Dictating how retailers can interact with your competitors is anti-competitive. Dictating what prices they can offer when they put up listings is a part of that, it is anti-competitive.
This is no different than what non-e-commerce stores (such as Walmart) have been doing for years.
As a simple practical manner a small manufacturer can more cheaply sell products at their factory than the overhead of selling through Amazon or anywhere else. You often see this where mid sized brewery offers beer kegs more cheaply on location.
Amazon’s policy simply increases prices without any benefit to consumers or the overall economy.
It's annoyingly a pretty standard practice. And they will see through the "different SKU" trick simply by comparing the product images.
I have personalky spoken to wholesalers who sell widgets X (lighters etc) to retail stores.
If the retail stores undercut everyone else and drop the price below MSRP, they will exclude them in the future. There is centralized price control even though the retailers are free to do what they want.
That is done by auto dealers and anyone else who does MSRP. The difference is that they are still competing in that product category. Amazon on the other hand is a platform that stands BEHIND them. This leads to an emergent price cartel, just like in the propu lica piece on NYC real estate:
And as you've stated, it's done by anyone who publishes a MSRP.
https://www.deltafaucet.com/for-professionals/product-resour...
https://assets.ctfassets.net/zlhl2y58oyef/3wENIXr7qvqyOoVD6R...
It is literally Amazon’s business to offer pricing at equal to or better than their competitors.
> …the only reason they care is that they want to crush the competition.
Every company wants to beat their competition, and many (most?) want to “crush” their competition. Don’t you think Target wants to crush Amazon? Don’t you think Google wants to crush Apple in smartphone sales? Don’t you think a local retailer would love to crush Amazon for products in their niche?
The only question here is whether Amazon is doing this in an abusive way and/or a way that negatively impacts consumers.
We’ll find out in the trial…
For their own products they can.
For third-party items, Amazon is free to lower their margin.