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Posted by toomuchtodo 5 hours ago

Amazon accused of widespread scheme to inflate prices across the economy(www.thebignewsletter.com)
244 points | 77 commentspage 2
chuckadams 4 hours ago|
Amazon better watch their step or they might get fined a single-digit percentage of the profits they made off this scheme. That'll show 'em.
cyanydeez 4 hours ago|
[flagged]
dmbche 3 hours ago||
Markov chain?
freakynit 4 hours ago||
At what levels does greed of people like Bezos, Elon, Gates or Larry comes to a halt?
aschla 3 hours ago||
When the average person stops spending money in ways that enrich them.
chii 3 hours ago|||
Why should the desire to own more and more of the world ever come to a halt?
SilverElfin 4 hours ago||
It doesn’t. They’re sociopaths. They get to where they are because they’re willing to do things others are too nice to do. Otherwise they’re no better than many other talented business people.
toomuchtodo 5 hours ago||
https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/REDAC...

paxys 3 hours ago||
The fact that California is pushing this gives me some hope.

Walmart and Pepsi engaged in a blatant decade-long price fixing scheme designed to raised prices and punish small local competitors and were sued for it by Lina Khan's FTC, but - surprise - the case was thrown out the minute Trump took office.

burnt-resistor 4 hours ago||
Oligopoly gonna ...
jackblemming 4 hours ago||
Enough is enough. Executives need to do jail time, no bullshit slap on the wrist nonsense.
netsharc 4 hours ago|
[flagged]
SilverElfin 4 hours ago||
> Vendors, cowed 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 has been openly doing this for years. They scrape other competitor websites, even though it’s against their terms of service, and if you sell for less elsewhere they find out and punish you. It’s blatantly anti competitive.

Groxx 2 hours ago||
tbh I thought it was explicitly stated somewhere. literally every seller I've talked to has mentioned it at some point.
freakynit 4 hours ago||
This process can actually be exploited to work against amazon itself.
SilverElfin 52 minutes ago|||
How? It seems constructed so that despite the high costs of doing business on Amazon (seller fees), you have to not charge more there. If you raise prices everywhere, your sales elsewhere drop. What’s the loophole?
2OEH8eoCRo0 3 hours ago|||
How?
freakynit 2 hours ago||
By giving their scrapers false signals using dummy ecomemrce stores with artificial/dummy prices. If done constantly, it might render their scrapers useless or less reliable for buy-box algorithms.
SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago||
I just don't believe this is the case. Bonta acknowledges in his press release that Amazon's prices intuitively seem to be cheap, and the concrete examples of alleged price fixing are all so redacted that it's impossible to process them. Like, this is the complete available text of example 2:

> Amazon, vendor [...] fixed prices on [...] This is also an example of Breaking the Price Match, but here, Amazon [...] The plan was memorialized in an email from [...] In other words [...] In response, Amazon insisted on [...] The plan was realized [...] The result of Amazon, [...] price fixing agreement was to increase the retail prices

I don't know how you could even understand what's being alleged without seeing the unredacted version.

black_13 3 hours ago||
[dead]
maerF0x0 3 hours ago|
Once upon a time Amazon would pressure book sellers to sell for _less_... now they're actually causing prices to go up... Sad fall from grace.