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Comment by abigail95 | Hacker News Reader

They have money because of AWS, which is a fantastic product in an extremely competitive market, competing against players who lose money like GCP and Azure.

Amazon.com as a store makes next to nothing as profit.

Who cares what he did to some diaper companies. Are consumers paying more or less because of amazon? Much less.

They basically run amazon.com for no profit and consumers get fantastic deals and cheaper products and more reliable service than ever before.

How much would you have to charge for same day delivery for that many products? Could you get close to Amazon? You would have to rip off you customers so badly just to stay alive.

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> Who cares what he did to some diaper companies. Are consumers paying more or less because of amazon? Much less.

They are probably generally paying less but Amazon isn't the surefire low-cost provider on the internet the way they used to be. I don't expect the trend of them raising prices to reverse as they gain market power.

> How much would you have to charge for same day delivery for that many products? Could you get close to Amazon? You would have to rip off you customers so badly just to stay alive.

It's not "ripping off" it's just charging customers the actual cost of the service they are getting.

> I don't expect the trend of them raising prices to reverse as they gain market power.

Except their competitors have followed suit with cheaper shipping and online shopping. They are the best, but not a monopoly.

> Who cares what he did to some diaper companies.

Going out on a limb here, but I'd say the diaper companies.

What happened to the diaper companies? Feel like I see the same brands of diapers still. Procter and gamble, Kimberly Clark, etc.

So...your concern is for branding continuity?

No, my concern was the claim that something happened to the diaper companies is false.

Some middleman website might have lost out on being able to sell for more money to Walmart, but that was their choice to not to pursue a deal with Walmart.

I am guessing what they were probably concerned about was guaranteeing themselves cashing out at least at Amazon’s offer because if Walmart found out Amazon was backing out of the deal, then Walmart would have had the power to push the price down.

Either way, diapers.com was going to lose to Amazon/Walmart/Target/Costco in the long run, so if they were getting a high valuation simply for being a popular website as online shopping was ramping up, then their best move was to sell while the iron was hot.

> consumers get fantastic deals and cheaper products and more reliable service than ever before.

This hasn't been true for many years IME, and will almost certainly get worse over time. Companies like Amazon don't fight tooth and nail to monopolize industries because they want to be nice to people, they do it because it results in power they can use to increase profits over the long term. Less competition means that they can ratchet up prices for customers and squeeze sellers/suppliers more. There are only a handful of general stories online these days, largely due to Amazon's actions.

I have never ever seen an example where Amazon has ratcheted up prices on any product after getting x market share. In fact, I've seen the opposite. Looking at camelcamelcamel price history, many diaper products on Amazon are trending down since 2018-2019 (max price history). Surprising given inflation.

It's too easy to enter the diaper (or whatever) retail market that such a tactic makes no sense.

How on earth do GCP and Azure lose money when they (just like AWS) are ridiculously expensive? Like frequently >3x the competition for VMs and for bandwidth egress, I’ve sometimes seen 10x, or charging for things that competitors don’t.

Well they don't. Azure doesen't in fact it's the complete opposite. Not sure about GCP though, but I'd also be surprised...

> who lose money like GCP and Azure

Really? First time I'm hearing Azure is unprofitable. In fact "Intelligent Cloud" which I assume is mainly Azure is their most profitable business...

If I understand it correctly (probably not) they actually have higher margins than AWS?

I care because once Amazon kills all their competitors then they are the only ones selling diapers. And then they can charge 10 bucks per diaper.

And then someone sees that people are buying diapers for 10 bucks and starts selling them for 5.

The latency between the observation of a market opportunity, and actually realizing lower prices at the consumer level, is significant. Millions of people would be charged monopolistic prices for the year it would take.

This also assumes Amazon doesn’t buy any competitor early on, such as happened with Warby Parker.

Except Amazon has the the diaper production locked up, and we're back where Amazon temporarily sells them for 2 bucks while you try and get your diaper factory off the ground.

What they will see is “geeze, if we try to sell diapers Amazon will crush us”

Yet here we are in reality where they did kill the diaper competitor and we have MORE retailers shipping diapers at a competitive cost.

For now, and only because bezos allows it.

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