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Comment by randycupertino | Hacker News Reader

I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores. There were instances of their prices being lower than Walmart or other budget stores. The avocados were $0.25 each and carrots were half price of ones in Safeway, even ground beef was weirdly cheap. One time as a comparison I put the same items in my cart for Amazon fresh and Walmart and it was $21 at Amazon fresh and $36 at Walmart. WAY cheaper than Instacart too.

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> operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores

Wouldn't surprise me. I know a guy who invented a device for truckers that became ubiquitous in truck stops across the US. This would've been like 2014.

He refused to sell on Amazon, so Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price, until he agreed to list (at which point they dropped their competing product)

I'm not aware of any Amazon product lines or organizations that specializes in devices for truckers. Can you provide a listing?

Truckers are the biggest demo but it's sold under a generic category.

huh. What's the product listing? I don't think this story rings true.

it's a known behavior of theirs[0]. sounds plausible to me.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-produ...

It's good to ask for a link (although not good to give one if this is your friend and it may affect their relationship with Amazon that you're talking about this in public), but you can't expect people to waste time thinking about your ringing ears.

Amazon also did this with diapers.com

They are notorious for doing this.

https://archive.is/2020.07.29-212026/https://www.bloomberg.c...

>“We have already initiated a more aggressive ‘plan to win’ against diapers.com,” longtime Amazon retail executive Doug Herrington apparently wrote in an email released by the committee. “To the extent that this plan undercuts the core diapers business for diapers.com, it will slow the adoption of Soap.com,” another company owned by Quidsi.

>Herrington called Quidsi Amazon’s No. 1 short-term competitor. “We need to match pricing on these guys no matter what the cost,” he said in the email.

I bet Quidsi was also selling the diapers at a loss since they were using UPS and Fedex, so not sure what the difference is if Amazon sells diapers at a loss or Quidsi was selling diapers at a loss.

The innovation would have been in the logistics buildout, which Quidsi obviously wasn’t doing.

The logistics buildout is arguably Amazon's biggest retail lynchpin.

However, it's built on a few fragile external costs.

First that comes to mind, is the comingling, which will theoretically resolve one way or another with their ending of comingling. Comingling almost certainly lowered logistics costs however...

Second being, the externality of how both warehouse and delivery workers are treated in the name of the almighty metrics. NGL I feel like the public's acceptance of their labor practices has ironically only accelerated the erosion of labor rights and worker treatment.

Then don’t believe it and go on with your day. No one owes you a link to anything, especially if you simply don’t pay attention to Amazon’s widely-reported business practices.

You don't think it's believable that Amazon sells something truckers would use?

All of the replies to this comment: "The fact that I thought it was real says a lot" [0]

[0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah

There's no listing. The story is made up.

While the general premise is true (big company will try to rip off small company), Amazon doesn't have the magical power to get around patent law and the economic penalties are fairly harsh, which is why most companies don't do it. And no war chest of tech patents is going to get Amazon around a patent in the trucking industry because the inventor of the trucking gizmo couldn't care less about whether Amazon patented the right to make Alexa speak in tongues.

It's possible, and likely, that Alibaba vendors decided to rip off the product, but again...patent law is a useful tool for those who use it, and Amazon can be held liable for the sales of infringing products on its storefronts.

Amazon currently sells fake fuses that have probably already killed people.

Amazon cares just slightly more about breaking the law then they about killing people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

That's because criminal prosecution and product tort liability are not meaningful deterrents.

Patent litigation is a different thing entirely. The burden of proof is lower, and the payouts are higher.

To put things in perspective, Apple, Amazon, etc., have lost patent lawsuits worth hundreds of millions over trivial aspects of their devices that are just tiny parts out of thousands compromising the phone/tablet/whatever.

> criminal prosecution and product tort liability are not meaningful deterrents.

> Patent litigation is a different thing entirely

Wow! Infringing my idea is "worse" than infringing my body...

Tell that to a judge after 15 years millions of dollars and an out of date product.

It seems a lot of people on HN fundamentally misunderstand how patent litigation works.

If this trucking device actually existed, and for some reason was being sold on Amazon, and the inventor had sued, he would be living large these days off the settlement.

Yes, Amazon sellers have copied products before, but those aren't Amazon. Amazon prefers to just buy the competition (see, e.g., Diapers.com and Zappos).

Such tactics sound… illegal

The password is Melania...

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/07/when-billionaire-go...

https://pagesix.com/2026/01/27/hollywood/inside-melania-trum...

https://youtu.be/B1zKWNB2rho?t=230

Haven’t you heard? Laws don’t apply to companies

Illegal in what way? They are not allowed to set prices lower than competitors or raise them at any time?

Predatory pricing is illegal in the US, but difficult to prosecute under the existing laws.

Which means it’s actually: legal and widespread

No it means it’s illegal and enforcement agencies don’t have the means and/or political support to prosecute.

What is “predatory pricing” vs. “pricing”?

Selling items for less than they cost to produce is known as "dumping" in international trade (where it is generally disallowed by trade organizations) and can be illegal in the US if the intent is to eliminate competition [0]. That last factor can be hard to prove, and I don't think the FTC is doing much about anticompetitive behavior these days.

[0]: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

Yes, I can imagine it’s hard to prove, which is a pretty good indicator it’s a slippery concept to being with. Everyone wants to “eliminate the competition”, including your competition!

The predatory pricing pattern the FTC would in theory sure over would be: selling items at an artificially low price until the competition goes out of business, then raising prices once you are the only seller left standing. It's the second step that makes it anticompetitive instead of just competitive

What does it mean to be “the only seller left standing”? If somebody’s out there making big margins because they don’t face competition, competition is likely to emerge!

Yes, but the monopoly seller has already demonstrated that they will operate at a loss until their competitors go out of business, which is a pretty big deterrent to any new market entrants. They've also demonstrated that no one will be making any money until either the monopolist or the new entrant is out of business, so who would actually launch a new business in that environment?

“Imagine profitability doesn’t matter to ownership, and investors will accept losses—and less losses than a more efficient competitor—indefinitely.”

Even Amazon had to eventually find its way to profitability.

Yeah, it is theoretically possible to have a marketplace where "predatory pricing" is an accepted though aggressive business strategy, and I'd say that we are roughly there in the US. But the original intent behind the law on the books was to make markets friendly to new entrants, even if that meant sometimes constraining what large participants were allowed to do.

This is an historical question I’m not equipped to answer, but I’d guess it was just the opposite: These laws were intended to protect incumbents from more efficient, better financed new competitors!

I'd be unsurprised in this case that Amazon could produce the product profitably for less than half the cost due to scale.

I don't think Amazon was producing anything they sold in their grocery stores. They were probably buying the same white label items as everyone else for their store brand.

The Biden admin went slightly harder against anti-competitive actions and anti-consumer actions by companies and all the billionaires freaked out and poured money into Republican campaigns in 2024 in order to roll all that back.

What was rolled back? There was no major change in action whatsoever, only rhetoric, which is meaningless. As for funding, Trump raised substantially less in 2024 than 2020 while Harris raised more money than any campaign ever has, by a wide margin. [1] Dark money also overwhelmingly flowed to the DNC. [2] And a large chunk of all of Trump's funding came after the previous administration tried to imprison him, which rather freaked people out - even those not particularly fond of him. That also likely played a significant role in the more DGAF presidency we're seeing today relative to 2016.

[1] - https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_election_campaign_finan...

[2] - https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/dark...

Enforcement.

> As for funding, Trump raised substantially less in 2024 than 2020 while Harris raised more money than any campaign ever has, by a wide margin.

Does that include the $44b spent on the Twitter acquisition?

Selling it at cost though isn’t. And the cost to make a good is often less than 50% retail

Standard grocery margins are usually lower, in the 30%-40% range, and are often much lower for promotional items. Rotating "loss leaders" to get people in the door are standard practice. IMHO that would make it hard to bring an antitrust action against a grocery chain, as pretty much every store engages in a limited amount of predatory pricing as a marketing technique.

50% is the standard retail markup, but it varies by industry.

To add onto sibling comment: it is specifically when they sell below cost to eliminate competition, with the goal of later being able to raise prices to recover those losses (and more) once they are the only player in town and can jack the prices up all they want. The later price elevations are what result in consumer harm, which is why it is illegal.

Predatory pricing:

A big gorilla comes in and under prices the entire market. They can do that because they already have tons of money. They do this long enough to break the market and drive the competition out of business. Once the competitors are gone they jack up the prices to unprecedented levels because there's no more alternatives available and bleed the market for all the money.

Regular pricing:

Charge a fair price based on actual costs.

This presupposes some athletic new competitor can’t enter the market and take the margin off the fat incumbent.

It’s why we have capital markets: If capturing a profitable opportunity requires spending some money, someone who wants to profit will send that money your way.

You can do this to a low margin business. In fact you can increase the margin once the dust settles.

But it should only be because they indeed have lower margins or more efficient operations. It should not be funded by external money (other departments or investors), only to undercut competition too force them out only to raise prices to above the previous point after.

So a simple law could be that prices can only be raised to the point where they were at before the competition was squashed.

> Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price

Pricing below an appropriate measure of cost is generally considered predatory pricing. It is very difficult to enforce this, but that doesn't change the fact that it could be illegal and a violation of antitrust laws.

Amazon could also have the resources/know-how/volume to manufacture a comparable product that could be sold for half the cost

Then that is okay as long as they don’t raise the prices after the competition is gone.

Did he have a patent?

Do you want to go up against whatever patent portfolio AMZN has?

He already had the product, what would he be going up against?

I just looked it up - yes, and far in advance of the timeframe

This is (or was) a very small business. An office and a warehouse, basically.

Can you link to the patent?

Patents last up to 20 years, assuming all maintenance fees are paid, so having a patent far in advance of an event may mean it's no longer valid.

It has been their practice since forever. Look up the diapers.com case.

> I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition

iirc that's exactly what Amazon did to destroy diapers.com over a decade ago

Amazon did not destroy diapers.com.

Diapers.com aka Quidsi was already operating at a loss when it was acquired by Amazon. It's whole business model was using VC-funding to offer products below sustainable costs with the goal of eventually jacking up prices once they drove out smaller/local competitors. Amazon used its own business model against it by dropping prices even lower, knowing that the VC investors couldn't afford it.

Walmart passed on buying Quidsi when Walmart was thinking about launching its own e-commerce platform because the business model was unsustainable. Walmart decided they would rather spend several hundred millions building out their own platform then to buy an existing website with millions of customers.

Walmart bought out jet.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet.com

5 years after it passed up on buying Quidsi, and after it's first disastrous e-commerce attempt...

This is basically the playbook of every "disruptive technology" startup or FAANG initiative of a similar stripe - set prices incredibly low to bleed out competition and gain market share, then raise them once you are in the dominant market position.

At a certain point it's not about technology anymore, but access to cheap finance. See also: Uber.

Uber is far better for me than the old taxi system.

Maybe the one where you flagged down a car on the street, but you could always call to book a taxi and those companies worked exactly like Uber — over the phone, because it was the pre–app era.

Uber also gives you a price upfront, and that is the most you will pay (+ tip, if you feel like it). I don't remember pre-mobile phone taxi system that gave you a price upfront. They used to list the price per mile, and then it was up to you to figure out the distance and make sure the driver took a reasonably short route.

So no, the old taxi companies did NOT work "exactly like" Uber.

I've seen more than a few people on this forum assert that the old taxi system was/is comparable to Uber or somehow better. I even got some shit for referring to it as old, legacy, I forget the exact verbiage I used. But it is old, and it is worse. I get the price upfront, I can adjust the "class" of car I order if I'm going to the pharmacy alone or to a nice dinner. Calling ahead to preorder a taxi feels like calling to order a pizza over the phone at this point. If I called, would they even know how to handle it?

Obviously we live in a different era now where things are ordered by apps instead of websites or phone calls, but those used to be socially acceptable ways to order things.

For sure, I was there. But we also used to have to have the people on the phone read our order back to us to confirm it, now I've got a screen that does that automatically. I'm not at all nostalgic for the alternative.

We're talking about the ride service itself, not the interface used to book it.

The whole thing end-to-end is the ride service though. The interface is the differentiator that made Uber popular and forced traditional taxi providers to compete for once. There used to be tons of anecdotes about "the card reader being broken" in traditional taxis, because they dodged taxes by only accepting cash. Exposing the whole process through an app and handling your billing outside of the car made tactics like that less useful. Taxis thrived on hidden information games and obligation; Uber doesn't remove that entirely but the playing field is more level.

> the playing field is more level

Quoted for truth. I still take taxis from time to time if there’s no wait at a taxi stand at an airport or building. I noticed in places like Las Vegas things seem better now, there’s flat rates and everyone has touchscreen payment terminals in the passenger area. I remember pre-Uber occasionally getting cab drivers that would take suboptimal routes like getting on the freeway to drive up the meter.

It depends on where you lived. NYC had a large number of "black car" livery services where you would call, arrange a ride, and typically get a price up front. It wasn't legal to hail them on the street, but in practice it was pretty common to hail a black car (a "gypsy cab") and negotiate a price up front. Source: I lived a few blocks north of Central Park and in Hamilton Heights before Uber was a thing and took gypsy cabs a couple of times a week.

Also, Uber drivers tend to show up. It was always a crapshoot with regular cab drivers. I don't have experience with other car services, maybe they were better pre-Uber.

> and those companies worked exactly like Uber

Not in my country they didn’t. Booking or no booking, taxis did whatever they wanted. More often than not your booked taxi just wouldn’t turn up and you wouldn’t know until well after you needed it.

nah. They never came, or took hours. Taxis were awful services and deserved to die. (australia)

I really like this piece for Real Life Mag (rip) on what most startups "do":

https://reallifemag.com/money-for-nothing/

"privatization by way of electrification"

Nobody on this forum believes in startups or technology anymore.

Heck, Elon's ownership of SpaceX even got to me to not really care about space travel anymore, one of my biggest passions since I was 6. But I just can't root for whatever his vision of space faring society would look like.

Kessler syndrome, but every debris piece is a Starlink transceiver.

Politics consuming all other interests

Yeah I hear you. I too wish he would have stayed out of politics. Sadly he chose not to, and not just go a little, but to go all in. And to choose to make it basically his public identity.

You know rocket science was founded by literal Nazis, right? We actually brought them to America to run NASA and get us to the moon.

Correct, and this is why US big tech, including the big LLM players, need to be tarriffed/DSTed harder than Chinese cars by the rest of the world. They get big off of the exact dumping that China has always been accused of.

And then they can’t figure out why the economics don’t work.

Phase 1: bankrupt the competition

Phase 2: ???

Phase 3: profit!

That's literally their MO. They've been doing that forever.

Walmart isn't a budget grocery store, though. Its prices are higher than actual grocery stores (like Safeway.) Also, everyone is WAY cheaper than Instacart.

>Walmart isn't a budget grocery store,

The answer to this is complex, it has any number of products that are cheaper than products of similar quality from any other store. Places like Safeway/Aldi typically beat on price on very generic items that may or may not have similar quality.

The biggest thing to watch for at Walmart is price discrimination dependent on location. Back in the days I used to shop with them (read made less money) picking a store in a poorer neighborhood could save $10 to $30 dollars on the same car of items.

I found Lowes (hardware) to be one of the worst about this. I lived in an area with 4 Lowes, and never shopped at my local one because of how much more expensive everything was, and never clearance. I'm not talking a couple dollars, in some cases 4x the price of one just 15 minutes away.

In the days before places started requiring ID for returns an acquaintance of mine would pick up rifle scopes at one Walmart and return them at another Walmart on a route he took. Only once every few weeks to give employees time to rotate out. He could pay for a few days of gas with that arbitrage.

Not in the areas of California I frequent. Walmart is usually the cheapest around here; heck, even Target beats Safeway on some items. On the other hand, Walmart is also usually the worst at stock rotation.

Walmart is certainly the cheapest in some rather remote cities, like Fargo, ND.

This is the opposite of my experience. Safeway is usually the most expensive, more than the Kroger/Albertsons chains.

The only place that competed with Walmart on price for me was WinCo.

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