Cancelled my Prime subscription last month after the past year of worsening experiences with Amazon:
Received several orders that were returned items, with broken open packaging and sometimes the item was something else entirely, purely put there for weight by whoever returned it.
When I went to return some things at a major Amazon distribution center, the return area was closed for the week for some sort of construction or renovation, with no indication of that anywhere on the site. The only messaging was a piece of paper in the window once you got there.
At another separate major distribution center, the return area was a small room with pieces of paper taped to a door with an arrow pointing to the Amazon lockers where the returns are accepted.
Orders are now often so delayed that it makes the Prime subscription pointless. Have had multiple orders over the past year that didn't ship for 3 or 4 days.
Amazon listings are almost half Sponsored listings now, and there are unrelated ads on the side of listings.
Half of the listings are some random made-up brand name, like XIJGNU, which is just a Chinese seller selling low-quality products, and when the reviews get bad enough, they re-list the product under another made-up brand name.
Fake reviews were already rampant before LLMs, but now reviews are effectively useless because they are so easy to fake.
1. Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering.
2. As of now the trial is not scheduled to begin until January 2027 (although the discussed injunction is meant to address that). I believe the length of time required to get a decision in court is the single biggest impediment to justice being served. It usually waters down the final judgment, makes costs prohibitive for plaintiffs, and allows perpetrators to continue benefiting from illegal behavior indefinitely. In some cases, the defendant can be elected President in the interim eliminating any chance of facing a court decision.
This is very bad math on the part of the article. You can’t just take total revenue/number of households. I mean have they not heard of a little side business Amazon has called AWS?
Amazon is not just a US company either.
They also have an ad business. You could rightfully argue that ad spend gets passed on to the consumer.
The number Matt’s quoting doesn’t include AWS, AFAICT. It’s “North American segment” revenue in AMZN accounting. AWS is accounted separately as a global unit.
Though now that I write that, I wonder if Matt divided by the total number of North American households or the number of US ones.
EDIT: Amazon North American segment revenue divided by aggregate North American household count is roughly $2,300. But I’m guessing the real number is closer to Matt’s estimate as US households are wealthier and likely represent a disproportionate fraction of that revenue.
Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering.
Is it? That’s by households, not individuals. Is it really crazy to imagine a household spending $200-300/month at Costco, Walmart, Whole
Foods—or Amazon?
I wouldn't ascribe averages to mean much. I expect there is a small minority that buys everything on amazon (everything meaning groceries, holiday gifts, prescriptions, etc) that would jack up the average significantly.
It is a well-documented fact that Amazon forces it's sellers to "fix" their prices to match the Amazon price. If you sell on Amazon, you're not allowed to sell the same item for less ANYWHERE. This- coupled with Amazon's insane fees- should be a huge red flag to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and maybe a Attorney General can get them to do their damn job and crack down on it... I wouldn't hold my breath though.
The biggest mistake we've made is allowing Amazon (and now Walmart) to both be a seller and to operate what is supposed to be an open marketplace
It's insane that the landlord of the mall is also running the biggest store in the mall
It's led to this scheme, but also just the general enshittification of buying things online. You can never trust what you buy from Amazon because their "marketplace sellers" will send you a counterfeit, and it's hard to find some brand names because they don't want to be in that cesspool
As low rent and lowest common denominator as Walmart was in the 90s, at least I could go in and know that a) I probably was getting the lowest price on that Rubbermaid trash can b) it was legitimately a Rubbermaid trashcan and not someone who ripped off the molds, used plastic that was 50% as good, and sells it under the brand Xyxldk, and c) could reasonably expect to find that trashcan offered for sale in the first place
Why amazon sellers have not opened up a class action lawsuit is beyond me. This case, succeed or fail will surface enough documentation that they may find cause.
Small companies and individuals cannot pursue expensive lawsuits. It risks their livelihood while it goes through courts over years. And even if you win other big marketplaces may stop doing business with you. Plus class actions are prohibited in many contractual agreements - you’re forced into individual arbitration. It shouldn’t be legal but that’s normal today.
> Small companies and individuals cannot pursue expensive lawsuits.
The fact that lawsuits are won by whoever has more money and time is so deeply problematic. I have no idea how you’d go about equalizing it. Spending limits with devastating consequences if it can be proven that you broke them?
This is why Andy Jassy was a big supporter of BLM in the Biden era and is now funding the Melania documentary in the Trump era. Amazon bribes each administration to avoid the law. Many companies do this though, not just them. Companies worth more than a trillion shouldn’t exist, yet here they are corrupting our entire system.
I can say how this worked for books. Used to be Amazon didn't enforce their pricing policy. So a bookseller could price their book's list price lower on a different site than on amazon. Amazon would discount to match, but pay the bookseller based on the list price.
It was effectively a way to get an excess commission out of amazon if you printed through their printing arm, Createspace/KDP. Not sure if this worked the same for non print on demand books but if you printed through createspace you could set a higher list price and get royalties that were about 100% of the actual sale price.
No idea if the same mechanic is in play with the FBA rules but it seems very plausible to me that the largest impact is has is closing exploits like this.
That doesn't mean it doesn't also entrench market position, raise a few prices at the margin etc but it's very easy to miss the potential for gaming rules, legally, unless you're actively in the system. If an incentive is there the market incentive will be to use it.
It doesn’t. They’re sociopaths. They get to where they are because they’re willing to do things others are too nice to do. Otherwise they’re no better than many other talented business people.
> sued Amazon for prohibiting vendors that sold on its website from offering discounts outside of Amazon... to make sure that sellers can’t sell through a different store or even through their own site with a lower price...
First, this is not new. It's been stated policy for years.
Second, manufacturers get around it in a clever way. They always list their items on their own site at the same price as at Amazon... but then magically almost always seem to have a 20% or 25%-off sitewide coupon available, whether it's for first-time customers, or "spinning the wheel" that pops up, etc.
So I don't know how much this is really raising actual prices in the end.
Otherwise, I'm not sure how to feel about it, because pricing contracts are common on both ends. Manufacturers frequently only sell to retailers who promise they won't charge less than the MSRP, and large retailers similarly often require "most-favored-nation" pricing, so they can always claim they have the lowest prices. If you want to end these practices, then it's only fair to have a law prohibiting it across the board, rather than singling out Amazon.
I saw through the Amazon Prime scam about four years ago and canceled my membership. Counterfeit products, obviously returned/resold products, and failure to meet delivery date promises. And prices steadily rising.
I just go to Walmart now. And Walmart is no choir boy either but at least I can see what I'm buying.
The fact that California is pushing this gives me some hope.
Walmart and Pepsi engaged in a blatant decade-long price fixing scheme designed to raised prices and punish small local competitors and were sued for it by Lina Khan's FTC, but - surprise - the case was thrown out the minute Trump took office.
> Vendors, cowed 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 has been openly doing this for years. They scrape other competitor websites, even though it’s against their terms of service, and if you sell for less elsewhere they find out and punish you. It’s blatantly anti competitive.
I just don't believe this is the case. Bonta acknowledges in his press release that Amazon's prices intuitively seem to be cheap, and the concrete examples of alleged price fixing are all so redacted that it's impossible to process them. Like, this is the complete available text of example 2:
> Amazon, vendor [...] fixed prices on [...] This is also an example of Breaking the Price Match, but here, Amazon [...] The plan was memorialized in an email from [...] In other words [...] In response, Amazon insisted on [...] The plan was realized [...] The result of Amazon, [...] price fixing agreement was to increase the retail prices
I don't know how you could even understand what's being alleged without seeing the unredacted version.
Received several orders that were returned items, with broken open packaging and sometimes the item was something else entirely, purely put there for weight by whoever returned it.
When I went to return some things at a major Amazon distribution center, the return area was closed for the week for some sort of construction or renovation, with no indication of that anywhere on the site. The only messaging was a piece of paper in the window once you got there.
At another separate major distribution center, the return area was a small room with pieces of paper taped to a door with an arrow pointing to the Amazon lockers where the returns are accepted.
Orders are now often so delayed that it makes the Prime subscription pointless. Have had multiple orders over the past year that didn't ship for 3 or 4 days.
Amazon listings are almost half Sponsored listings now, and there are unrelated ads on the side of listings.
Half of the listings are some random made-up brand name, like XIJGNU, which is just a Chinese seller selling low-quality products, and when the reviews get bad enough, they re-list the product under another made-up brand name.
Fake reviews were already rampant before LLMs, but now reviews are effectively useless because they are so easy to fake.
1. Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering.
2. As of now the trial is not scheduled to begin until January 2027 (although the discussed injunction is meant to address that). I believe the length of time required to get a decision in court is the single biggest impediment to justice being served. It usually waters down the final judgment, makes costs prohibitive for plaintiffs, and allows perpetrators to continue benefiting from illegal behavior indefinitely. In some cases, the defendant can be elected President in the interim eliminating any chance of facing a court decision.
Amazon is not just a US company either.
They also have an ad business. You could rightfully argue that ad spend gets passed on to the consumer.
Though now that I write that, I wonder if Matt divided by the total number of North American households or the number of US ones.
EDIT: Amazon North American segment revenue divided by aggregate North American household count is roughly $2,300. But I’m guessing the real number is closer to Matt’s estimate as US households are wealthier and likely represent a disproportionate fraction of that revenue.
Is it? That’s by households, not individuals. Is it really crazy to imagine a household spending $200-300/month at Costco, Walmart, Whole Foods—or Amazon?
Frankly, I think a lot of people have lost perspective on just how rich the average American household is: Around $145k annual income.
Not shocking that Amazon is capturing 2% of that gross.
https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
http://www.sellersprite.com/en/blog/most-expensive-thing-on-...
It's insane that the landlord of the mall is also running the biggest store in the mall
It's led to this scheme, but also just the general enshittification of buying things online. You can never trust what you buy from Amazon because their "marketplace sellers" will send you a counterfeit, and it's hard to find some brand names because they don't want to be in that cesspool
As low rent and lowest common denominator as Walmart was in the 90s, at least I could go in and know that a) I probably was getting the lowest price on that Rubbermaid trash can b) it was legitimately a Rubbermaid trashcan and not someone who ripped off the molds, used plastic that was 50% as good, and sells it under the brand Xyxldk, and c) could reasonably expect to find that trashcan offered for sale in the first place
Why amazon sellers have not opened up a class action lawsuit is beyond me. This case, succeed or fail will surface enough documentation that they may find cause.
The fact that lawsuits are won by whoever has more money and time is so deeply problematic. I have no idea how you’d go about equalizing it. Spending limits with devastating consequences if it can be proven that you broke them?
It was effectively a way to get an excess commission out of amazon if you printed through their printing arm, Createspace/KDP. Not sure if this worked the same for non print on demand books but if you printed through createspace you could set a higher list price and get royalties that were about 100% of the actual sale price.
No idea if the same mechanic is in play with the FBA rules but it seems very plausible to me that the largest impact is has is closing exploits like this.
That doesn't mean it doesn't also entrench market position, raise a few prices at the margin etc but it's very easy to miss the potential for gaming rules, legally, unless you're actively in the system. If an incentive is there the market incentive will be to use it.
First, this is not new. It's been stated policy for years.
Second, manufacturers get around it in a clever way. They always list their items on their own site at the same price as at Amazon... but then magically almost always seem to have a 20% or 25%-off sitewide coupon available, whether it's for first-time customers, or "spinning the wheel" that pops up, etc.
So I don't know how much this is really raising actual prices in the end.
Otherwise, I'm not sure how to feel about it, because pricing contracts are common on both ends. Manufacturers frequently only sell to retailers who promise they won't charge less than the MSRP, and large retailers similarly often require "most-favored-nation" pricing, so they can always claim they have the lowest prices. If you want to end these practices, then it's only fair to have a law prohibiting it across the board, rather than singling out Amazon.
I just go to Walmart now. And Walmart is no choir boy either but at least I can see what I'm buying.
Walmart and Pepsi engaged in a blatant decade-long price fixing scheme designed to raised prices and punish small local competitors and were sued for it by Lina Khan's FTC, but - surprise - the case was thrown out the minute Trump took office.
A long read (which is actually a book review) about corrupt nations: https://archive.is/CBQFY
Amazon has been openly doing this for years. They scrape other competitor websites, even though it’s against their terms of service, and if you sell for less elsewhere they find out and punish you. It’s blatantly anti competitive.
https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/REDAC...
> Amazon, vendor [...] fixed prices on [...] This is also an example of Breaking the Price Match, but here, Amazon [...] The plan was memorialized in an email from [...] In other words [...] In response, Amazon insisted on [...] The plan was realized [...] The result of Amazon, [...] price fixing agreement was to increase the retail prices
I don't know how you could even understand what's being alleged without seeing the unredacted version.