Technology

BREAKING NEWS!!

Evil company known for being evil is caught doing evil things!

👏🏻 We 👏🏻 demand 👏🏻 public 👏🏻 executions 👏🏻

Nothing will change until there's jail time for executives.

But but but capitalism, free market, competition, etc. etc. etc ...

New evidence shows Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products and making Amazon richer and richer

So, jail time it is for Jeff Bezos, right?

You can stop buying from Amazon whenever you choose to. There are online alternatives to every product they sell. You don't need to be part of it. Whatever excuse you give is wrong.

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.

I’ve pointed out Valve doing basically the same thing; games can’t be priced lower than Steam on competing game storefronts (not Steam key resellers), or Valve will threaten to delist your game. Which would be essentially kill it. And they obviously do this to protect their chunky store fee.

But personal loyalty goes a long way.

I’m trying to reframe the perspective here, not drag into an argument about Valve. A whole lot of people feel good about finding “deals” on Amazon, about Amazon services that have helped them, and especially about the value and convenience the whole platform provides. It’s easy for Lemmy to hate on Amazon, but for the average person, I think this is a harder sell than most of us realize. They’ll dismiss it as the “market working” or California sensationalism or, more likely, just filter it out as noise in their feed, just like most PC gamers would when they read something bad about Valve.

Busted? It's well know Amazon price fixes across the economy and forces sellers to charge for the product, plus the listing fees to get on the first two pages of searches , now creeping up to 40%.

All these comments reminded me why we got the personal responsibility to recycle plastic, and the corporations got more incentives to produce and consume plastic. All you tankies need to take responsibility for your voting habits and get out of poor people’s spending habits. You sound like the capitalists. Cut the avocado toast out and the world will change.