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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

> No new products are being ordered for the brands being phased out, which will cease to exist once their inventory is sold. Strong-selling items in brands that have been discontinued are being rebranded under Amazon Essentials or other remaining labels.

Sounds like the usual whittling of unsuccessful products and a consolidation of branding.

Unsure how much this actually impacts end users (except those thinking they’re being anti-Amazon by buying a non-Amazon product that’s aktually an Amazon product)

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I think it's good from transparency point of view. It's one thing when a retailer has one or two house brands, like Kirkland brand at Costco. Then the consumer can know that's the retailers house brand. Amazon on the other hand had 30 clothing brands with names like Lark & Ro, Daily Ritual and Goodthreads with just a tiny "An Amazon brand" buried in the product description bullets. I'm not sure if it was designed this way to be misleading, but I can see how it wouldn't be interpreted kindly during any kind of antitrust scrutiny.

It's not uncommon for big-box retailers to have multiple house brands. Walmart and Target both have dozens, for instance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walmart_brands

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_Corporation#Private-lab...

Home Depot has tons of brands too. I didn't realize how many brands were theirs until I did a kitchen remodel, and got a bunch of cheaply built crap that started having problems after installation. Fuckin anything with "Bay" in the name is theirs. Hampton Bay, Glacier Bay, etc. Most of the stuff in their stores is their own brand. Most of it is trash too. Their doors have all been sagging on me, the stainless steel sink I bought keeps needing me to scrub off corrosion, their wood countertops have some shitty UV coating that just peels off.

Costco actually pioneered that approach. The traditional corporate strategy had always been to have a bunch of different house brands fpr different product categories.

Costco is generally cheaper and top shelf products.

Not my experience with Amazon basics.

My experience is that Costco is cheaper and entirely adequate/sufficient quality products, but rarely/never "top shelf" products (assuming that's meant to mean "the best").

This makes sense, as Costco is trying to move a lot of units and you can move a lot more units into the market that's looking for "perfectly adequate" than the ones looking for "the best". Honda outsells Porsche, Ferrari, and Lamborghini combined and all that...

That was the intent though. How can I buy cheap Chinese mass-produced products (usually low on the quality scale) but still have some basic quality bar that the products are not fraudulent? That they wouldn't fail basic safety standards or cause a fire or contain highly toxic ingredients. If I cared about higher quality for a given purchase, I wouldn't be choosing Amazon Basics. But for plenty of products (garbage bags, whiteboard markers, shop towels, etc ...) I just want the cheapest thing thing that actually will do the bare the minimum job.

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