My family had a small manufacturing business that went bankrupt years ago. At one point we were making a part that ultimately ended up on a WM product. Periodically WM's folks would come around and do a strong arm routine trying to renegotiate the contract. It got bad enough my dad adopted the habit of bringing a couple of the very burly folks that worked in the fabrication shop to sit in on meetings and reduce the intimidation BS.
They are a ruthlessly scummy business and have been for a very long time.
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0143038788
It's worth reading.
"Make it cheaper or we'll make it cheaper for you."
I often keep an eye on the product number if I'm every buying electronics or tools at a big box store to see if it's different than what I find online for what is ostensibly the same exact product, as that can be an indication that you're buying a cheapened version.
I sympathize however. Strong Arming small and middle sized businesses, which are the bedrock of American Capitalist Power is just egregiously scummy. This is also what I think is currently gone wrong with the American Capitalism, but thats another comment, somewhere, sometime I guess :)
Here are stand out ones from the article. For just small business alone. I actually thought middle size business would have had figures like this.
* Small businesses create 75 percent of the net new jobs in our economy. * Small businesses pay more than 44 percent of the nation's private payroll. * More than 50 percent of the U.S. private gross domestic product is generated by small businesses. * Almost 97 percent of exporters are small businesses.
Take Books and Ebooks for a good example.
Regarding the major book selling firms, Amazon are the good guys because a relatively few book firms control the market. Amazon is helping to improve the customer experience by lowering the price of books.
they're replacing an oligopoly that is exploiting their customers with a monopoly though.
amazon hasn't really started exploiting its monopoly status yet (to my knowledge) toward the consumers, but a lot of authors have already started to complain about it.
The best managers there are the ones who largely disregard the incentives placed before them and respect the complexities of working at such a large scale. It sounds like the people who would show up at your dad's were enabled by management who cared more about bottom line sales than understanding how to appropriately treat a supplier with limited volume.
I'm sorry this was the experience you had, but there are just as many talented, respectful, and generally honorable people that work there and I wouldn't want them to get lumped in with the scum. (Source, have worked at WM home office)
Wal-Mart is pretty infamous for squeezing suppliers & vendors on price and operating procedures. Hard.
I think it is funny that the people demand the government force companies to lower prices caused by the government granting a monopoly to said companies why way of the patent system....
How about we just end patents.
Second, the real danger in both cases (though people only see it in one, hence my point) is that you're killing off the OEMs this way. No one wants to bring innovative new products to market if some monopsonist will just force them down to the mandated n% profits.
1) Walmart doesn't pass savings to consumers, it passes them to shareholders, as they have a fiduciary obligation to do. The "lower prices" thing is just marketing; WM's prices aren't particularly low once they've driven away their competition.
2) If drug companies want to charge a R&D premium for bleeding-edge innovative products, that's fine. What's not fine is price gouging consumers for drugs they depend on to live, that are not innovative in 2017, and that are cheaply available in other countries, like the EpiPen.
Which it does, so it is a completely valid option.
There is absolutely nothing forcing them to pick any particular use for the money. Both uses benefit the company in some way. Both uses are fine. It's not like they're burning it.
>There is absolutely nothing forcing them to pick any particular use for the money.
Except this legal precedent right here:
It works hard to lower supplier and employee costs not to benefit consumers but to prop up their own margins.
That's what Trump should tackle if he wants to stop job migration, but it seems like he's focused on anything but regulating BigCos.
Back when Barnes and Noble was the big book store, same thing, they pressured better prices. What do you do, split up the book store into two companies, who still control the same market share and will both still put pressure on the book companies?
Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle prices, because it's considerably cheaper to sell a 12 meg file than a 200 page physical book. Which I agree with publishers, only benefits Amazon and not entirely fair, but for the most part, not much ahs changed, most kindle copies are MAYBE a dollar less.
In Germany, book prices are regulated: the printer sets the price, and the price the customer pays must be this price. Only exception are damaged (e.g. books with CD-ROM, but the CD is missing) or used books.
The prices the retailers have to pay at the printer are of course different and may well be based on the # of books the retailer has purchased, but the system right now successfully prevents price wars. And yes, I am happy with that, because it ensures that authors get proper funding instead of having to fight for the scraps.
> Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle prices, because it's considerably cheaper to sell a 12 meg file than a 200 page physical book
The printing and distribution costs of a book are not that high, once you have a significant enough mass of books. What Amazon wants to do here is squeeze the authors off their profit, and this must be prevented.
Books are culture, and culture must not be bowing to the demands of predatory capitalism or else we'll sooner or later live in a Idiocracy world with a movie called "*ss" the sole Oscar winner... (okay, that was an exaggeration, but still, it's a danger to culture!)
This is already becoming reality as the internet has made traditional copyright completely unenforceable on the general population. For example, Adobe no longer sells Photoshop as a standalone unit, but as an ongoing subscription, which gives the impression that the vendor is an active participant in usage.
I mean that culture prospers more by allowing people to create and publish whatever iteration, derivation, or alteration they want than by ensuring a small group of well-moneyed "idea owners" can utilize the force of the state to monopolize significant cultural icons and stop people from going "too far" in their cultural iterations (that is, too likely to win the favor of the public as compared to the "owner's" offering; being too desirable and competitive).
The viability of establishing a revenue stream from this cultural lather is separate from the value or existence of a fertile culture itself. Creation will always occur. Copyright is just a matter of how far those creations are allowed to grow and/or spread before they get crushed by someone else's bank account (which can have chilling effects on the back-end, preventing the incubation of certain ideas due to uncomfortable legal risk, but it won't stop the ideas from germinating).
Culture is in a bad state when disseminating the wrong ideas in the wrong medium can result in the complete forfeiture of all earthly freedoms. If you sell T-shirts bearing Mickey Mouse's image without the permission of the "owner" of that cultural icon, you may very well find yourself not only deprived of your possessions through a costly legal battle (which you have lost before you begin), but potentially also deprived of your liberty when you're jailed for criminal copyright infringement. All because our concern for an active "culture" somehow translates into preventing derivatives, iterations, or improvements, blocking normal feedback and optimization processes and hopelessly distorting the market.
Fanfic authors have been sued for getting too close to the "owner's" trademarks. It's an entirely unnatural state of affairs and it stifles our cultural maturity.
Personally, I would suggest that people stop expecting passive IP-based revenue streams to cover them, because I don't think there is a lot of money in that down the road (because the internet makes it impossible to practically enforce copyright). You'll have to create a need for an ongoing service, paid for in small units, to get people to part with their money. Software vendors like Adobe have already accepted this.
Same is similarly true for ebook distribution. It isn't like the infrastructure to do that at scale is free, either. Both in technical of copying the bits around, and in the physical of authors/editors/etc.
However, I fail to see any way in which the advantages do not weigh in on the ebook side heavily.
Authors typically get a 10-15% cut of print books. Amazon wants to squeeze the publishers off their profit. While they can be heavy-handed and exploitative, they are much less so than traditional publishing. It's not abnormal for an author to make more money of a $9.99 kindle sale than a $25 print sale.
My Raptor romance novel should not be 'regulated'.
I'm a strong proponent of open <EVERYTHING>. If shady behavior arises in business, government, public services, and even public discourse, I'd love to see a moderated form of public disclosure become the standard way to reveal and address such 'discrepancies'. Now that the 'net is ubiquitous, I don't see why age-old small town arbitration principles can't be applied to redress virtually all forms of grievance, as long as the public exchange is conducted decorously, as a judge or strict moderator rules could ensure.
IMO, the state of AI is getting pretty close to enabling this sort of moderator service, making it impossible for 'conduct unbecoming' to persist out of the public eye. What cellphone videos are doing to police/perp misbehavior ought to be possible for general business practices too.
The problem is, there is no such thing as a moderated public exchange. Everything can be bought off, be it a journalist, a policeman or a judge. Mass media outside of countries with well-funded public media stations (think BBC or the German TV/radio stations) is always aligned to corporate interest, not to public/journalistic interest. And for what it's worth, state-funded journalism is often enough also subject to meddling by politicians.
> IMO, the state of AI is getting pretty close to enabling this sort of moderator service
lol even Facebook's content AI, which may very well be the strongest in moderating (Google's strength is lying more in content comprehension!) is not able to distinguish between an iconic Vietnam picture and child porn or remotely good at detecting propaganda. I certainly would not want the Facebook AI as a political moderator.
A lot of conduct unbecoming like this becomes public (Intel is a good example). How many people stopped buying their products even with literal judges finding them guilty of some particularly nasty anti-competitive practices?
Indeed. If people could get cheaper clothing if slavery was made legal again, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Witness to a lesser extent the general sentiment on HN that Uber is "helping drivers", when they're indentured servants.
I wouldn't call it consumer excess when you're exploiting someone with limited options.
However, like other credit agencies, it isn't infallible and is only as good as the information it is able to gather through information sharing agreements. They have also branched into the "Improve/Monitor your D&B score" business which is pretty shady. [2]
[Edit: We also have vendors require references if we are looking to establish a line of credit. We also provide references saying how much credit they have and how often they pay on time. It is a manual process.]
[1] http://www.dnb.com/ [2] https://www.dandb.com/ (See, their credit services are totally different! They use "and" instead of "&"!)
Of course investors and larger institutions use Standard & Poors and Moody's to provide credit ratings and background histories on public companies and their stocks and bonds.
What's distinctive here, I guess, is that Walmart has the weight to get that info and then start making demands instead of just deciding whether to trust the partner.
In 2002, Walmart did more business than its next 6 grocery and general-good competitors combined. Something like that is presumably still true if you restrict to brick-and-mortar spending. If you sell something mass-market (e.g. pickles), a huge portion of all shopping happens at Walmart - you can get beaten by a competitor just for not playing ball with one retailer. Similarly, struggling companies can be saved by Walmart (e.g. Levis), but only if they concede to whatever Walmart demands.
I'm not going to take the anti-capitalist tack, here. When Walmart tells Levis to fix their supply chain and introduce products at a lower price point, that's how markets should work. They demanded reform, and that's what saved Levis - they might not even have needed to sell at Walmart if those changes had come sooner.
But the larger pattern is troubling. Walmart has so much power over smaller suppliers that it's like informal ownership - they're vertically integrating with none of the legal conditions or risk. And that helps them drive pretty serious ethical issues without ever taking direct action. Everything from monopoly creation to violation of labor laws to environmental devastation (mostly overseas) stems from Walmart's pricing demands.
They may not ask for anything unethical, but asking for a 5% price cut every year means something has to give. With such enormous legislative influence, they can bend laws and trade agreements to favor their model. With the freedom to change suppliers and limited legal accountability for their suppliers' actions, they can work with whoever's willing to behave worst, and give them a market that cripples everyone better behaved. So you don't have to sell for Walmart, but in a lot of industries you can expect to suffer for those scruples.
And if you're creating a valuable product at a good price, then you have leverage over Walmart. If you're selling a commodity, then be prepared to get squeezed. That's how it should work.
That goes against our entire economic system. We'd still be driving shitty expensive cars if that were true.
Not sure if this is the case with Snapper (article doesn't say), but that's typically how they get back into the stores.
1) Walmart may be the biggest retailer in the US, but they don't have half of the US homes as subscribers. Amazon Prime does. I doubt Walmart.com attracts any where near as many e-tail visitors as Amazon, and I suspect the gap is widening.
2) Amazon is decades ahead of Walmart in the online shopper experience. I grit my teeth each time I visit Walmart's website. It's slow and ugly and very clumsy to navigate or search. And it hasn't gotten better after years of this.
3) Walmart's products are mostly middle-to-down-market, even online, and that doesn't seem to have changed all that much even as they've grown their e-tail efforts. Try buying a nice watch or high-end stereo equipment there. No such ceiling applies to Amazon, probably because Amazon welcomes re-sellers (which can span all market niches), while Walmart doesn't.
So I think Walmart has a long way to go to compete equally with Amazon, and isn't a comparable threat as an all 'round monopoly.
And personally, I don't hate Amazon enough to object to a monopoly threat from them the way I do Walmart. I think ill-will does matter when it comes to federal action on anti-competition. If Microsoft were as despised as AT&T was in 1984, they would be in pieces today.
Ha- as it happens I just bought a nice watch, today, and after perusing the options on Amazon I found the same watch I was about to buy direct from the retailer. However after considering the number of knock-off items I've received from Amazon, I simply refused to trust that the watch was authentic, and ended up paying more for the peace of mind that I got from buying it direct from the manufacturer.
Amazon's lack of quality control makes it impossible to trust them for expensive items that can be knocked off. It's funny that you say that Wal-Mart is middle-to-down market, because Amazon is where I buy my household staples and some consumer electronic items and cheap crap that I'm not overly concerned with the quality. Clothing, watches- pretty much anything of quality I look elsewhere.
That said, I do buy clothing from Zappos, and I think Wal-Mart made a smart move to acquire Bonobos to make a serious move into high-end apparel.
Yes but I'm quite sure when I order something from walmart I'm getting the genuine article, not a knockoff dumped into the SKU bin by some shitty counterfitter
This is false, You can sell things on walmart.com as a reseller
https://marketplace.walmart.com/
There are not many resellers doing it, no where near as many as Amazon but many large online shops are embracing the Amazon Model, Newegg does it now, Walmart, and a few others.
Amazon is also getting more aggressive with their resellers, putting in more restrictions, heavily favoring the Fulfilled by program where Amazon gets a larger cut, increase the number of blackout catagories, and increasing the number of items sold by Amazon directly which puts huge pricing pressure on Resellers that can not get the pricing amazon can.
Several Niche and some larger brand have pulled out of Amazon completely in the last couple of years for these (and the counterfeiting problem) issues
http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56abe654c08a80431d8...
Hasn't the same thing been said about Walmart?
To wax metaphorical, I'd rather the monsters devour each other while we race for a super-weapon to defeat all monsters and protect real people.
This situation where corporations are effectively replacing the state is not exactly what I had in mind when I said the world would be a better place with a diminished role of the State in individual life.
And I think it would be very difficult for a company to offer the level of convenience and good UX that Amazon does at a much smaller scale. For example, part of why they can get very fast shipping down to a reasonable price is their huge network of distribution centers + their size giving them leverage in negotiations with UPS/Fedex/et al.
If you split Amazon into a dozen smaller companies, the overall customer experience would likely be worse.
I completely agree with it.
My hometown's retail business all goes to the Walmart super store on the outskirts of town. It's weird to be living in a Bruce Springsteen song.
Could say the same thing about WalMart w/r/t local retail in rural America and now cities for the past 40 or so years...
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_...
It's not limited to warehouse workers, either. In 2015 Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld of the New York times published an expose of the hard-charging environment at Amazon, with stories about employees reduced to tears at their desks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
That was so untrue, that Jeff Bezos felt the need to send out a memo stating how much he has never seen that side of Amazon, which, as CEO, of course he's never been mistreated by middle management.
I'm also a mod at /r/cscareerquestions, Amazonians would chime in back when this was big news, but the vast majority were always like "yeah it exists but not my team".
Thank you.
Please do demonstrate how it is absurd.
this should be enough
> devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year.
Luddites repeat: automation, price reduction and job shifting isn't bad for the economy and it isn't worse either
> It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans.
Completely unsubstantiated. Surely it's one of the larger employees, but compared to automotive there are few satellites that lives because of the induced workload - if Ford closes, all subsidiaries and most vendor will close with it; if Amazon closes, the impact will be more limited.
> Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this
This is incredibly short sighted, since those were written at Rockefeller peak. Entities larger than this and more looming where at the order of the day, while Amazon has a load competitors and alternatives to fend off.
> the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business...
This political climate endured for most USA history, with shortly timed bouts into centrism, hardly something current, hardly something that slowed down the USA economic growth. cfr - Europe.
> I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors.
That's ok tho, as in not a bad thing
All in all the whole claim is conflated hyperbole that's filtered by an unhistorical view of the current situation
You haven't proven that. And its entirely possible that it's not worse for the economy in general, but it's quite awful for segments of it. And given the current attitude toward the safety net in the US, once those jobs are gone, that's it for those people.
I wish this would see wider acknowledgement.
Lump of Labor is a fallacy, people do find new jobs, and productivity does improve the economy. But none of that implies that the displaced people will be better off in the end!
Similarly, free trade agreements are economically efficient, and boost per-capita GDP. But even aside from implementation issues (i.e. agreements that go far beyond lowering tariffs), there's no particular reason that the extra money ends up benefiting the same people who get hit by outsourcing.
If anything, the studies I've seen say that being displaced by automation or outsourcing causes a permanent wage decline. The original Luddites were right - they probably saw lower wages for their entire lives thanks to automation.
Pretending that overall growth inherently means an economy which works better for the majority of people is frankly dishonest, especially (as you say) in a country so opposed to helping the displaced.
I think that's awful. You think you should have to fight and use substantial resources to have a say in how your life is lived. I do not share this belief.
But it's worth pulling at one string of your argument. Work is effectively mandatory for US citizens. You cannot handle any health crisis, or even eat and drink reliably, if you do not work. There is no notion of job retraining or security, and over half the citizens of the US make so little money that they effectively get subsidies from the government and don't pay taxes.
Removing these people's livelihoods without any opportunity for retraining is effectively ruining their lives. Automation threatens to do this without sharing the returns on automation with the work force it's displacing. That is an unacceptable outcome.
nope, but I see that's not stopping you to go ahead and make up things about me just to hijack a high post for your tirade about social security, to which I agree in principle, but furthers nothing the argument at hand
But secondary effects of lost sales from vendors would almost certainly upend the vendor table and make goods very difficult to get ahold of. Amazon as a delivery service (and its smile boxes, ads for its own products on said boxes, and specialized delivery frameworks) is as much of an American institution as the post office now, and growing as it takes over its own delivery and logistics.
But accounts for less than 5% of retail sales overall. Until they start hitting a bigger chunk of total sales, I would not consider them too big to fall. Walmart is too big to fall, as it litterally controls a bunch of local economies. If Amazon closed tomorrow, there would be a shitty time in Seattle, but people would just go to Ebay, Walmart, Etsy, and Alibaba.
If WalMart closed tomorrow, a good chunk of the southern states would run into a state of emergency because the unemployment rate would skyrocket, and there would be no companies to pick up the slack locally, so local economies all across the US would crash.
Many towns would lack groceries or supplies because WalMart is all they have after WalMart ran everyone else out of business. How many businesses has Amazon shut down across the entire US?
Amazon may end up like Uber: forcing competitors to upgrade their technology, but not succeeding in stamping the competitors out entirely.
Maybe that should change. But... even if we take it at face value...
Name a company in the world that is competing at scale and cost with AWS.
In the US, Amazon is definitely nowhere near suffering a loss of customers from Google and Microsoft's offerings. and they're securing massive contracts with key institutions in the US.
There's 1 in China, I guess. That market isn't freely accessible.
Cloud services providers are a New Thing but a Thing which is absolutely critical to the world market. It's utterly unregulated right now, and that's pretty crazy given how much power it has. The only thing holding AWS rates in check is the threat of competition from 2 other American companies, and the hope of securing more critical telcom and bank contracts.
And beyond that, in terms of "simple VPS's" there are a TON of competitors and some of them are already starting to move "up the stack" by adding new features and services like object storage.
That's not to say that AWS isn't fairly dominant at the moment, but there is enough competition to keep them honest. See, for example, how they've had to continue to lower prices on a regular basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_...
Azure has more locations, and is better than AWS is several areas.
What Azure and GCE both have over AWS is better performance and better cost. AWS on the other hand has more services that just work together. So you either choose ease of integration or better performance. My company chose ease of integration.
Example, Amazon owns its CDN, Amazon owns all its services. Everything is in house, developed to work together, and just works out of the box, and you are dependent only on AWS.
Azure CDN uses Akamai. So it's not entirely in house designed and built. So we are now reliant on two companies working smoothly together rather than just one keeping it together. Not a huge issue, but something my company also had to factor in on reliablity.
Same with SLA. AWS has a better up time than Azure and GCE.
Again, not to say these services are inferior, but to say Azure is a better service is a lie. Does it have better performance on networking and HDD side? Yes, but I will take slower performance over a better up time, every time.
You shouldn't ding me on voicing a clearly labeled opinion as an opinion.
> but to say Azure is a better service is a lie.
Like you did here. This is ridiculous. You have your value judgement, I have mine. They're different.
That's not necessarily true: https://www.theinformation.com/how-aws-stacks-up-against-riv...
what is unreasonable about this? do you trust amazon?
Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year.
But I suppose two battling monsters beat one rampaging monster, at least.
Explain how this is wrong.
On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this and the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business... I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors.