The Amazon tactics that hiked prices across the internet | Hacker News Reader

The Amazon tactics that hiked prices across the internet

theguardian.com

51 pointsdredmorbius8 comments

Amazon needed some good old fashioned trust busting years ago. It’s long overdue. Now, because they’ve waited so long, it’s unlikely prices will ever be able to go down to what they should be without Amazon’s interference.

FTC has been asleep at the switch for over two decades now.

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

this is monopolistic behavior. I think a yearly billion dollar inflation adjusted fine sounds about right.

Amazon is garbage. The majority of goods on amazon are trash too. Everything about it is shitty unless you think it's neat that a guy drives a truck clear across your town because you can't be bothered. And those people are trash too.

I'm all for criticizing Amazon where it makes sense, but...

> guy drives a truck clear across your town because you can't be bothered.

Can't be bothered to what? Get things shipped to a UPS or Fedex depot for pickup?

Or are you seriously trying to imply the better alternative is to drive your own car to a brick and mortar store, walk in with ambiguous purchase intent, suffer limited selection and lack of price context, and think your suffering is noble or something?

Not to mention that Amazon drivers are delivering to dozens of stops along their route to you, making them far more efficient compared to each consumer traveling to the store in their own vehicles.

Yeah that too, although I'm not looking to throw my weight behind that argument as I've seen how many redundant deliveries Amazon tends to make. Never mind the amount of stuff one has to return due to it arriving broken or due to trying to mitigate their customer-hostile policies. I'd like to think this demonstrates how cheap amortized delivery actually is, but I think the truth is they've just got things set up so sellers eat the costs.

Wow this is despicable. I'm glad the California attorney general is investigating this.

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