Link: https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-exposes-amazon-price-fixing-scheme-driving-costs

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.

Bezos was a hedge fund manager. This should surprise nobody.

First time using AliExpress I got scammed. I got a refund, at least, but I haven't been back since.

I think it was pretty obviously sarcasm

how far the mighty have fallen to be compared unfavorably to aliexpress. sheesh.

Amazon 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.

how did you get scammed if you got a refund?

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.

I'm just gonna leave this here

Guess what there going to do to stop it.
Nothing.

When you're not sure check their overview. That one was obviously sarcasm.

Yourself though, you're angry and reactionary so it tracks.

I'm the same way I'll look up a product... When it's obviously an import.. I'll just go to AliExpress and get it there.

The time savings isn't worth the additional price imho

Fabric.com they did the same thing with.

Now you can't buy fabric by the yard hardly anywhere.

Joanne's filed for bankruptcy and then closed, 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 own nothing and be happy about it

Edit. Damn you autocorrect!
Edit2. Clarity

Poe's law strikes again

In the game, you have to improve your properties to charge more rent. In reality, the monopoly can reduce quality and raise price at the same time.

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.

I think you mean own nothing. Under capitalism you owe everything ;) just found the typo amusing

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.

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.

The fucking TikTok shop is better

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.

And 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.

Ehhh not really. They operated at massive losses for a decade or more to eliminate the competition while growing their customer base. This is simply stage 1 of enshittification. You can only do this if you're unbelievably filthy fucking rich. Then at some point they needed to cash out on all the good will and reputation they developed and that brings us to the shithole economy of today where people are simply too lazy to shop anywhere else.

LOL WTF are you talking about!? Virtually everything on AliExpress is a scam.

E: God damn tankies at it again

You 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 the distinction isn't necessary. Idk. I'm just trying to foster conversation

Wait, is Jee how the kids spell it these days?

Seems to me like over half the crap on Amazon is just drop shipped AliExpress junk anyway. Why not cut out the middle asshole?

Oh wow. First I've heard of this.

Hold up everyone. Think of the shareholders.

Considering the origin is "Jesus", "Jee" is technically closer spelling than "Gee". Not that I have a dog in this race.

Do you think AliExpress is manufacturing all that shit? It's a digital storefront (middle asshole), just like Amazon. Difference is Amazon will refund just about anything with no questions asked. And actually attempts to crack down on straight scams. Ali will just tell you "better luck next time". Not to mention that they blocked my VPN so I couldn't buy from them if I wanted to.

You have to do way more marketing since you can't rely on search result hits, right?

It would be cool if there were a business fediverse type deal where searching worked across all the small business federated web sites. Such a network should putposely exclude or kick out (politely and with a celebration) anyone that got too large, to maintain a small business focus to basically give the little guys a leg up.

It would be like a fediverse small bis cooperative kinda thing. That way there would be a search box for products and services that everyone could use to search the entire small bis network. And this would bypass monopolies like Google or Amazon.

#NoShit

i owe my soul to the company store

This is OK because our Leaders are Looking out For the COMMON man! That's why I'm going to ENTHUSIASTICALLY Vote for the Billionaire AGAIN!

In the game, even if you've built yourself up, an unlucky roll can still lose you the game. As opposed to real life, where the government decides you're too big to fail.

It's easy to crush the competition when you purposely take a loss as an investment in future market share.

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.

I 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

The appeal of Amazon is the things that surround the store.

When I buy from a random website it often takes weeks to ship, costs more to ship, makes me deal with CC fraud if something is untoward, fights me on returns and I usually have to pay to ship back etc etc.

Amazon is bad for a number of reasons but the main driver for me is not the choice of things on there, it's everything else.

Yeah it’s cutting out one of the middle assholes so it’s one instead of two. From the stuff I get recommended on Amazon it’s pretty clear they don’t care about false advertising either. Cant help you with your vpn problem though

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.

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.

It's not cutting out anyone, it's just a different middle asshole.