This isn’t exactly where this belongs so feel free to delete this. I’m mildly infuriated there is no usable alternative to Amazon.com. I’m more than willing to buy products elsewhere, but it’s so easy to default to Amazon. Please help.
I’m more than willing to buy products elsewhere, but it’s so easy to default to Amazon.
One of the practices that the FTC sued Amazon over was their requirement that sellers list their lowest prices on Amazon and outsource fulfillment (and give up a huge cut) to Amazon in order to qualify for Prime and good search results.
The result is that even though most sellers can afford to sell on their own store and keep a larger percentage of the sales revenue, they’re not allowed to actually undercut Amazon’s prices. And so Amazon has shielded itself from price competition, despite engaging in pretty expensive practices (free 2 day shipping for most items and places, free 1-day or even same day shipping for some items in some places). And they did it with contracts instead of actually competing.
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
No.
Amazon is what it is because it creates an easier path for America to buy cheap, as Walmart and McDonald’s has done before to great microscopic economic success, due to the failures of our economic paradigm that shrinks wages and pushes manufacturing offshore for corporate profit.
We need higher wages, which create higher prices, which corrects for the misdeeds of our economic exploitation of foreign economies.
We have offloaded our economic burden onto other poorer nations, and that needs to stop. Pay a living wage and accept the higher cost at lower profits. Doing otherwise is an economic ouroboros that only swallows the easy part at the sake of the whole in the name of kicking an inflationary can down the road so that yachts can grow larger as the foundation of this country in undermined for icarian profits.
Fuck your CEO, pay us so they can pay us something and they can have less than everything, so they can keep from having nothing less than more than we can achieve through reluctant violence.
SouthEndSunset@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
I wish it’d had stayed in the USA, Amazon has upset economies in other countries too.
They’re also shit to work for.
The one I worked at I heard a spoiled rich manager laughing about how “Amazon wont pay a living wage due to its great relationship with the local community”.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
So, taken by a normal person, not aquainted with corpo speak… that is some astounding anti-logic.
But if you know a bit of corpo, what that actually means is something like:
We have the local city government by the balls, got them to subsidize our construction costs, relax zoning laws or fees, change tax laws or give us a special carve out so that we pay less than if anyone else tried to build a warehouse here…
… and now if the ciry gov goes for policies/laws we don’t like, we’ll just shut down this location, I’ll go work the same job somewhere else, everyone else is unemployed, and then we’ll tell the media that’s because of the city government.
Tetsuo@jlai.lu 4 weeks ago
Also Amazon EU I think is based in Ireland which is kind of a tax haven. We can’t even cooperate within the EU to prevent tax havens…
francisfordpoopola@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Climb down off of your soapbox. Amazon is what it is because of early strategic decision making and long term shittiness. I’m talking about aggregation and exposure to semi-local partners.
Poach@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Isn’t this what Etsy has tried to do? Miserably failed at it recently I think.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Wtf.