- cross-posted to:
- PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- 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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So the fine for price fixing is $100M and Amazon is worth $2 trillion so that’s like 20,000x bigger than the fine. I think they will survive this one gang
Amazon NUTTED 🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤
oh I just cant wait for the highest profile minor slap on the wrist of the century!
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.
Dont worry guys well give one of the richest men in the world a 100k fine!
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
Its true, but perfect is the enemy of good. If 10,000 people quit using amazon right now, that’s a huge difference. And millions of people use it.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once all the competitors are gone, they will increase the prices to absurd, heartless levels
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.
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
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.
Yeah, IIRC when a bunch of large corporations got away with doing this in the 1980s and 90s, a lot of us just assumed it would keep happening. Some people have tried raising the alarm about this, but have been shouted down pretty consistently.
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?
But but but capitalism, free market, competition, etc. etc. etc …
This is why you shouldn’t buy US
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.
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.
Quickest solution? Stop buying from Amazon. I quit cold turkey and the sky does not fall. I still buy what I need. I am sometimes saved from buying stuff that I don’t really need but was easily available. Just stop buying from them. They are the evil capitalism that everyone complains about.
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
Astonishing what happens when people are paid what they’re worth
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
