BeepAmazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products, making Amazon richer
db2Fucking bow down to your overlord, peasant.
You’re just jealous you’re not him.
What a weird fucking comment. Everyone on earth besides like 90 people are closer to poverty than to wealth
Fuck off class traitor
I think it was pretty obviously sarcasm
It was not. Poe’s Law.
They’re a complete stranger, and there are actual people who unironically say stuff like that, even on the Fediverse.
MelodiousFunkIt’s pretty obviously a troll account.
When you’re not sure check their overview. That one was obviously sarcasm.
Yourself though, you’re angry and reactionary so it tracks.
Their post history reveals them to be kind of a jerk. If it was an attempt at sarcasm it was a poor one.
yall are exhausting. Hate it or don’t but move on. Nobody wants to check post history
Poe’s law strikes again
Lol, these mods are a joke.
Bezos was a Senior VP by the age of 30, working for D.E. Shaw, and was a rumored heir for taking over the business after he retires. Bezos would have made billions and managed a major hedge fund. Set for life.
But that was not enough for him, he wanted hundreds of billions, so here we are. How perfectly healthy and in no way a mental illness.
I use Aliexpress over Amazon whenever possible.
It’s insane the amount of scams going on on Amazon.
First time using AliExpress I got scammed. I got a refund, at least, but I haven’t been back since.
I don’t know how AliExpress works internally. It was one of the apparently common scams where the seller pretends to ship a package to you. It’s scam #5 in this list: www.reddit.com/r/Aliexpress/s/YEqwsP1ef6
hmmm don’t know. I am sure there are scams out there, no doubt. But your situation is identical to a “lost in the mail” scenario.
My point is that if AliExpress made you whole, all you lost was time. It sucks but I would not considered myself to be scammed if at the end of the day I have my money back.
I don’t think I would trust Ali or Amazon (which I rather not use, period) with anything over $100 just in case anyway.
UlrichAmazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites
This is and has been part of Amazon’s contract to be listed on their site since the beginning. They are not even remotely the only one doing this. It’s an industry norm in digital storefronts. Valve has also been sued for this several times. I don’t know why we’re acting like this is a recent discovery.
We need to just ban this practice, because as long as they’re allowed to, they will.
Valve states you can’t sell a steam key in another platform for cheaper than in steam, not that you can’t sell your game anywhere else at a lower price. That’s slightly different than here. Not defending it just saying that it is actually different than here.
PikaI just want to add in that what Valve has as official policy and what they actually practice differ in this case. Because yes, their policy states it’s for keys only. However, they have admitted in court that if the publisher has it as a cheaper price elsewhere, they will delist your game
Source?
The Wolfire versus Valve antitrust case.
They submitted evidence of email chains from Valve customer support stating that they want Valve to have the best deal available and that they will not choose to do business with companies that do not give them the best deal.
On top of that, they also went on record stating that the steam product key page under the Steamworks area is meant to be intended for all products on Steam, not just keys.
It’s a textbook example of, hey look, this is our policy that’s written down, but we don’t actually follow it.
The, I’ll look it up
I have the docket link which is here but its a mess because the original case was dismissed back in 2021, but then amended and merged to contain a larger case.
I used to have the actual document number somewhere if i can find it I will let you know as well. Sadly when the case started getting media attention valve started filing for seal motions on newer evidence, but I don’t /think/ they retroactively sealed anything.
The case is well worth a read, the intent on it is of course valves potential monopoly on video game storefront but it goes into detail about other providers as well. It aims to focus on the valve 30% cut system they use and whether valve uses their market position to abuse or not. I don’t personally think they do, because I feel their choices are fair in a business mentality, but it’s cool reading about others POV’s on it.
There was a time when Amazon was not full of scummy rip-off products, when it was not playing games with prices, when it was not a cloud-computing powerhouse, and you know what happened?
That’s right, they crushed their adversaries (retail shopping) and earned billions in profits. They won.
But somehow that’s not enough winning, there isn’t enough winning until all the value has been vacuumed up from the world.
Bezos explicitly undercut the competition for years to drive all of the competition out of business. Amazon took as much time from 1997-2016 to make as much profit as they did in 2017, which is also (not) coincidentally when they hit peak market saturation and were able to start raising their prices.
So what you’re talking about was real, but it wasn’t like, “back when Amazon was good”, they were just preparing for what they are now. Having a huge monopoly on just about everything has always been their win condition, and they’re no where near done winning.
Yeah. It’s the same thing Uber did with pushing cab services out of business.
Not only that, but AWS is the real money maker for them. Not that retail and gaming and prime and whatever don’t also make boat loads of cash, but it doesn’t even graze AWS. The scale of these data centers is unreal and most of the internet runs on AWS.
I’m an industrial electrician with background on what they’re ordering and installing in terms of control panels and if you saw the weekly shipments it’d make you sick. And we’re only one supplier, they have others.
kescusayAnd that is why I no longer buy anything from them. I’m just embarrassed it took me as long as it did to realize what they were really doing.
The frustrating thing is we can’t boycott AWS since so many of the sites we use run on it. But yes, we absolutely shouldn’t buy things through Amazon or any of the other web stores Amazon owns.
we absolutely shouldn’t buy things through Amazon or any of the other web stores Amazon owns.
I try to use eBay as an alternative, though i find every 3-4 orders i place there, i get one in an Amazon box that by all rights appears to have been shipped by Amazon. I swear people are drop-shipping stuff from Amazon to their eBay buyers.
They are. If it has free returns and thousands of feedback it’s probably a drop shipper. Return it and use the eBay label it ends up costing them money.
They are doing exactly that for a sometimes hefty markup. I got something like that with a gift receipt, so ultra lazy, looked up the item and it was $11 cheaper. Like that totally defeats the purpose of going elsewhere.
I have often wondered whether targeted internet boycott days would shake up AWS, but I don’t know enough about their billing structure to run the numbers to see how much that would dig into AWS profits + how much of their income is flat subscription fees vs. billing on number of calls and haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet.
You would basically have to convince a few hundred million people to not use the internet for months at a time with out a single percentage of them breaking the boycott to actually even start to hit aws.
Frustrating, but I appreciate your answer; thank you.
The government, use the government. It’s our last chance to use the government to regulate corporations before they become the government
I am a big believer in regulation, and some governments right now are in a position where they can be pressured to take anti-monopoly action against Amazon, which I want very much to see. Being in the U.S. as I am right now, though… There are some state governments I would like to see act, but I am also brainstorming other nonviolent disruptive action which could be taken, because the federal government right now is actual fascists.
I was hoping last years shenanigans would have pushed Europe away from our tech companies. I don’t see much hope unless we can elect a new Congress that is willing to do Monopoly busting across the board.
ramassesYou can’t really compare online book retailer Amazon to global online marketplace Amazon. Your underlying point is still mostly correct, but I would exclude the years that they were primarily focused on books. From my lived memory they didn’t really become the online retail juggernaut until a few years after the launch of Prime. Free shipping turned them into what it is today. So maybe the best comparison would be from like 2006-2016? Or maybe I’m wrong and thebl distinction isn’t necessary. Idk. I’m just trying to foster conversation
waddle_deeYeah, I remember Amazon the book store. I still had my mom take me to the local bookstores, cause I knew them and the people, so I was comfortable lol. I remember when Prime launched. I don’t think anyone was expecting that, at the time. Free 2-day shipping on so many products was insane. And all for $89?/yr? Especially, when everywhere else online charged anywhere from $5-10. It was truly the Walmart of the online world. They ate shipping costs, which killed them, and put hurt their competition until AWS became such a powerhouse and they had a monopoly on online marketplaces.
That’s what’s crazy to me, they survived the dot com crash and were so diversified that I have no idea how they stayed afloat. I would think that all of the combined expenses across all of their ventures without a true cash cow would sink them. Instead they survived and became the trash heap of consumer rights violations that they are.
Prime launched after the dot com crash. The reason Amazon survived is because they WEREN’T running a dozen different ventures. They were an online bookstore and people kept buying books. Amazon benefited from the crash because that was when they started buying up servers to build AWS.
AKA the Walmart method.
Walmart didn’t even touch amazon on this. There were articles for years about how mind boggling (and the articles were praising, not even critical of) it was that amazon’s investors were content to let bezos run amazon on a net zero or even negative profit model. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of walmart not pulling a profit.
The other commenters here are right about Amazon’s initial methods, but I’m also going to highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification for a detailed explanation of how this happens (including a breakdown on Amazon specifically) and what to do about it.
To quote a favorite singer of mine,
You could fill a man with gold, and still have room for greed.
Fabric.com they did the same thing with.
Now you can’t buy fabric by the yard hardly anywhere.
Joanne’s file for bankruptcy Michael’s has it sometimes hobby lobby they’ll take your money and make sure you’re gay cousin can’t get married…
The mom and pop fabric stores are dead…
I guess we’ll owe nothing and be happy about it
I think you mean own nothing. Under capitalism you owe everything ;) just found the typo amusing
🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞i owe my soul to the company store
Oh wow. First I’ve heard of this.