- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world
California Attorney General Rob Bonta last night filed a request for a preliminary injunction in California’s existing case against Amazon for price fixing. Attorney General Bonta’s 2022 lawsuit alleged that the company stifled competition and caused increased prices across California through its anticompetitive policies in order to avoid competing on price with other retailers. New evidence paints a clearer and more shocking picture. The motion for a preliminary injunction comes after a robust discovery process where California uncovered evidence of countless interactions in which Amazon, vendors, and Amazon’s competitors agree to increase and fix the prices of products on other retail websites to bolster Amazon’s profits. Time and again, across years and product categories, Amazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites, threatening dire consequences if vendors do not comply. Vendors, bullied by Amazon’s overwhelming bargaining leverage and fearing punishment, comply — agreeing to raise prices on competitors’ websites (often with the awareness and cooperation of the competing retailer), or to remove products from competing websites altogether. Amazon’s goal is to insulate itself from price competition by preventing lower retail prices in the market at the expense of American consumers who are already struggling with a crisis of affordability.
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This is why you shouldn’t buy US
This is OK because our Leaders are Looking out For the COMMON man! That’s why I’m going to ENTHUSIASTICALLY Vote for the Billionaire AGAIN!
cApItAlIsM
Hold up everyone. Think of the shareholders.
Capitalism at it’s most advantageous to humanity.
As far as distractions from the Epstein Files go, this is an exciting one.
Can’t wait for them to be fined one penny for every $20B made.
Hey now, don’t get your hopes up.
well they also see what products are doing well on their site, then making exact copies to sell at a loss to kill the original maker, then once the captured competition is killed take their place and inflate the price
BREAKING NEWS!!
Evil company known for being evil is caught doing evil things!
I cannot express enough how angry I am that people still use amazon. Major cringe when friends tell me all the shit they buy on there. I used it 10 years ago a couple times, never once since then. Its shit, slave labor, and enriches billionaires. No one forces you to use it.
Unfortunately, they are a master at driving local businesses out of money. Buying a certain pet food at my local retailer (a franchisee) would be about $30. On Amazon, it’s $25 (and sometimes even $15-20, if you do the subscription discount). At the local store, I’d have to pay more and drag the stuff home on my own feet.
It’s the Walmart model. A lot of the frustration is that it’s a systemic problem where individuals are incentivized against their best interests and the best interests of their communities.
Because shareholders. The Line, must go up.
Thankfully (/s) Amazon has enough money that it’s cheaper to bribe politicians than provide a better product. So systemic solutions are that much more difficult.
Feel free to provide goods to my rural community any time! You can’t believe that poor people have budget consideration and seek the cheapest product?
Use eBay or literally any other site. What is so specific to amazon that you need ? Amazon isn’t even cheaper in many cases if you actually search.
Amazon is cheaper than eBay on every item I’ve looked at in the last 6 months. eBay has robbed me a few times in the last 6 months. What a wild ass suggestion.
Huh, bad luck. I’ve been using eBay for 20 years with maybe 2 issues and they’ve always been resolved.
Companies like Amazon and eBay exist to leverage to post office and their platform for profit. They both do the same thing to the same people.
eBay’s just as fucking bad? They monopolized your post office pricing and fix prices on their market place, they manipulate visibility and charge more for promotions. It’s the same scam with a different name lmao
Well, if you wanna say that, all stores are bad, capitalism is evil, stop buying things and go live in a cave 😁
There is not one store out there that’s not evil, because capitalism relies on exploiting the poor and weak and less intelligent. That’s how it is. Unless you go live off grid in Alaska but guess what you’ll still have to import products made with slave labor.
Again, Lemmy being angry because we aren’t perfect. Using eBay or a small store instead of amazon is astronomically better than buying your funko pop collection on amazon.
It’s cringe because it’s affordable and convenient? Whenever I buy something from there I always price compare online and it’s the cheapest hands-down. Some people don’t have the luxury of constantly considering geopolitics and large-scale repercussions when they’re just simply trying to get by.
Sure, but there’s many people who are wealthy enough to make the choice and still use amazon because they dont know any better. And this is what happens.
Understandable, perhaps one day I’ll be in that boat myself. Amazon has pissed me off in a few ways and I’m definitely looking for alternatives. Regardless of where I shop, I feel like my money is still going into the same greedy pockets unless it’s a local brick and mortar store.
It super depends on what you’re buying. Personally, I just go without in order to avoid them. The only things I ever buy from Amazon are things I cannot find anywhere else that I need to have, such as water filters for the lead pipes in Montréal.
We don’t have the luxury to ignore how bad Amazon is. Amazon is aware of this and does everything it can to force you to buy from them by under cutting other businesses until competition dries up. Every time I can buy something for a little bit more and skip Amazon that’s a huge a win for everyone from the original supplier, the more local store selling it, and the working class in general.
Edit: Reading and writing more comments, I’m gunna find a way to get those filters from elsewhere even if they cost a bunch more.
No bro water filters from Amazon are unethical, please expose yourself to lead because some guy on lemmy is virtue signaling /s
I cannot tell what side of the argument you’re trying to be on here, gunna be real hokest with ya.
I think personal safety is more important than virtue signaling. You should have used your political power to regulate it before it became a critical service in communities. I hate Amazon, yet I am dependent on it. I come from the side of nuance. You want to handle Amazon you monopoly bust it. Boycotting won’t help.
I have always voted progressive, never even centrist. I live in Canada, also, but yea I don’t actually make the rules but the people I vote for to make said rules don’t like Amazon either.
That’s my only point it doesn’t matter if there’s a group of consumers boycotting them if the government doesn’t listen to those constituents. Amazon is a political problem not a consumer problem.
I mean what I said. I also buy water filters from Amazon because I suck water straight from the ground. Some times the water is yellow and needs to be filtered.
Did you miss the part where I said I’d be looking for filters elsewhere even if they cost a bunch more?
“some people don’t have the luxury of considering whether their product is made from death camp body parts when they’re just simply trying to get by”
Jesus H Fucking Christ. How about electing a government that will regulate Amazon instead of comparing poor people who need consumer goods to nazis. This is some tankie ass behavior
You missed the point completely, so I’ll lay it out for you: Everyone has to draw a line SOMEWHERE. And when a country whose government sends fascist death squads into the streets is supported by a company, there’s a fuckton of lines to be drawn.
There’s ZERO excuse for doing business with amazon. No one is starving because they can’t shop there. So GTFO with your lazy ass morally corrupt exuses.
Now that we have a dictator I find it hilarious you’re trying to do the steps from before we have a dictator. It’s too late for boycotts and protests and voting. You missed your chance for that 10 years ago. Amazon’s got cheap body armor.
Great reason to business with Amazon. Armor plates and carrier. Gun mods. These are real expressions of political will. Enjoy your boycott. Glad you’re privileged enough to have money and options on places to purchase consumer goods. Super happy for you. Very righteous.
Sorry bub I’ve got plants to feed. Don’t worry my neighbor is going to genocide us no matter where we buy water filters from.
Yeah, these people saying they NEED amazon probably didn’t live in ye olden days without internet. We survived then, you can survive now.
There’s thousands if not millions of sellers all over the internet. People are lazy/dumb and just want to 1 click buy and are scared to go anywhere but amazon.
And then have the nerve to argue on behalf of “poor people” most of whom probably don’t have any spare money to buy convenience products on amazon.
I mean Walmart wiped out every other store so that’s usually where “poor” people have to go, especially in small towns. Amazon is doing it on a much larger scale.
Once all the competitors are gone, they will increase the prices to absurd, heartless levels
Its always the plan. Walmart. Discord. They all do the exact same thing. Which is why we must resist.
I avoid Amazon as much as possible, though on occasion I’ve more or less had no other reasonable choice. But that’s happened something like 4 times in the last 10 years or so.
The big problem with boycotting Amazon is that while it’s easy enough to avoid buying from their online store as much as possible, AWS (Amazon Web Services) is pretty much unavoidable if you’re using the modern internet.
oh I just cant wait for the highest profile minor slap on the wrist of the century!
Dont worry guys well give one of the richest men in the world a 100k fine!
Yeah don’t worry. They’ll get a small fine and will appeal and drag it out for years
I could see them threatening something absurd like no longer shipping to California.
Kinda suspected they were doing that. Looked at some drywall panel lifts this morning and saw one for $75. Shipping however was $247. Dropped that like a hot rivet
I mean, that makes sense to me at least. Drywall lifts aren’t difficult machines, they’re basically a lifting mechanism on a steel frame.
However, they are heavy and big mother fuckers, and therefore cost a ton to ship. Shipping is damned expensive, even without price fixing and gouging.
True but $240+ just seems excessive if the tool itself is priced 1/3 of that
It depends on a lot of things. Weight, truck availability, packaging size, whatever deal the manufacturer has with the shipping company, warehouse location, etc.
Supply chain management is an absolute unsolvable beast. I used to help out a local warehouse business, and the amount of work that went solely into optimizing their shipping costs was staggering
The guy they had on staff whose job it was to optimize everything was paid more than the owner or co-owner, and it was worth every penny. Dude was making 300k a year + 2% of all cost savings. Dude saved them 4.5 million on shipping costs according to the paper work I saw. And this is pre AI. Dude was doing all of this with scripts and spreadsheets
I know but amazon has a policy for non prime users that items over $35 qualify for free shipping. After dropping that deal I looked at some on a couple big box homimprov stores and they have some that are double the amazon item price but ship free so a net savings of around $100 on the deal
Astonishing what happens when people are paid what they’re worth
This has been their standard business practice for over a decade. There are already tons of apps and browser plugins that track prices on amazon items and list the lowest/highest they’ve been listed at.
The issue I’ve had with the “Just shop somewhere else. Don’t use Amazon” is that it’s very US-specific response. Amazon has absolutely dominated the online shopping space in Canada for years because they are one of the few companies that dealt with the biggest reason why shopping online in Canada has been difficult: Shipping. $20-$40+ domestic shipping fees are normal in Canada for most other retailers which means you could be paying double the cost of your order (or more) just on shipping alone, so as soon as Amazon came in and offered free coast-to-coast shipping they had basically won the market instantly. There were teething issues, of course, and their earlier shipping contractors were horrendous but they did smooth most of that out.
Nowadays they still have very little competition that can beat them on shipping, but there are more and more options popping up. There are some Canadian online stores that offer free shipping or free if over a certain reasonable amount. The COVID pandemic really pushed a lot of local retailers to set up affordable online ordering and delivery systems for local customers, so that has also become an option. Aliexpress has also greatly improved their free shipping process to Canada and considering most of what Amazon sells is just rebranded Aliexpress stuff, it’s a great way of getting the same items for cheaper if you’re ok waiting a few extra days. So most of my online purchases these days have been a mixture of Canadian retailers and Aliexpress.
Can openers is what did it for me.
In 2015 I needed a new manual can opener. The local big-box stores had two basic styles. A cheap, all metal one that was just stamped from a single sheet, and a more expensive one with better handles.
The more expensive one had previously rusted and began to look nasty within a few years.
Amazon had a bunch of different styles at less than the price point of the more expensive one.I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.
Anyway. Replaced it in 2019. Amazon still had a broad selection, but all except for obvious crap was as expensive as the local big box store’s expensive option. Wound up going to a smaller local(ish) bulk foods store and bought a cheapo restaurant one for less than Amazon’s/the big box store’s similar offerings. Minimal rusting to date.
I had a similar experience with a juicer. The hand ones kept breaking so I bought a rack and pinion beast from a restaurant supply company that will be inherited by my grand kids.
It cost me less than half of what Amazon wanted, and it wasn’t cheap
I had experiences like this one a lot. Most of the time what you get in Amazon cheap ist trash. All the good stuff isn’t much cheaper most of the time, 35€ instead of 40€ sounds legit. For me at least (worker, 2 Kids, most def. not rich) this ist not enough to buy from the devil thats kills all thats is good
I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.
That sounds like a really shitty one, actually. The can openers that operate on the side of the can should uncrimp the top, not actually cut into the can.
I would read your review of various day to day items.
👏🏻 We 👏🏻 demand 👏🏻 public 👏🏻 executions 👏🏻
