there
Anker is a good example of this. It seems like Amazon doesn't commingle inventory if there is an official store.
2) If I want something faster than Alibaba/Aliexpress
Quite often I can find the exact Chinesium equivalent on Amazon and I get the benefit of returnability if what is advertised is completely out of whack.
This has to be costing Amazon money, but, it's their funeral.
Is there any confirmation of this? I've seen assertions both ways.