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Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by fergie on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @02:10AM (#16534783)
> Amazon has a serious problem with counterfeit goods

Or you could say that Amazon is highlighting the comparative lack of quality of branded goods. A Lacoste shirt is so easy to replicate at a fraction of the cost, that Amazon, by its very nature undermines the entire rationale for buying Lacoste.

Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by oldcynic on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @03:09AM (#16535001)
Or quite the reverse, such as the last set of "Panasonic" batteries I bought off Amazon. After about 3 months all 12 had leaked and were dead. I'm damn sure they were not Panasonic. The reputation damage was to amazon, not Panasonic, and I resolved not to buy batteries from Amazon ever again.

No doubt a fake Lacoste would disintegrate in a fraction of the time of a genuine shirt.

Know what's ridiculous? I trust Poundland more than I trust Amazon to supply genuine goods.

Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by pbasista on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @03:45AM (#16535119)
> No doubt a fake Lacoste would disintegrate in a fraction of the time of a genuine shirt.

Such a statement has no grounds to stand on. There are non-genuine items which are of the same or better quality than the genuine ones. You cannot just put them all in one bin.

Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by oldcynic on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @03:57AM (#16535153)
> You cannot just put them all in one bin.

Amazon do, that's the problem.

As you provide no citations either, your assertion seems to have no more grounds. The chances of counterfeit being better quality are so vanishingly rare as to be headline worthy.

Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by barry-cotter on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @05:31AM (#16535491)
On fakes being of high quality I imagine it varies by market and supplier. If real Calvin Klein underwear is better than the thirty I got in Thailand four years ago it’s made of angel feathers and adamantium.
Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by scottlegrand2 on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @09:24AM (#16536508)
One of my in-laws more or less pioneered the entire clothing manufacturing industry in Southeast Asia. Watching him and his wife tear apart garments by looking at the stitches and feeling the fabric is incredibly entertaining. It's on par with the way I tear apart other people's code on GPUs. 10,000+ hours doing anything gives one some serious skill.

I've even used their expertise as evidence that AI and machine learning could do the same if we only knew how to train it. They've written several books on the subject and they are recognized authorities in Asia.

Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by sten on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @10:35AM (#16537054)
Can you PM me the names of the books. My wife does a lot of that stuff and she'd either be very interested or insulted that I gave her more work to look at.
Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by scottlegrand2 on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @01:24PM (#16538530)
Look up Conway Liu with "garment" and that ought to get you the information you need. I do not appear to have the karma to PM yet.
Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by baybal2 on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @02:50AM (#16534934)
>Or you could say that Amazon is highlighting the comparative lack of quality of branded goods. A Lacoste shirt is so easy to replicate at a fraction of the cost, that Amazon, by its very nature undermines the entire rationale for buying Lacoste.

And so does Alibaba, except for it is in China and is outside of US IP enforcement regime. If Amazon were not to do a great pivot towards 3rd party sellers back in 2012-2014 and do the same thing Alibaba does, we could have been talking about Alibaba swallowing Amazon's online retail business by now. Alibaba is a type of company you can do nothing about, yet it can do a lot of things about you, and I can throw a couple examples for you:

Paypal - they used to have a "partner agreement" with Alibaba, but the moment they began to carve into eBay's domain, Paypal's board was foolish enough to antagonise them.

Alipay was the result of all of above, as well as Paypal's almost complete loss of Chinese market, and few others where Alipay made inroads.

Apple - they had pretty much to bribe Alibaba along with Sony to have their products delisted and prohibit trade in refurbished electronics on their platform (which was also eating into Apple's sales big big time).

Also, Alibaba strongarmed Apple into letting them send payments and selling virtual goods without paying "Apple tax." Knowing that, Tencent and few other big Chinese dotcoms followed the suit, which gave them enormous commercial advantage against foreign competitors for in-app payments.

And all of above is on a minute scale of societal impact in comparison how Aliexpress singlehandedly nuked a big big chunk of the brick and store retail industry in the former bloc countries. (Alibaba makes more profit in Russia than in all other foreign markets combined)

Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by fujiters on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @02:25AM (#16534831)
Not everything related to quality can be easily identified by the end consumer. I trust major food manufacturers to have products without high levels of arsenic, lead, and mercury. I don't trust that counterfeit food manufacturers are ensuring the same.
Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by throwaway0255 on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @03:39AM (#16535101)
Probably not the best example.

Maybe you're talking about a different kind of shirt, but I tried Amazon's brand of collared long-sleeve button-up shirts and found the quality so low that I'd consider them unwearable.

The material was very thin, extremely wrinkle-prone, the collars were wilted and didn't keep their shape at all, and the cut wasn't very good.

I'm not the type to be easily fooled by marketing/branding psychological tricks, quite the opposite. But every off-brand collared shirt I've ever bought in my life has been a cheap unwearable disheveled mess.

I know designer brands are just cranking these things out of Cambodia for $3/unit, but no-name brands still just can't seem to compete at all on quality. They're not even trying as far as I can tell.

Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by baxtr on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @03:21AM (#16535041)
> At a fraction of the cost

That’s exactly the problem. Brands can be held accountable. Unbranded goods can’t. Me personally, I don’t want to live in a world, where all standards are given up just to have the lowest price.

Re:How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management by dazc on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @02:27AM (#16534841)
'...Amazon, by its very nature undermines the entire rationale for buying Lacoste.'

I don't know about Lacoste, but of the brands I do know about, they do a pretty good job on their own of undermining that rationale.