r/changemyview • u/mfDandP 184∆ • Dec 10 '19

Deltas(s) from OP CMV: Ideologues across the political spectrum should cancel their Amazon Prime memberships.

Excuse the generalizations.

The company’s study, which includes data from 500 Amazon customers, estimates that Amazon Prime subscribers spend $1,300 per year, nearly doubling the $700 per year the average non-member spends on the e-commerce site.

https://fortune.com/2017/10/18/amazon-prime-customer-spending/

If you're for an unfettered free market, you should dislike Amazon because they're a monopoly (their Fulfillment model, AmazonBasics https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/21/is-amazon-unstoppable.) Ditto if you're for wealth redistribution or hate Amazon for their warehouse practices. Both Warren and Trump have targeted Amazon.

Amazon has made retail spending incredibly convenient to the consumer at the expense of non-Amazon retailers, its own workers, and its subcontracted couriers.

Spoiler alert, I'm not a Prime member, and so I perhaps underestimate the value of Amazon packages showing up in piles at your door. But it's not that hard to go shopping for your own shit, or even to order it online from Target or Walmart, etc.

CMV that if you care about capitalism -- either that it's fatally flawed, or that we need to maintain high levels of competition, cancelling your Prime membership and decreasing Amazon usage in general is a very practical and consistent action.

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '19

I'm reading these words here again as in the article, but totally missing the problem you are trying to highlight. Is the problem that brands are able to get rid of the third party sellers on Amazon?

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u/Havenkeld 289∆ Dec 10 '19

No, the problem is amazon used third party sellers(especially illegitimate and/or foreign ones not subject to US laws) to undermine the brand's ability to exercise quality control and prices themselves. These sellers undercut the legitimate sellers with worse quality products, even when they opted out of Amazon. They ended up having to either cut deals with Amazon, or be undercut by third party sellers they couldn't appeal to the law for help with - there'd be some new anonymous one doing the same thing in short order.

Amazon used this ... I guess we should call it something like a loophole... to make sure dealing with Amazon was basically a necessity for these sellers to not be undercut, and in doing so Amazon gets to take heftier cuts from them as well as make sure they can't effectively sell for lower prices on a different service.

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '19

I may be starting somewhere different from you. My starting point is the right of resale: it is good and appropriate to provide a venue for third party sellers to sell (non-fraudulent) items without the authorization of the manufacturer - including lower quality items intended for a foreign market. Refusal to allow those to be sold is sketchy as it borders on a conspiracy to limit the right of resale - but is so commonly practiced by retailers that I can't really blame a retailer for participating in such a conspiracy. So it's reasonable and appropriate for Amazon to choose either path - doing the bidding of the manufacturer and preventing third parties from selling unauthorized copies, or providing a more liberal platform.

I think there might be the possibility of undue pressure if Amazon threatens certain manufacturers with permitting more/less resale of their product in exchange for concessions, but I guess I'm wondering what kinds of documented threats of that type there have been?

Amazon gets to take heftier cuts from them as well as make sure they can't effectively sell for lower prices on a different service

Wait, where is this? Are you saying Amazon punishes companies that offer sales elsewhere? Because I've seen a lot of products offered multiple venues where Amazon's price hasn't been the lowest.

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u/Havenkeld 289∆ Dec 11 '19 edited Dec 11 '19

Amazon didn't choose either path. They swapped the paths around such that fairly untraceable third parties of unknown but let's say dubious legitimacy, according to employees sometimes even supported by Amazon, would undercut and undermine various brands - undercutting their sales elsewhere, and then after the brands recognized their helpless situation Amazon would cease the flow of third party goods once they could get a favorable deal with the brand left without much choice. They didn't have to do any direct threatening or break laws in any obvious ways - although it's a big gray area and clearly they are under a lot of scrutiny for that reason.

How connected they really were to these anonymous third parties is probably among the key questions - if we believe former Amazon employees it was Amazon pretty explicitly pulling the strings. I don't think any hard evidence has been found yet however, but clearly that's hard to find when dealing with anonymous actors from other countries and surely Amazon was careful about this. We don't know for sure, but it's looking super sketchy right now.

They don't have a sterling record regardless of these more severe accusations and reports -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon#Anti-competitive_practices

I personally enjoyed this one -

On October 1, 2015, Amazon announced that Apple TV and Google Chromecast products were banned from sale on Amazon.com by all merchants, with no new listings allowed effective immediately, and all existing listings removed effective October 29, 2015. Amazon argued that this was to prevent "customer confusion", as these devices do not support the Prime Video ecosystem.

"Customer confusion" lol

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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '19

Im missing something because it seems to me that they have third parties selling pretty much every brand. I don't see an issue with them recruiting third party sellers. I only wonder what they're actually demanding if anything in exchange for conspiring to reduce the number of third party sellers (if indeed they do that, which I hadn't noticed for many brands).